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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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A note from the lodge04

What running a lodge taught us about tourism websites

It is surprisingly difficult to make your own website when you are deeply attached to the thing it represents. We run Wakaranai Lodge in Tomamu, and our passion, creativity, and daily work kept finding their way into the site. Sometimes that made it more alive. Sometimes it made it harder for a guest to understand.

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Business foundations05

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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SEO · GEO06

What is GEO, and why does it matter for tourism businesses in Japan?

Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, is a useful name for making a business easier for AI-assisted search tools to understand. It is not a secret markup or a promise that an AI will recommend you. For a tourism business in Japan, it starts with the same practical work as good SEO: clear information, real evidence, useful pages, and a website that answers the questions a traveller actually has.

6 min read
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Tourism website audit07

Would you send a friend to your tourism website?

There is a simple test we come back to when looking at a tourism website: would we confidently send a friend here? Not a web person. Not someone who already knows Hokkaido. A friend planning a trip from overseas, looking at their phone after dinner, with a few tabs open and no appetite for detective work.

6 min read
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