A Croatian yacht charter company came to us with years of technical debt. Search engines refused to index part of their website. The design was broken due to constant patching. Their backend was so fragile the team was afraid to touch it. This is the full story of what we found — and what we built instead.
The business itself is polished and well-run. Their website was not.
How It Started: A Site That Became a Liability
Conviva Maris offers private sailing along the Adriatic coast — bareboat boats, luxury crewed yachts, tailored itineraries. By the time they reached out to us, the site had become a liability. Legacy code had piled up from years of patched fixes. Search engines could no longer find their pages. Their WordPress backend was so fragile the team avoided the update button entirely. Contact forms silently swallowed enquiries. The team misused cookie consent tools outside their intended purpose. In short, this was the kind of quiet chaos that builds when a site gets maintained reactively rather than built with intention.
Moreover, they had already been burned — twice — by contractors who left things worse than they found them. We’ve heard this story before — not from Conviva Maris alone, but from most clients who come to us. The pattern is familiar: a contractor who moved fast, charged the work, disappeared after delivery, and left a mess behind. The cautious approach Maja’s team brought was completely reasonable. Because of this, we started with the audit — not to impress them, but to give them something concrete before any money changed hands.
What the Audit Revealed
Before writing a single line of code, we ran a full brand and website audit. Not to justify a larger quote — but because throwing a new design on top of a broken foundation solves nothing. Instead, the audit gave the client a clear picture of what needed to happen, in what order, and why.
Third-party plugins propped up jobs they were never built to handle. On top of that, the design system had no consistency. Furthermore, the update process had become a known source of instability. Finally, code bloat actively dragged down performance and crawlability. Together, these issues meant the site was failing on every level at once.
What We Built
We handled the full development cycle — design through to deployment — without subcontracting any part of it. That matters more than it sounds. When one team owns the whole stack, decisions stay coherent. Handoffs don’t break things. The client gets a single point of accountability.
We designed modern interface templates — index, product listing, price listing, contact, and single product pages. In addition, we developed a custom WordPress module system that gives the Conviva Maris team an intuitive way to manage charter content without touching a single plugin. All solutions are integrated. The goal was to lower third-party dependencies and cut the client off from useless plugins previous developers had added.
What We Fixed on the Technical Side
We completed a full server migration. Contact forms we rebuilt and properly tested. GTM and analytics went in cleanly. Cookie consent finally entered proper setup. Finally, we restored the WordPress update process to safe, reliable function — something we hadn’t seen work properly in years, and one that had been quietly causing instability behind the scenes.
The website has gone from a liability to a business asset.
The Result
The impact showed up quickly. Pages that search engines had previously ignored began ranking across multiple platforms. This was a direct result of cleaner architecture and targeted content optimisation. We refined mobile and desktop experiences for the actual audience. As a result, the team now has a backend they can use confidently, without fear of triggering a cascade of errors.
The rollout is intentionally phased. We replace legacy pages systematically, per the client’s request, rather than all at once. This approach keeps the site stable and operational throughout, instead of creating risk with a single large launch. Today, the site runs cleanly with future updates already in check.
Client's Review of Our Work
"After several bad experiences with other contractors who left us with a non-functional website full of errors, we approached our collaboration with Zeljko from Studio Simple with a degree of caution. However, from the very first communication, we saw that his approach was completely different... He didn't just 'build us a website', he restored our trust in digital collaborators. Zeljko's goal wasn't just to 'complete the job and get paid.' Throughout the entire process, he gave concrete suggestions, warned us in advance about things that could cause problems later, and invested his time to make the website as good as possible. He leaves nothing to chance: he checks and tests everything, and explains decisions clearly and sensibly."
— Maja V., CEO, Conviva MarisWhy Our Approach Works
A good website is not a deliverable you receive and forget about. Instead, it is infrastructure — and like any infrastructure, how you build it determines how reliably it performs over time. The Conviva Maris project shows what happens when you treat a website rebuild as an engineering problem rather than a cosmetic one.
First, we audited before we acted. Then, we built systems the client can own. Throughout the process, we communicated the reasoning behind every decision. We tested thoroughly. Finally, we stayed engaged through the phased rollout rather than disappearing after delivery.
That is not a special service. That is simply how the work should be done.
Got a website that’s holding your business back?
We’ll tell you exactly what’s wrong and what it will take to fix it — before you commit to anything. No pitch, no pressure, no rush.
Common Questions
Do you work with businesses outside Croatia?
Yes. Studio Simple works with clients remotely across Europe and beyond. Most of our process is asynchronous — we communicate clearly, document decisions, and deliver without needing to be in the same room.
We already have a website. Can you fix it rather than rebuild it?
Sometimes. The audit determines that. Some sites need targeted repairs; others have accumulated so much technical debt that a clean rebuild is both faster and cheaper in the long run. We’ll always tell you which is which — and why — before any work begins.
What does the audit actually cover?
We look at your site’s technical health, indexation status, backend stability, design consistency, and conversion flow. You’ll receive a clear written summary of what’s working, what isn’t, and what we’d prioritise fixing first. It’s a real assessment, not a sales document.
How long does a project like this take?
A full rebuild of this scope — audit, design, custom development, migration, and QA — typically runs eight to fourteen weeks depending on content complexity and client feedback cycles. We’ll give you a realistic timeline at the start, not an optimistic one we can’t keep.
Will we be able to manage the site ourselves after handover?
That’s a requirement, not a bonus. Every site we build is handed over with a working backend the client can actually use — no dependency on us for routine updates, no mysterious settings, no third-party plugin roulette. The goal is for you to feel confident in your own platform.
Studio Simple is a full-stack design and development studio. We work with businesses that need a website to function as a reliable business tool — not a source of ongoing stress. If your current site is underperforming, is unstable, or simply invisible to the people you’re trying to reach, we’d like to hear about it.
