Cobalt Boats

Cobalt makes boats that cost six figures. The people shopping for them are informed, opinionated, and comparing everything against competitors who present themselves like luxury brands. Cobalt’s website didn’t match the experience of being on a Cobalt boat. Research and competitive review confirmed it. The digital presence wasn’t communicating the quality the product delivers.

The structure was sound and returning users knew where things lived. The issue was fidelity, consistency, and polish across a wide template set: models, innovations, events, shopping tools, and owner resources. Every page needed to feel like it belonged to the same premium brand. I rebuilt the site in WordPress, keeping the existing IA in most places while overhauling the visual system, page patterns, and componentry.

The other constraint was Design Your Dream, a separate PHP boat configurator living under its own path inside the site. It had established interaction patterns that dealers and buyers relied on. I couldn’t redesign it from scratch without breaking those workflows. Instead, I reskinned it with a CSS override approach that brought it into the updated visual system while leaving every interaction intact. A buyer could move from browsing a model page to configuring their build and never feel like they’d left the experience.