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Cherry on the Moon
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Field notes

Useful thinking from tourism and the web.

What we learn while running a lodge in Tomamu and building websites for tourism businesses. No content-machine summaries: these are the details, mistakes, and useful truths we have met in the work itself.

Discuss your website
Tourism websites01

A practical website checklist for welcoming international guests

We learned this from both sides of the desk. We build tourism websites, but we also run Wakaranai Lodge in Tomamu and answer the messages that arrive when a guest cannot work out the train, the snow, dinner, check-in, or what rural Hokkaido is actually like. International visitors often arrive with more uncertainty than a local guest. A good website should reduce that uncertainty before asking for a reservation.

7 min read
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Website rebuilds02

Rebuilding a Wix website without losing your search visibility

We have nothing against the website that got a business through its first years. Wix can be a perfectly sensible way to get online. The problem comes when the monthly cost grows, editing feels like moving furniture through a narrow doorway, or the site no longer fits the business it helped create. Rebuilding is possible without throwing away everything Google already understands.

6 min read
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Direct inquiries03

How a tourism website can earn more direct inquiries

A direct inquiry is rarely created by one heroic red button. It happens when the website answers enough questions, builds enough trust, and makes the next step feel easier than opening another twelve tabs. We see this in our own lodge, and in the strong flow of leads arriving through the website we built for Raven Outdoors.

6 min read
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Business foundations04

Clarify the business before designing the brand or website

When we started Wakaranai Lodge, the logo was not the difficult part. The difficult part was turning a place, a set of skills, a limited budget, and a slightly unruly collection of ideas into a business guests could understand. That experience changed the way we approach every brand and website project.

7 min read
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