Coolwaters Productions
A custom WordPress build for a celebrity talent agency, run entirely by their own team.
- Location
- Burbank, California
- Sector
- Media & Talent
- Year
- 2026
- Services
- UI/UX, Design, Development, SEO
The client.
Coolwaters Productions is a celebrity talent management and booking agency based in Burbank, California. Founded in 2000, they represent over 90 actors, puppeteers, voice artists and performers from franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel and Ghostbusters.
They work with over 200 event promoters across the US, Mexico, Canada, Europe and Japan.
Their website was dated, hard to manage, and didn’t reflect the calibre of talent they represent. They needed a rebuild their team could run day to day, with a constantly changing roster and events calendar, without touching the front end.
What I built.
The centrepiece is a custom WordPress plugin that powers the whole site. Two custom post types, Clients and Events, with full admin panels and custom fields for bios, credits, social links, franchise tags, event locations and talent assignments. Everything the team needs to manage 90+ clients and dozens of events a year, from the standard WordPress editor.
The plugin includes 11 custom Elementor widgets built for the site: a hero headshot grid with a crossfade, franchise filter pills sorted by popularity with instant filtering, a credits grid, an event timeline grouped by month, event counters, upcoming appearances, related franchises and more. Each one has full style controls, so the design can evolve without code changes.
A CSV import and export system lets the team bulk update clients, events and franchise descriptions from a spreadsheet. It matches on name and updates rather than duplicating, so the same file can be imported again after edits.
Schema markup is generated automatically through Rank Math: Person schema on client pages, Event schema with performers, venues and dates, and CollectionPage schema on archives. All built from the plugin’s data, with nothing to configure by hand.
The site in use.
The detail.
I wrote the full site copy, built HTML mockups for every template, created a style guide and Elementor kit, designed the email notifications, drafted a privacy policy covering GDPR and CCPA, wrote descriptions for all 345 franchises, and delivered a content guide for their team.
It runs on my managed stack with Nginx and PHP-FPM, BunnyCDN for delivery, and Rank Math Pro for SEO.
Coolwaters went from a static, hard to update website to a system their team runs themselves. Adding a new client takes two minutes. Importing a batch of 20 events takes 30 seconds. Visitors can browse talent by franchise instantly, and the whole thing finally matches the quality of the people they represent.
- Clients managed in house
- 90+
- Custom Elementor widgets
- 11
- To import 20 events
- 30s
Michael Overton has proven to be an amazing asset to my company. His creativity and design work are stunning. He took my old website and turned it into something that is easy to use, informational, fun to look at, and updates can be done easily.
He’s been easy to deal with and is always willing to listen while at the same time provide guidance and schooling to be sure my brand is well represented online! He’s a great communicator and will work through an issue till he gets it right. I am glad he is now part of my “team of experts” that I rely on to have my brand be seen globally.
