Three years.
Twenty-eight locations.
One Country  Club for boaters.

A WordPress site that bounced 64% of visitors became a Webflow brand system that 28 owner-operators run on. Built by Lake Austin Design — Brand Architecture, Web Design, Resource Center.

The introduction
2018
I joined the Lake Austin location in 2018.
Best boats. Best service. The kind of place where the people who run it are at the dock with you.

Five percent of pages held a visitor past fifteen seconds.

I wasn't a designer to them. I was a member.
The conversation
2018–2023
That's where I met Bryan Wallace. We talked about the club the way members do — what works, what doesn't, what could be sharper. Bryan listened. The fixable things kept getting fixed. Five years of those conversations is what changed everything.
“Andy doesn’t talk like a designer pitching a project. He talks about Vignelli, Swiss grids from the 1930s, and the discipline behind why something works for 30 years instead of 30 months. That’s why I trust the system he built for us — it gives the product room to grow without the brand fighting it.” — Dean De Beer, CTO & Co-Founder
The trust
2023
Bryan became president. The casual feedback turned into the work. He asked me to take on what the brand needed — not as a vendor, as a partner who already understood what the club was, because I'd been on the dock for five years. The brief was simple: don't lose what makes us work.

Owner-operators receive a system, not a stylebook.

“Andy's creative efforts have elevated every aspect of our marketing with clean imagery and engaging website design. We would highly recommend Lake Austin Design if you are looking to clean up or refresh your brand.”

Alex McLaughlin, Member — April 2024

The brief
2023
The site was the weakest part of the business. Ten years on WordPress. Not mobile-friendly. Members signed up despite the site, not because of it. Less is more. Do things right. Sweat the little things. Build for what's coming.
See it live on LinkedIn

“Less is more. Do things right. Sweat the little things.”

The brief, in three lines.

The architecture
January 2024
Branded house. One identity. Twenty-eight locations under one parent. Trademarks first, because the trademarks are the brand's IP, not its decoration. Boat Life Without Limits®. Boating Country Club®. The First & Only Boating Country Club®. Don't Buy a Boat — Join the Club. Category language, owned.

One brand. Twenty-eight locations. Every member room we walk into.

See the brand system
The migration
February 2024
WordPress to Webflow. Mobile-first. Swiss grid. CMS-driven, so a new location goes live in a weekend, not months. Built for the path from twenty-eight to fifty. Locations and Membership pages rebuilt around the heatmap data — the two pages members actually used were the two pages we made impossible to miss. Site shipped February 2024.

This isn't about making the site pretty. It's about how it works — for the owner-operator, for the member, for the boater who hasn't found us yet.

Built for what's coming.

animate

Investigate
breaches
phishing
identities
malware
insiders
threats
alerts
anything

The brand system
2024–2025
The work didn't stop at the site. A design system in Adobe Express. Adobe Garamond and Helvetica on the same grid. Every owner-operator at every location runs the brand without a designer in the room. Local push. National consistency.
see it live at nauticalboatclub.com
The Resource Center
2025
Ship in a weekend.
Conversion is one job. Discovery is another. Editorial-grade. Modular across all twenty-eight locations. Built so the boater who had never heard of Nautical now finds Nautical first. Locations and Membership stayed the highest-intent traffic on the site. Exactly as designed.

Built to grow. Twenty-eight today. Fifty by 2030.

The recognition
2026
Competing chains started imitating the look. The boating industry called it the new standard. Members noticed the polish. Three years in, the brand was carrying the weight that used to be carried by hand. Bounce rate down to 12.2%, the lowest figure on file. Returning visitors from 4,000 to 138,000 in a year. The numbers backed up what members already felt.

“I met Andy as a member, not a designer. That's how I knew he understood what the club is. Three years later, he's not the vendor. He's the partner who built the brand we're growing into.”

Bryan Wallace, President, Nautical Boat Club

The path
Today
Twenty-eight locations today. Fifty by 2030. The architecture is built to absorb the growth without rebuild. Every new location ships in a weekend. Every owner-operator gets the same system on day one. The site is no longer the weakest part of the business. It's the engine.

“The system Andy built means I run my location and the brand runs itself. That's what I needed.”

Tom Gardiner, Owner-Operator, Nautical Boat Club

Lake
Austin
Design

© Lake Austin Design 2024
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Austin, TX 78746