Captain John's Fawn Harbor & Marina
Ground-up rebuild of a family marina's website on Big Bear Lake's north shore, built on the marina's own drone photography, plus its social, review, and map listings.
View the preview build →// what I manage · 14 channels
* Website: Rebuild live in preview, launching on the marina's own domain
// the site
Preview captures, desktop and mobile.
Home
On the Water
Tours & Boats
Our Story
// footage
Drone footage shot for the brand and cut vertical for social.
// the brand
The marina's own drone and dockside photography, the same set the new site is built on.
// why it's built this way
The brief
Captain John's is a small family harbor in Fawnskin: kayaks, paddle boards, pontoons, the Tarzan Jungle Float, and Captain Ben's lake tours. The old site was a free GoDaddy page with an ad banner, and the socials were scattered, with look-alike accounts the business doesn't control. The job was one current site and one consistent identity across every channel people use to find a marina.
Shot on their own lake, not stock
Every photo on the new site is the marina's own: drone stills from the fall and September shoots, plus dockside shots from the old site. Each one is rotated upright, stripped of metadata (including phone GPS), and resized, but never retouched. Where a planned shot doesn't exist yet, a real client photo stands in, and preview builds tag it so nothing placeholder ships by accident.
'Today at the harbor' up front
The homepage leads with a small daily card: dock hours, water conditions, tour times, and the latest eagle sighting. It's one short file staff can update, because 'are you open and is it calm' is the question people ask before they drive around the lake.
Launching without breaking a booking
The rebuild goes live while the last tours of the season are still running, so booking is deliberately left alone: every button still goes to the same booking listings, and the old URLs (/pricing, /rent-now, /lake-tours) 301 to their new homes, so a bookmarked link or an old Google result never hits a dead page. The staging build stays out of search on its own until the real domain is attached.
Telling the eagle story with care
The marina looks straight across the bay at the most-watched bald eagle nest in the country. 'Our Story' covers the village, the harbor and the eagles as history and legacy rather than a sales hook, which matters when a lot of the people reading it are there because they followed the nest.