About JBM Boat Shows
JBM & Associates runs three boat shows in the Southeast: the Charleston Boat Show at the Charleston Area Convention Center in North Charleston, the Columbia Boat Show at the SC State Fairgrounds, and the Savannah Boat Show at the Savannah Convention Center and IGY Savannah Harbor Marina. Each show has its own website, where visitors check dates, buy tickets, find exhibitors and plan their day.
The brief
JBM asked us to rebuild all three show websites on one shared design system and move them to new hosting. The show team edits the sites themselves, so the admin side had to stay simple.
One plugin, three shows
We built a custom WordPress plugin, JBM Show Engine, that runs all three sites from one codebase. It stores each show by year, along with its exhibitors, experiences, food vendors and sponsors. A “This Site’s Show” setting tells each install which show it serves, so the same code runs Charleston, Columbia and Savannah. When a show wraps, a rollover tool copies it and its listings to the next year.
An in-admin Getting Started page walks editors through every shortcode and option.
Exhibitor and experience directories
The plugin’s React front end powers the interactive parts of each site. Visitors can search exhibitors and filter them by location and category. Experiences such as live music and kids’ clinics can be filtered by day and type, and shown as a grid or as a day-by-day schedule. Food vendors and sponsors get their own grids, with sponsor logos grouped by tier.
Show details that stay current
Dates, hours, venues, parking and ticket prices live in one show record. A shortcode turns that record into the When, Venues and Tickets panels on each site, and Elementor dynamic tags let the team drop any show field into a heading or button. Change the dates once and every page that shows them updates. The “Tickets Powered by” credit comes from the sponsor list, and it hides itself when no ticket sponsor is set.
Design
A shared child theme carries the design system: Barlow Condensed headlines, Archivo body text and a gold button color. Each show keeps its own logo and its own shade of blue, so the three sites read as a family without looking identical.
Launch
Charleston went live on August 5, 2026, and Columbia and Savannah followed on September 2. We moved all three to WP Engine and set up search titles, sitemaps, structured data and social sharing images on each one.
Ongoing support
We host all three sites and take care of security, plugin updates and maintenance.
For another custom plugin build, see Upstate International or Offshore Marine & Outdoors, or read about our systems and integrations work.