Lake America Outdoors
Project Overview
Lake America Outdoors is a fishing charter directory for the eleven New York ports on Lake Ontario, which U.S. charts now call Lake America. An angler fills in one trip request and it goes to licensed captains who fish that port. Captains, lodging, marinas, and tackle shops pay to be listed. The site also publishes a weekly fishing report and a calendar of the derbies and town festivals that bring people to the lake.
The Work
The Challenge
The founder bought the domain the day the lake was renamed and built the first version himself with Claude Cowork. He got a long way on his own, with 24 pages, structured data, a sitemap, and an llms.txt file already in place. He needed someone with more experience to get it over the finish line and find out whether the idea had legs. The site had no analytics, no photos, and no captains listed. The www address served a second copy of the site and six extra domains forwarded to plain http. The copy also needed a careful human edit.
Our Solution
We kept his static site and built on it, because the goal was a quick test of the market and a rebuild could wait. On day one we mirrored the live site and saved the original so any change could roll back. The first production deploy went out on day two, and the rest followed over the next two days. We edited the copy on all 28 pages, put his photos on the homepage and page headers, added sample captain listings for both plans, and reworked the advertise page so each button fills in the enquiry form for that plan. Every form now writes to his Google Sheet and emails him, and we found and fixed a bug where browser autofill tripped the spam filter and dropped submissions without a word. We set up Google Analytics, Search Console, Bing, and IndexNow, sent the www address to the main domain, and added FAQ and breadcrumb schema. We also built a marinas and tackle page and designed 20 printable countertop signs for tackle shops. Each sign has a QR code with a tracked short link, so the founder can see which shop sent each lead.
Results & Impact
2 days
Kickoff to production
28
Pages of copy edited
20
QR countertop signs for tackle shops
97–100
Lighthouse Performance, 13 pages on mobile and desktop
Technology
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