Hospedo — Mi web now speaks Dutch, and on a phone again
Your booking page reaches Dutch guests in Dutch, and the editor stops fighting your screen. Three tabs, not two columns squashed into one.
Until today, the Mi web editor had two side-by-side columns — Spanish on the left, English on the right — for your headline, your "About" paragraph, your house rules, and each room's description. It worked on a desktop. On a phone, the columns crowded each other to the point where you couldn't comfortably edit either one. And there was no Dutch.
That last bit had a sharper edge than it sounds. A guest landing on your booking subdomain in Dutch saw the page chrome in Dutch — "Boek direct," "Onze kamers," the date picker labels — but the words that actually describe your house were silently substituted from your English copy. So a Dutch guest read an English paragraph in a Dutch wrapper. Not broken, exactly. Just not yours.
What changes for you
The editor now has three language tabs at the top: ES · EN · NL. Pick a tab, the fields below swap to that language. Your phone, email, check-in and check-out times sit in a section above the tabs that doesn't change between languages — those are operational details that stay put while you work on your copy.
A few specifics worth knowing:
- The active tab defaults to your property's source language (Spanish for Doña Concha). Tap once to switch.
- If you start typing in one language and tap a different tab, the editor checks before throwing your work away — "Tienes cambios sin guardar. ¿Descartar?" Pick "Cancelar" to stay where you were; pick "Aceptar" to switch and drop the draft.
- Each language saves into its own column. Editing English doesn't touch your Spanish; adding Dutch doesn't touch either.
- And on the public side: a Dutch guest now reads what you wrote in Dutch. If you haven't written anything in Dutch yet, the section just disappears for them — no more silent English fallback. The booking page renders your Dutch copy, your Spanish copy, or your English copy, depending on who's reading.
Why the layout pivot needed to land with the Dutch column
Adding a third side-by-side column to the editor would have made the form unworkable on a 375-pixel-wide phone — your fields are tight enough at two columns. Doing the layout change as a separate release would have meant shipping three crammed columns first, then ripping them out for tabs. Tabs were the right answer to "we'll need this to scale to more languages eventually anyway"; doing both changes together avoided spending engineering effort on a layout that was about to be replaced. Standard convention from Wikipedia, Crowdin, DeepL — anywhere content has multiple translations — tab-the-language, don't column-the-language.
Photo management for your rooms is the next thing in the pipeline (Phase 5b), and the admin nav itself is getting cleaned up so the language tabs sit alongside a clearer top-level structure (separate ticket). For now: open Mi web, tap NL, write your house story for your Dutch guests in their language.