Sea Speed Design (SSD) is an Australian and Thai marine sales, design and project development company with more than 37 years of experience behind it. Led by principal designer Paul Birgan and based out of Ocean Marina in Na Chom Thian, Thailand, SSD works with commercial operators and private owners across the globe, delivering aluminium catamarans, passenger ferries, workboats and custom motor yachts built for performance and long service life. Their designs currently run in Australia, the UK, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
Paul and Mari-on Birgan have been Digital Base clients for a good while now, through their sister company Sea Cat Ships, so when SSD needed a new website of its own, the brief came with a fair bit of trust already built in. SSD deals in big-ticket, highly technical vessels, so the site had to carry a lot of visual and commercial weight: featured designs, boats currently for sale, custom motor yacht projects, and a way for potential buyers anywhere in the world to get in touch with Paul directly. The old approach wasn’t cutting it, and the business had genuinely outgrown it.
The goal was straightforward on paper and a little more involved in practice: build a site that could showcase a large and constantly changing portfolio of vessels, without turning every update into a ticket back to the developer. Paul and Mari-on wanted the freedom to swap out a boat listing, update a price, or add a new design themselves, whenever a sale went through or a new project landed. On top of that, the site needed to load quickly despite handling a lot of imagery, since photos and renders do most of the selling in this industry, and it had to hold up well on search engines given how specialised and competitive the aluminium catamaran market can be.
We built the new seaspeedcats.com on WordPress, and that decision was deliberate rather than default. For a business like SSD, where boat listings and featured designs change regularly, WordPress gives Paul and Mari-on a proper content management system rather than a static site that needs a developer for every small change. It’s also a platform with a long track record for SEO, which mattered given how niche the marine design space is; getting found by the right buyers, ferry operators and shipyards matters just as much as looking good once they arrive.
On top of WordPress, we used Elementor as the page builder, and this is where the real, practical benefit shows up for a client like SSD. Elementor’s visual, drag-and-drop editor means Paul or Mari-on can open a page, adjust text, swap an image, or add a new boat to the “Boats for Sale” section without touching a line of code. For a business that adds and removes listings as vessels sell or new designs are finalised, that kind of independence is worth a lot. It also means our ongoing relationship with SSD isn’t tied up in small edits; we can focus our time on strategy, SEO and bigger improvements, while the day-to-day content stays in their hands.
The build itself covered a proper homepage with vessel range and experience highlights, dedicated sections for Featured Designs, Boats for Sale and Motor Yachts, and a Company Profile page setting out SSD’s history and shipyard partnership with Sea Cat Ships. We paid close attention to how the site would perform on mobile, since a good number of enquiries come from buyers browsing on their phones, sometimes from the other side of the world.
Because Paul and Mari-on already knew our team from working with us on Sea Cat Ships, the whole process ran on genuinely open communication. Calls and messages went back and forth throughout, covering everything from layout choices to how each vessel category should be presented, and that kind of direct, ongoing dialogue between client and developer made a real difference to how closely the finished site matches how SSD actually operates.
The new site gives SSD a professional shopfront that reflects the scale and seriousness of the vessels they design, sell and build. Paul now has a platform where featured designs, motor yacht projects and available boats sit together clearly, each with its own path through to an enquiry. And because the site runs on WordPress with Elementor behind it, updates that once meant a call to a developer can now happen the same day, whenever Paul or Mari-on decide something needs changing.
Working with SSD on this project was a natural extension of an already strong relationship built through Sea Cat Ships, and that made the collaboration easier from day one. Digital Base continues to support Sea Speed Design with ongoing SEO work, refining content and technical performance as the site settles in and starts building organic visibility. We’re looking forward to continuing that partnership as SSD’s portfolio, and their online presence, keeps growing.
