The phone was already the format

Quadomania runs guided quad tours out of Žabljak, inside the Durmitor national park. The footage that came back from the rides was vertical, because a person riding a quad holds a phone the way a person holds a phone, and the first instinct with material shaped like that is to crop it into something that looks like a proper website.

The clip at the top of the site is ten seconds long, seven hundred and twenty pixels across and twelve hundred and eighty tall. It was left alone. The nine photographs below it are the same shape for the same reason. Cropping them to landscape would have cost the top of a peak or the bottom of a machine, and what it bought in return was a format that nobody visiting the site was actually holding.

Who is visiting settles the argument. The traffic is a tourist standing in Žabljak with an afternoon free, comparing two operators on a phone, and that phone is in portrait. Reshaping the material so it looks correct on a laptop almost nobody will open is a decision made for the studio rather than for the business paying for it.

The booking runs on the same rule. Reserving hands off to WhatsApp or Viber, with the tour, the date and the number of riders already written into the message. There are no cards, no deposit and no account to create, because each of those is a place where somebody choosing between two operators puts the phone down. The channel was picked because it is the one already open on the screen.

What is left is five tour pages sorted by what each ride asks of you, a gallery of real rides, and a FAQ that answers what a first-time rider actually worries about, which is the gear, whether a licence is needed, and what happens when the weather turns on the plateau. All of the site is built for somebody holding a phone in one hand, because that is the only way it is ever going to be read.