A Croatian yacht charter company came to us with years of technical debt, a website search engines refused to index, broken design, and a broken backend their team was afraid to touch. 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.
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 accumulated from years of patched fixes. Pages invisible to search engines. A WordPress backend so fragile the team avoided pressing an update button. Contact forms that silently swallowed enquiries. Cookie consent tools operating outside their intendent use. The kind of quiet chaos that builds up when a site is maintained reactively rather than built with intention.
They had already been burned — twice — by contractors who left things worse than they found them. The word “caution” appeared in their own review when they described how they approached us. Happens when IT companies don’t know what they are doing, and worst of all, don’t care about the level of quality they are delivering to the businesses who are ordering their services. Good thing is that we are different. We deliver quality, we fix what others break, and bring justice to our clients businesses.
What We Inherited
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. The audit gave the client a clear picture of what needed to happen, in what order, and why.
What we found was a site held together by third-party plugins doing jobs they were never designed for, completely broken design system, an update process so broken it had become a known source of instability, and code bloat that was actively dragging down performance and crawlability.
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 person owns the whole stack, decisions are coherent, handoffs don’t break things, and the client has a single point of accountability.
We designed a few modern interface templates — index, product listing, price listing, contact, and single product pages — and developed a custom WordPress module system that gives the Conviva Maris team an intuitive way to manage charter content without touching a single plugin or worrying about breaking something. All our solutions are integrated. The goal is to lower third-party dependencies, and cut off client from useless plugins previous developers added.
On the technical side: full server migration, redesigned interface to serve and promote the content, contact forms rebuilt and properly tested, GTM and analytics integrated cleanly, cookie consent brought into proper setup, and the WordPress update process restored to safe, reliable function — something that had been broken for a long time and was 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 refused to index began ranking across multiple platforms — a direct consequence of cleaner architecture and targeted content optimisation. Mobile and desktop experiences were refined for the actual audience. And the team now has a backend they can use confidently, without fear of triggering a cascade of errors.
The rollout is intentionally phased — legacy pages are replaced systematically, per the client’s request, rather than all at once. This keeps the site stable and operational throughout, rather than creating risk with a single large launch. Today, the site is fully stable and running 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. It is infrastructure — and like any infrastructure, how it is built determines how reliably it performs over time. The Conviva Maris project is an example of what happens when you treat a website rebuild as an engineering problem rather than a cosmetic one.
We audited before we acted. We built systems the client can own. We communicated the reasoning behind every decision. We tested thoroughly. And we remained engaged through the phased rollout rather than disappearing after delivery.
That is not a special service. That is just 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, unstable, or simply invisible to the people you’re trying to reach, we’d like to hear about it.
