Originally scheduled to launch well before the summer travel season, the Steamship Authority’s redesigned website and mobile application are still not ready for the public.

The boat line board of governors voted last week to postpone the launch a second time, to September, after agreeing earlier this year to move it from March to May.

“It seems we’re going in the right direction, it’s just taking longer,” said chair Robert Ranney, who was on the board when the current website made its debut a decade ago.

“The transition was very complicated,” Mr. Ranney recalled, supporting the postponement.

Most of the website work has been completed, but the boat line’s reservation system has proved far more challenging than expected, according to project manager Ben Kaplan of Stellar Elements (formerly ADK), the development firm hired by the boat line in late 2021.

“It’s a very complex application that is interfacing with an even more complex back end, that is then laid over a very complex and nuanced business,” Mr. Kaplan said at Thursday’s Steamship board meeting in Hyannis.

An SSA decision slowed the process down as well, general manager Robert Davis said.

“We had not planned on switching our credit card processors, which had a big impact on the timeline,” he said.

The test-and-revise process of website development also lends itself to delays, said SSA communications director Sean Driscoll, who is supervising the project.

“You test, you find things, you have to go back and redesign [and] the path forward is not always a straight one,” Mr. Driscoll said.

For instance, he said, certain types of reservations may be infrequent but still need to be designed into the system in case they are needed.

“Just as an example, when you’re taking a car over and you’ve got a trailer one way but not a trailer the other way — little things like that, that most people aren’t going to have on their reservations,” Mr. Driscoll said.

The additional work has pushed the Steamship Authority’s original contract with Stellar Elements from $1.9 million to nearly $2.8 million, including a $288,000 change order the board approved Thursday on a 3-1 vote.

The project’s actual costs are significantly higher, Mr. Kaplan told the board.

“We have felt it important to provide, as we’ve worked through these challenges, substantial discounts on our rates,” he said.

The company had previously budgeted $96,000 a month to build the website and application, Mr. Kaplan said, but that proved insufficient.

“We made a decision … that in order to make this project successful we needed substantially more resources,” he said.

Currently, according to a written report from Mr. Davis, Stellar Elements has eight full-time and three part-time engineers, designers and other specialists working on the SSA project, at a 40 per cent discount from regular rates.

Board member Peter Jeffrey voted against the change order, expressing anger at the repeated postponements.

“I’m a little outraged at this point. This is the third delay [and] it was supposed to be a one-year contract. I don’t have any real confidence in the information I’m being given,” Mr. Jeffrey said.

But Mr. Kaplan assured the board that the end is in sight.

“We are within striking distance of launch,” he said.