Friday Night, and Your Entertainment Site Has No Way to Book

Twenty to ten on a Friday night, and four people are standing in a restaurant parking lot with their coats on, nobody quite ready to go home yet.

So they go looking for somewhere. One of them already has her phone out, and yours is the entertainment business whose name she half remembers.

She gets most of it right and lets her thumb fill in the rest.

She finds the Instagram first, because everybody finds the Instagram first. Photographs from last weekend, a story posted an hour ago, and a link sitting underneath the bio.

She taps it.

You have about forty seconds of her attention. What does she find on the other end of that tap?

The one thing this business already wins

73.0% of the entertainment websites I audited link out to at least one social profile, against 66% across my whole sample.

That habit, 14 of 47 across the trades I check, costs an owner nothing whatsoever and takes an afternoon to set up once.

My check is a simple thing. It looks for a link to a profile somewhere on the page, and it holds no opinion at all about whether anybody ever follows it.

But an industry pointing outward at that rate is an industry that lives out there, on the app, while the website waits at home for whoever the app decides to send over.

The trade that is best at pointing outward is almost worst at the headline on its own homepage, which tells you where the attention went.

Links travel well in this trade, too. A wedding band I look after emailed their own web address to a corporate booker a couple of years ago, and it landed in her inbox as a naked blue underline with nothing underneath it.

The photograph and the two lines of wording that normally travel alongside a link get filled in by Open Graph tags, and their page hadn’t any written. 76.8% of the sites in this business carry them, slightly ahead of the 75.7% I find everywhere else.

So the promotion is working. Something has to be, or four people wouldn’t be standing in a parking lot saying your name.

Then she lands on your homepage

She arrives on a phone, outdoors, at twenty to ten, with three friends waiting on her to decide something.

She wants one of about three things. Whether there’s a table, whether there’s a ticket left for Sunday, and what the whole thing is going to cost.

20.9% of these homepages have a contact form on them, against 28% of small business websites generally.

On most of the ones I opened, what sits there instead is a telephone number.

I don’t hate a phone number. I’ve built plenty of pages where the phone was the right answer, and in your trade at two in the afternoon it usually is.

Try calling that number at twenty to ten on a Friday. It rings out in a room with a band playing in it, or it drops into a voicemail box nobody has opened since the spring.

She isn’t going to write you an email about it. Would you email a comedy club from a parking lot?

Count the gap properly

None of this ever shows up in an owner’s life as a percentage. It shows up as:

• The table of four in the parking lot, who walked to the place with the bigger sign instead.
• The mother arranging a birthday party for eleven year olds, who wanted a Sunday afternoon and a price on a Tuesday morning and got neither.
• The corporate booker who needed to forward your address to five colleagues and forwarded a blue underline instead.
• The regular who watched your story, meant to buy two tickets, and had forgotten the entire thing by Wednesday because there was nothing to tap while she was thinking about it.

Now do that on fifty Fridays a year. That is a real number, in real money, and not one line of it appears anywhere you could go and look at it.

Owners almost never get to watch this happen. One of mine did, standing at my shoulder while I tried to book his own room on my phone, and he got quieter and quieter the longer I scrolled.

How many of those has this month already had? You don’t know, and neither would I, and that is a separate problem sitting underneath the first one.

The part you never find out about

A haunted attraction I picked up two Octobers ago sold out almost every night, and its owner couldn’t tell me why.

The radio spots, the posters his nephew stapled to hydro poles, or the one video that went sideways on TikTok in September, he had no idea which of them filled his field.

I asked him four questions about that October and he answered every one of them with a shrug, and I liked him more for being straight with me.

Nothing on that website was keeping a record. Analytics would have kept one for him: arrivals, what they arrived from, and which hour of the evening they turned up in.

54.0% of this industry runs analytics where 58% do nationally.

An industry this fluent on social media is putting real effort in every single week and then deciding not to learn which part of it worked.

I keep these numbers somewhere anybody can go and check them, partly because I got tired of being asked and partly because I don’t trust my own memory on a decimal point. The report has an explorer with an industry box on it: choose Entertainment, leave the city box alone, and the card it hands back prints every check with the number of websites standing behind it. I usually have it open in a second tab while I write.

None of this is a technical failure

Owners find that part hardest to believe, because they’ve been told for years that a phone problem is what’s costing them.

So your web guy wasn’t lying to you. He answered a question about the building, and your customer was asking a question about the door.

79.8% of these pages pass the basic mobile checks, a shade above the 78% I get nationally, so her phone almost certainly got a page that fit the screen and behaved itself.

Whole cities clear that bar. Corpus Christi tops my mobile column, and the theme those owners bought did it for them.

It fit beautifully. There was simply nothing on it for her to do.

Fitting a screen and giving a person something to do on it were never the same job.

Would your own page have given her a way to book, from a parking lot, with three people waiting on her? Have you ever opened it standing up, outdoors, in a hurry?

So what can a stranger do on your homepage tonight without calling you? Book a thing? Buy a thing? Or read about you, nod, and put the phone back in her pocket?

Most of the work I do on entertainment websites has very little to do with design. It’s putting a way to book or buy on the first screen a phone shows, and making sure your address, when it lands in a group chat, arrives looking like a business rather than a rumor.

Send me your homepage and I’ll tell you what a stranger can actually accomplish on it in forty seconds, because forty seconds is all she was ever going to give you.

If it were my business, I’d put one booking button on the first screen tonight and leave every other argument about that website until the spring.