An English website for a Japanese guesthouse

Context

Japanese and Western web design tend to sit at opposite ends. Japanese sites tend to put everything in view at once: dense text, many links, banners side by side. Western readers expect fewer choices, more space and a clear path to the next step. An English site that carries the Japanese one over word for word keeps the density and loses the reader.

The owner had taken the English site offline himself rather than let it keep working against the guesthouse. He knew something wasn’t right, but not what, or where to start. The Japanese site had real substance to build from: the founder’s own reasons for opening the place, a cat who “owns” the guesthouse, a rare white tanuki that visits the garden, none of it written with an English-speaking reader in mind.

The objective

That reader needed a new site, built from the ground up, with two jobs: sending first-time guests on to Booking.com, and receiving the inquiries that come in directly.

What I did

I audited the site and pitched what I thought the real fix was: a clean rebuild off WordPress, on a platform the owner could run without a developer on call. He preferred to stay on WordPress, for cost and to keep a setup he already had help with, so the rebuild happened there, scoped to the English site only.

I learned an unfamiliar theme’s component logic, then built a new English information architecture around how a first-time Western guest decides to book, using the Japanese content as reference material. Booking.com sits prominently in the new navigation as the primary way to book, built so it could point elsewhere later without the site needing restructuring again, and I set up inquiry-form email alerts for the first time. I also left a written handover of what remained: page metadata and SEO tags, language tags to stop the English and Japanese versions competing in search, and where a WordPress specialist would be worth the cost.

The site I pitched and the site I built took different paths, set by the owner’s priorities. Staying on WordPress meant working inside an aging theme and leaving some technical debt for later, outside the engagement’s scope. In return, the owner kept a setup he knew, and a site he can update himself, with inquiries now reaching him directly for the first time.

The outcome

• 1stsite designed for Western guests
• 2ways to book, ready for the owner’s own system
• 10pages written and built in English

The English site is live today at en.miyajimamikuniya.com, and the guesthouse now keeps it up itself, on the structure I built.

Skills and tools

Strategy

• Website audit
• Information architecture
• Pitch and phased proposal

Content

• English copywriting
• Adapting Japanese content for Western guests
• FAQ and booking information

Build

• WordPress (legacy theme)
• Inquiry forms and email alerts
• Technical handover