Dubrovnik Charter

The biggest technical challenge was combining three things that usually pull against each other:

• a media-heavy yacht charter website
• a dynamic catalog managed through Airtable
• near-perfect frontend performance

The site needed to feel polished, modern, minimal, and associated with the sea, while also being fast enough to compete in a very SEO-sensitive tourism market.

Airtable made the project both interesting and difficult. It gave the client a familiar, flexible operational tool, but it also meant we had to build a custom content and deployment workflow around a platform that was not designed as a typical web CMS.

The first version of the site was built in Gatsby, primarily because of its static generation model and excellent image processing. For a luxury charter website with high-quality photography, performance and image handling were crucial.

Later, we migrated the site to Astro, keeping the same core philosophy: generate as much as possible statically, keep the frontend lightweight, and make the browsing experience feel instant.

The reasoning stayed consistent across both versions:

• performance first
• excellent SEO fundamentals
• fast browsing on mobile
• low runtime complexity
• Airtable as CMS and business backend
• clean deployment and CI/CD workflows

The main tradeoff was build and deployment speed versus runtime performance. Gatsby handled the static site well, but building a large catalog with heavy image processing pushed the build pipeline hard. Moving to Astro helped modernize the architecture while keeping the same performance-oriented approach.

A major part of the project happened outside the visible website.

We built a custom Airtable-based CMS workflow with:

• structured tables for website content
• custom Airtable scripts
• form automations
• CMS integration into the build system
• deployment and CI/CD workflows
• Cloudflare-based deployment and caching infrastructure

One of the standout features was a fully dynamic form builder controlled through Airtable. This gave the client flexibility to manage inquiry flows without requiring code changes for every adjustment.

This was especially important because Dubrovnik Charter is not a simple brochure site. It includes fleet pages, routes, editorial content, search, lead forms, and custom booking-oriented interactions.

The visual direction was polished, clean, and modern, with subtle nautical associations rather than obvious seaside cliches.

There was an existing design direction, but we expanded it significantly with custom UI and interaction work. The final site includes bespoke animations and carefully crafted interface details designed to make the browsing and inquiry process feel refined.

Important interaction points include:

• a prominent “Plan My Yacht Charter” flow
• polished form popup interactions
• dynamic inquiry forms
• route and trip presentation
• catalog browsing and search
• rich image-led pages

The site has been live since 2021, and the client has been thrilled with the result. It scores 100 for SEO and best practices in Lighthouse, and 92 for performance on mobile. It has delivered strong search visibility, many conversions, flexible Airtable-based content management, and a polished digital experience aligned with the charter market.