A Boat Repair Site Whose Contact Page Is Only a Map

The site

A marine repair shop on a tidal river: engine servicing, fibreglass repair, winter storage, and a travel lift for hauling boats out of the water.

The site has four pages: a home page with a large photograph of a boat in the lift's slings, a list of services, an about page and a contact page.

The contact page is an embedded map, full width, with one red pin. That is the whole page.

There is no phone number in text anywhere on the site. The only number sits inside the home page photograph, where it cannot be tapped, copied or read aloud.

The inference a visitor makes

Someone on this page usually has a specific problem: an outboard that will not start, a gouge in the hull, a boat that has to come out before winter.

They came to find a number to call and the hours someone answers it. Finding a picture instead, most draw one of two conclusions.

Either the shop is too busy for new work, or too small for anyone to look after the site. Neither is true, and both send a boat owner back to the search results.

In July, with a boat stuck on its trailer in the driveway, the next shop on the list is one tap away.

What the page leaves out

List what a boat owner needs before calling or driving over, and the map supplies almost none of it.

• A phone number that can be tapped from the page.
• The street address in words that can be copied.
• Hours by season, since summer and winter differ.
• Directions by water for boats arriving under their own power.
• Directions by road for a truck towing a trailer.
• A way to send details after hours: engine, hull, problem.

The fourth is the one no map can show. A pin marks a street address, while a boat coming up the river needs to know which dock to use.

No number to tap

On a phone, a number written as text, and especially one set up as a call link, works as a button. One tap and the phone dials.

A map offers nothing of the kind. The visitor has to leave the site, open a map app, find the shop's listing, and hope the number there is current.

Each extra step loses some of the people who started, and the ones with the most urgent jobs tend to go first.

No address in words

The address exists only as a position on a map. Nobody can copy it into a text to the friend with the truck, or paste it into their own navigation app.

Search engines read the text of a page, and an embedded map is a separate page shown inside a frame. As far as the contact page is concerned, the address is not there.

It also weakens the link to the shop's business listing, which works best when the website shows the same name, address and phone number in text.

A worked example

The repair shop sits at the end of a marina road, sharing a gravel lot with a boatyard and the marina office. Its pin sat on the marina office, where the street number points.

Marina staff fielded calls meant for the repair shop every week. Trailers came in through the marina's main gate, where a truck towing a twenty-foot boat cannot turn.

Boats arriving by water tied up at the fuel dock, since nothing said otherwise, and the attendant walked up to fetch someone from the shop.

The owner had chosen the map deliberately, as the clearest possible answer. It was clear only to people who already knew the marina.

The rebuilt page opens with the phone number as a call link, the street address in text, and the hours for summer and winter.

Then come two short directions: by road with a trailer, use the second driveway past the boatyard sign; by water, tie up at the shop's own float and phone from there.

A short form for after-hours messages asks for the engine, the hull and the problem. The map stayed, at the bottom, under all of it.

Hours, and after hours

Boat repair runs to the seasons. A shop like this one might open Saturdays from April to September, close at noon on winter Fridays and shut for two weeks over Christmas.

None of that can be read from a pin. Some visitors phone to ask; others tow a boat over on a November Saturday and find the gate locked.

Write the hours out by season, in text, and change them on the day they change.

Many owners deal with repairs in the evening, after the shop has shut. A short form lets them send the engine, the boat's length and the problem, ready for the morning.

On a phone and with a screen reader

On a phone, a full-width map fills the screen, and a thumb meant to scroll the page drags the map instead.

A screen reader, which reads pages aloud, finds a frame and a set of map controls. It finds no street name, phone number or hours, because none of them exist as words.

The number in the home page photograph is no better. Without a text description, a screen reader skips the image or reads out its file name.

A title on the map's frame at least tells a listener what it is. The real fix is words on the page, near the top, before the map.

The counter-case within the site

The map is not useless. For a visitor who knows the area, a pin shows at a glance which side of the river the shop is on.

A mobile repair service working at customers' own marinas may need no map at all, only a list of the marinas it covers.

And a shop whose customers are nearly all long-time regulars can manage with a thinner page for longer, though regulars lose numbers too.

For everyone else, the order is the point: the number, the address and the hours in words first, the map underneath.

What to change

1. Put the phone number first, as a call link.
2. Write the street address in plain text.
3. List the hours for each season.
4. Add directions by water to the right dock.
5. Add directions by road for trailers.
6. Add a short form for after-hours details.
7. Move the map below, with a title.

Step four is the one only this trade needs, and it takes two sentences of text: which float belongs to the shop, and which number to phone from it.

The same habit of letting a picture stand in for the answer is covered in a hotel site with seven slides on the home page.

Frequently asked questions

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