Breskens Rigging Service

The problem

Breskens Rigging Service is my father's company, which is exactly why the site had to be as solid as their work on the masts.

The company is a rigging specialist for sailing yachts of 20–200 ft, founded in 2021. Its customers don't only come from the Netherlands: yacht owners from Belgium, Germany, France and the United Kingdom moor in Breskens or look for a specialist there. They want to know quickly whether they're in the right place, whether they can trust the company, and how to request a job. Often on a phone, sometimes from a boat.

A site that only speaks Dutch, loads slowly or ends in a vague contact form loses those people before they have asked anything.

The approach

Four languages from day one

The site is available in 4 languages: Dutch, English, German and French. Not as a translate button added later, but as the starting point: every page and every URL exists in every language. A German yacht owner lands on a German page, with a German address in the bar. The trade-off is more upkeep per text, and that is worth it for a company with this many international customers.

Fast pages with photos

You don't sell a rigging company with stock pictures of handshakes. The site shows the water, the boats and the harbour, and the pages are built ahead of time, so they load straight away, even on a weak signal in the harbour.

A quotation request instead of a loose contact form

A question like "could you have a look at my mast?" leads to a lot of back-and-forth email. So the site has a structured quotation request. You pick the services you need, and fill in the type of yacht, its length, the mast maker, the age of the rigging, the berth and the preferred timing. That way a request arrives with the information needed to actually say something about it.

The trade-off is that a form with more fields asks more of the visitor. So it is split into steps, each with a short explanation, and anyone unsure about a detail can simply pick ‘don't know’. Anyone with a short question can still simply email or call through the contact page.

Under the hood

The site is built with Next.js, with next-intl for the languages and Tailwind for the styling. The pages are static: they are made ahead of time and don't need to be computed again on each visit. That makes them fast and cheap to run.

Every language has its own address, such as /de for German, and every page tells search engines which translations exist. That way a French yacht owner searching in French finds the French page, not a Dutch one with a translate button.

The quotation request is the only part that sends anything. The form checks the input, and the request goes to the company by email, through Resend.

Result & status

The site is live at breskensriggingservice.com (opens an external site), in all four languages, with pages about the company, its services, its partners, the quotation request and contact.

What's next

• Let the site grow with the company, such as new services and partners.