The Legacy Yacht charters a private yacht on Bangkok’s Chao Phraya. The site’s job is to make you feel the evening before you enquire, then make enquiring easy.
Client
The Legacy Yacht, BangkokType
Marketing site and lead captureLanguages
English and ThaiSignature
The client’s real footage, on every pageA premium charter sold through
a website that has to earn the word premium.
The Legacy Yacht runs private evening charters on the Chao Phraya, with a three-deck yacht, a crew, set menus, and event packages. Guests board at ICONSIAM. The product is an atmosphere: the river at night, the bridges lighting up, and dinner moving past the temples. People book it for proposals, anniversaries, company celebrations, and weddings.
That’s a hard product to sell with stock photography and a paragraph. The client had something better: its own promotional reel, with drone passes over the boat at golden hour, the decks at night, and guests on the bow. The design decision that shaped the whole build was to lead with that footage everywhere. Instead of one hero video on the homepage, every page opens full-screen on the boat itself, and the section cards play their own clips as you reach them.
Footage-led is easy to say and heavy to ship. Video that impresses on a fibre connection can strangle a phone on hotel Wi-Fi, and a luxury brand can’t stutter. So I re-cut the reel clip by clip. Every hero loops on the same eight-second clock with no visible restart and no freeze at the turnaround. Each clip was re-encoded from the client’s masters to stay sharp at full-screen and still small enough to load in a breath.
The second half of the brief was the market. Charter customers in Bangkok are international visitors and Thai locals in roughly equal measure, so the site speaks both languages properly. Real Thai copy runs across the entire site, instead of a machine-translated afterthought bolted on later. English is served on clean URLs, and Thai is a single tap away.
Seven pages with one goal:
turn an evening’s daydream into an enquiry.
The yacht
The specifications a charter buyer asks about (capacity, decks, and crew) are presented guest-first. The onboard experience is shown as playing footage: the lounge, dining with the skyline moving past, and the open bow deck.
The route
An interactive map shows the two-hour round trip from ICONSIAM and the landmarks along the way: Wat Arun, the Memorial Bridge, and the Rama VIII at night. Each one is presented as moving imagery instead of a static thumbnail strip.
Packages and events
Charter packages and event formats (dinners, celebrations, weddings, and corporate events) are laid out as clear cards with real inclusions, so a buyer can compare options without emailing first. You can enquire from any card.
Lead capture
Tap “enquire” on any package or event, and the contact form arrives with that package already selected. The enquiry lands in the client’s inbox with the customer’s email as reply-to, so there’s no dashboard to log into and no leads lost to a spam folder.
Bilingual
Every page, label, package, and error message exists in both languages with exact parity. That includes Thai typography, with display and body faces chosen for Thai script instead of left on the defaults. The language toggle keeps you exactly where you were.
Speed
The site uses long-life caching, per-file versioning so a re-edited clip updates without re-downloading the rest, and a quiet background prefetch that readies the next page’s hero while you read this one. In my measurements, a hero is ready in milliseconds.
Nothing on the site pretends. The boat you scroll past is the boat that picks you up at the pier, and that’s the trust a four-figure evening booking needs.
Every hero loops in the same rhythm, out and back, with the turnaround frames trimmed so motion never freezes. Consistency is what reads as calm, and calm is the brand.
I made the encoding choices by measuring sharpness at the size people see on screen, instead of judging by eye at a zoomed-in crop. Several “obvious” quality upgrades were rejected because the measurements showed no visible gain for real load cost.
Charters are consultative: date, menu, occasion, and headcount. A form that pre-fills context beats a checkout that can’t ask questions. The structure leaves room to add booking later without a rebuild.
Open thelegacyyacht.io
and scroll with the sound of the river in mind.
Questions worth asking
Because the product is two hours of moving scenery. A photo of a yacht sells a boat. Footage of the river sliding past the dinner table sells the evening. The client already owned the footage, so the site’s job was to make it load fast enough to lead with.
Only if you ship it carelessly. Here, below-the-fold clips wait until you approach them, visited pages cache their footage for a year, and the next hero downloads quietly in the background while you read. The measured result is heroes that start in a breath on a first visit and instantly on every visit after.
Half the market books in Thai. A half-translated site tells those customers they’re the afterthought, and no premium brand can afford that message. Every string on the site exists in both languages, down to form errors, and the Thai pages use type chosen for Thai script.
The invisible work: making twenty-plus video clips behave like one calm system. That meant loops that never hitch, encodes measured at real display sizes, caching that survives re-edits, and prefetch that helps without hogging bandwidth. None of it is visible, and that’s the point.
Yes. Experience businesses are where footage-led design makes the most sense. Bring whatever media you have. Part of this build was making the client’s existing reel work harder than a new photoshoot would have. Pricing has the numbers, and you can start with the free audit.
That was this client’s problem too. Send your link, and the free audit will tell you what’s costing you bookings.
