The journey starts:
on a phone

It is a Wednesday evening in Amsterdam.

A couple are stretched out on the couch with the television going in the background, and neither of them is watching it. They have their phones in their hands. They are planning next summer.

Not at a desk. Not on a laptop with a notebook beside them. On their phones, half sideways, with the two of them showing each other things every couple of minutes.

At some point in that hour, they are going to land on your website.

And in the first few seconds, something is either going to make them lean in, or make them hit the back button.

That moment happens on a screen the size of your hand. For most Irish tourism businesses, somewhere between two thirds and four fifths of everyone who visits your website arrives on a phone. That is not a trend coming down the tracks at you. That is Tuesday.

Think about what that actually means.

Say a thousand people come to your website in a month. Around seven hundred of them will only ever see the phone version. Their entire impression of your business, your first hello, is whatever happens on that little screen. If it is slow, or cluttered, or fiddly to use, most of them are gone before they have read a word of what you wrote.

And here is the part that matters. This is not really about how the site looks on a phone. It is about whether it works on one.

There is a distinction here worth getting straight in your head, because the words get thrown around a lot and they are not the same thing at all.

Mobile-friendly. Mobile-responsive. Mobile-first.

Mobile-friendly means somebody checked that the site did not fall asunder on a phone.

Mobile-responsive means the layout shrinks down to fit the smaller screen.

Both of those are better than nothing. But neither of them started with the phone.

Mobile-first means the phone came first. The size of the buttons, the space between things, the order the pictures load in, where the booking button sits so a thumb can reach it. All of it designed for somebody holding a phone in one hand, probably with the other hand doing something else. The desktop version is then built out from that, rather than the other way round.

It is a genuinely different way of going about it, and you can see the difference in the results.

Now, there is one kind of phone visitor I want to single out, because they are the most valuable visitors your website will ever get.

These are the people who are already here. Already in the country, already in your town. Standing on the footpath with a phone in their hand, wondering what to do with the afternoon. The weather has turned, or the thing they had planned is closed, and they are looking for something now.

They have found you in a search. They are ready to move.

If your site opens quickly, if it is obvious within a second what you do, and if they can tap once to ring you or tap once to book, you have just picked up a customer at the exact moment they were ready to be picked up.

Miss it, and they put the phone back in their pocket and walk into the next place.

These people are not browsing. They are deciding. You have maybe five seconds to make the case, and the case is made by the phone version of your website or it is not made at all.

And while we are here, let me name the specific things that go wrong on phones, because they are nearly always the same handful.

Text so small that people have to pinch and zoom to read it, and nobody pinches and zooms for long.

A phone number sitting there as plain text instead of a link, so it cannot be tapped. That is a person deciding to ring you and then having to write your number down on the back of a receipt. A percentage of them will not bother.

A menu that opens over the whole screen with no obvious way to close it again.

Something asking them to sign up to a newsletter before they have read a single thing about you, with a little grey X too small for a thumb.

A price list that is a PDF. On a phone, a PDF opens in another app, loads sideways, and has to be zoomed into. That is three separate annoyances in a row, and all you wanted was to show them what a family ticket costs.

Big photographs that take an age to load on a patchy signal in a car park in Clare.

None of that is exotic. Every one of them is a five-minute fix, and every one of them is quietly turning people away.

Now, a well-built phone experience does not just look better. It puts bookings, calls and enquiries on the board, and you can see it in the numbers from the first week. It is one of those rare changes where the effect is not subtle. Fix the phone experience, and the figures move.

So what can you do this week? Three jobs.

The first one. Open your website on your phone right now. But not from your bookmark, and not by typing in your own address. Search for yourself on Google and tap through from the results, the way a stranger would. How long does it take to open? Is it immediately clear what you do? Is it obvious how to book? If anything feels slow or awkward to you, it feels worse to somebody who has never been there before and has no reason to be patient.

The second. Try to make a booking, or send an enquiry, the whole way through on your phone. Count the taps. See how the form behaves under your thumb. Is the keyboard bringing up numbers when it should? Is the payment step smooth? Every bit of friction is somewhere a person can decide to do this later, and later usually means never. People have far less patience on a phone than they do at a desk, and you can prove that to yourself in about four minutes.

And the third. Have a look at how many of your visitors are on phones and how many are on computers. If you have no analytics set up at all, that is about twenty minutes of work and it will tell you more about your business than a month of guessing. Once you see it in black and white, that seven out of ten of your visitors are on a phone, the argument for putting the phone first stops being an argument.

And here is what I want to leave you with.

For most of the people who will ever consider you, your first hello happens on a screen the size of a hand. Not at a desk. Not on a laptop. On a phone, usually in the evening, usually while planning something they are genuinely excited about.

That is a good moment to be arriving into somebody's life.

Make it a good one.