Catamarans & Yachts is a worldwide private boat charter website where visitors browse sailing and power catamarans and yachts by destination (Greece, Croatia, Turkey, Italy, France, Spain, Malta, Bahamas) and send enquiries straight to the boat owner or operator. I built the whole thing from scratch in custom PHP for Kevin Kolesky: the public website, admin panel, user dashboard and the automation behind it.
The boat charter website brief
Kevin Kolesky wanted a worldwide private boat charter marketplace where visitors can find catamarans and yachts by destination and contact the owners directly. The catalogue needed to be large, and it also needed to be easy to keep fresh. Adding boats and publishing content had to be mostly automatic, not a never-ending job of manual data entry.
He also wanted the site built as his own platform, not on WordPress or a hosted website builder. That meant a custom build from the ground up, where he controls how everything works.
What I built
- Custom front-end with listings by boat type and destination, so visitors can narrow down to the kind of boat and the place they want.
- AI search and recommendations that suggest the best boats for a visitor’s needs, based on what they describe.
- Automated boat imports: add a boat’s URL as a draft and a cron job scrapes it, pulling in images, amenities, specifications, prices, YouTube video and location.
- Automated blog posts: a cron job turns drafts into new blog posts, so the news section keeps growing.
- Custom admin panel to manage boats, enquiries and content in one place.
- User dashboard for boat owners and partners, so they can look after their own listings.
- Enquiry flow sending requests directly to boat owners, with no middleman in the way.
How the boat import works
Adding a boat used to mean copying details from another page by hand. Now the admin just pastes a boat’s listing URL as a draft. A scheduled cron job picks up those drafts, reads the page and fills in the listing for me: images, amenities, specifications, prices, a YouTube video when there is one, and the location.
The boat then goes into the catalogue ready for review. The benefit is simple: hours of copy-paste per boat become a single URL paste. That is what lets a large catalogue stay fresh without a big team behind it.
AI search and recommendations
Filters are useful, but not everyone knows exactly what they are looking for. So visitors can also describe what they want in their own words, and the site suggests suitable boats. It feels more like talking to a charter advisor than clicking through menus, and it helps people find a good match faster.
Automated blog posts
A charter site needs fresh content, but writing and publishing posts takes time. A cron job takes drafts and turns them into new blog posts, so the news section keeps growing without someone having to publish each one by hand. Fresh content also gives visitors more reasons to come back to the site.
Admin panel and dashboards
I built a custom admin panel to manage boats, enquiries and content, with only the tools that Kevin needs and nothing extra. There is also a user dashboard for boat owners and partners. The Partner with us page lets owners list their boats, and the dashboard gives them a place to manage them afterwards.
Tech used
- Custom PHP and a database for the whole platform
- jQuery for interactive parts of the pages
- Swiper slider for boat photo galleries and carousels
- Font Awesome for icons
- Cloudflare in front of the site
- Cron jobs for boat imports and blog posts
- An llms.txt file so AI tools can discover and understand the site
Result
Kevin now has a fully custom boat charter website and marketplace that he owns outright, live at catamarans.yachts. Listings and content largely maintain themselves, so he can spend his time on the charter business instead of data entry.
Client: Kevin Kolesky.
If you need a custom website or platform with automation like this, get in touch and tell me what you have in mind.