An engagement in progress: the maritime rebuild that has not launched yet

Two calls to a deposit

Discovery ran with the owner-side contact and the enrolments lead. A free homepage mockup went up on the first call alongside a live competitor comparison showing a direct rival at roughly double their organic traffic. Deposit invoiced and paid on the second call.

• Theory self-paced online, practical in Newcastle, so interstate students are addressable and Queensland students already fly in
• Brand tone agreed as friendly and simple

Architecture decided on screen-share

Two sessions locked the information architecture around how the two audiences actually behave: recreational buyers self-serve fast, commercial buyers read, then call, and need career pathway detail before they commit to a ticket.

• View Courses kept as the primary call to action, Inquire Now dropped, to cut clicks to enrolment
• Forms renamed Student Portal
• A career pathway selector splitting new-to-industry from progression students
• A student support section and a two-line navigation, both added off walking a benchmark site live on the call

The booking flow we argued the client out of

The client wanted a cart. We put up two options and recommended the simpler one: Book Now buttons linking to enrolment forms hosted in their student management system, rather than a WooCommerce checkout syncing over an API. The argument that carried it was a multi-course checkout we had built for another client that had not been used once in six months.

• Cheaper, faster, fewer failure points, better for search
• Logged internally as a process mistake anyway: the decision was made in a written options document rather than live on a call, which invites second-guessing

The re-scope

Recreational and jet ski pages pulled, every commercial course kept, placeholder imagery called out for replacement, and online against face-to-face delivery made explicit on each course page because it was a real source of customer confusion.

• Whole site re-scoped and reworked from two audiences to one inside two weeks
• The prior recreational keyword research and two-audience architecture became sunk cost
• The blog stays in the build, unpublished, for trainers to fill with course photos later

Feedback rounds, and three same-hour requests

Four rounds of staging feedback worked through and returned, each ahead of the client's own deadline. On 17 July three new build requests arrived inside nine minutes and were confirmed in writing 41 minutes later.

• A steps-to-a-certificate-of-competency page and an application process page, both linking the national regulator's own explainers
• A homepage banner reused from the current site, with a third party's logo removed at the client's instruction
• Full admin access to their student management and learning systems granted on 16 July so we could wire the enrolment links ourselves

The empty calendar on the screen-share

We demonstrated the enrolment flow live: click Find Courses, land on the booking calendar. Except there were no courses in it. Five of their courses are self-paced, so a date picker will never have anything to show. The enrolment architecture was rebuilt on the call into two paths.

• Scheduled courses keep the date picker. Self-paced courses go straight to enrol
• Certificate III relabelled with its qualification name so students recognise it
• The straight-to-enrol mechanism is still open, and we said so: no course record to enrol against, no synced database, plus student identifier and compliance obligations to satisfy

Booked, not done

The next call trains the client on running the site themselves, with go-live shortly after. The migration checklist behind that date, redirect plan, crawl and export, staging noindex, schema and metadata, is dated 1 August and still open.