Luxury fishing charters
DreamWork Sportfishing
A luxury Costa Rica charter site, with package comparisons, a trip-report blog and local SEO.
Fishing charters
Fishing Guide Tampa
Captain Matt Santiago Sportfishing runs inshore, tarpon and offshore charters in Tampa Bay, plus big game trips in Costa Rica. The site already ran on WordPress, so instead of starting over, I audited it and worked through it in phases: search, accessibility, a shorter path to booking, and a homepage that finally shows the fishing. Every change was scripted and tested first, with a rollback copy saved before anything went live.
Client
Captain Matt Santiago Sportfishing
Location
Tampa Bay, Florida
Launched
2026
Services
Accessibility, SEO, Video Editing, Web Design
Stack
WordPress, custom CSS and JS, structured data
The video
The homepage video, start to finish.
I edited this 38-second cut for the top of Captain Matt’s homepage. It opens on an animated version of his logo, moves through real catches, from tarpon beside the boat to snook along the mangroves, and closes on his credential as Tampa Bay’s only IGFA captain. On the site it plays silently in the background, with a smaller file for phones and a pause button. The video has no sound.
Highlight 01
Pages Google can actually read.
I gave the 11 pages that matter most their own titles, descriptions and focus keywords, written around how people search for a charter. Every page now has exactly one H1, and the headings were fixed without changing how they look. Local business schema tells Google what the business is and when it’s open, and 13 permanent redirects send old links and bookmarks to the right page. I also cleared out leftovers from the original build: links pointing at a staging site and a theme demo, phone links that didn’t match, and typos.
Highlight 02
Accessible without losing the look.
The gold accent was too light to read as link text, so I darkened it just enough to pass contrast while keeping the brand. Keyboard users get a skip link and a clear focus outline, animation calms down for people who ask for less motion, and body text on phones went up to 16px. Icon-only links got real names, links that open a new tab say so, duplicate carousel slides are hidden from screen readers, and the booking form has proper labels and autofill. More than 450 photos now have written alt text, and broken images in old fishing reports were removed. The fixes live in the theme’s own settings, so they don’t depend on a plugin to keep working.
Highlight 03
A shorter path from browsing to booking.
Every trip on the Trips & Rates page now has a Book This Trip button that opens the booking form with that charter already selected. The form itself got shorter: last name and kids are optional, and the unused subject field is gone. Call or Text sits in the header on every page, and on phones a tap-to-call bar stays on screen, because most charter bookings start with a phone call. I also removed a duplicate Costa Rica link from the menu.
Highlight 04
A homepage that shows the fishing.
The old slider heroes on the homepage and Costa Rica page are gone. I edited a new homepage video from real catches, shown in full above, with a lighter version for phones, a poster image while it loads and a pause button. The menu and sticky header were modernized, and Captain Matt’s newest result, 1st Place at the 2026 All Heroes Open, now leads his tournament page and shows up in his search listings. The win counter, which said 44 on desktop and 43 on phones, now says 45 everywhere.
Goal
Get Found and Get Booked Without Starting Over
Fishing Guide Tampa had great photos, a strong tournament record and a captain with over 30 years of fishing experience, but the site wasn’t telling Google or visitors much of that. Key pages had generic titles, headings were out of order, parts of the site were hard to use with a keyboard or screen reader, and booking a trip took more steps than it needed to. The site had to keep its existing setup so Captain Matt could keep editing it himself, so the goal was to fix what was underneath instead of rebuilding.
Approach
Audit First, Then Fix in Phases
I started with a full audit covering SEO, accessibility and usability, then worked through it in phases: cleanup, search, accessibility, booking and the homepage. The page builder stores every page in several copies, so I wrote small scripts that edit each copy the same way, run as a dry run first, and save a rollback copy before writing anything. That kept every change predictable and easy to undo, and left the page builder working exactly as before for future edits.
Results
Easier to Find, Use and Book
The modernized site delivers:
- Search basics done right on the 11 core pages: unique titles, descriptions and focus keywords, and one H1 each.
- Local business schema plus 13 permanent redirects from old URLs.
- Accessibility fixes for contrast, keyboard focus, motion, screen readers and forms, with alt text on more than 450 photos.
- One-click booking from every trip, a shorter form and tap-to-call on phones.
- A video homepage in place of the old slider, with the 2026 All Heroes Open win added across the site.
Captain Matt kept the site and the editor he knows, and it now works the way a charter site should.
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