There are multiple options available to chronicle your adventures and share your photos. Multiple options…but no debate on the correct choice: create a travel website. It’s the best medium to showcase your trip and experiences. Tumblr, Blogger, Medium, and similar sites are more writing and social network focused than creating a personal website. Don’t undercut chronicling your travels—go with the real thing, go with a personal website. A website helps memorialize your trip and serves as a digital scrapbook for yourself.
Build your website structure before you leave on your trip. One of the misconceptions about around the world travel is that you will have free time. Free time to write. Free time to edit photos. Free time to be productive. Free time to build a website to chronicle your travels. More free time than you will know how to use. None of that is true—free time is a myth. You won’t have any free time. Likewise, you’ve never been productive on a plane or a train or waiting for a departure yet in the days leading up to your trip you convince yourself that this time will be different. It won’t. You won’t suddenly find the inspiration to build a website in the common room at the hostel after you arrive. You won’t build a website after a month of gathering photos and writing stories about your experiences. Two months into your trip you won’t have an engaging landing page or any coherent organization that allows visitors to navigate your site. You need to build your website before you travel. If not, you’ll have a website with partially completed blog entries, space holders, and links that lead to nowhere.
It’s easier to build a website in advance of your travels when you can devote a few continuous, uninterrupted hours on the weekends. You can also return home from work each night and spend an hour or two creating a quality website. Compare this approach with building the website in the hostel. Do you want to save money pretravel (versus dining out) and build a website at home or sit in a hostel to build a website instead of seeing the places you changed your life for? No debate. Build the website in advance.
Building a website in advance allows you to realize the ease of the process. There’s no reason to delay building a website because you think it’s too complicated. If you know how to send an email with an attachment, you can build a website. Developers realized that if their applications are more complicated than “Click. Drag. Drop.” there won’t be mass adoption. Today’s applications are intuitive to operate with no instructions needed. Worst-case scenario, which infrequently happens, if you are stuck, there’s plenty of YouTube videos to help you over specific hurdles.
The initial website setup takes an hour or two. The first thirty minutes may be rough. Just breath. You’ll ultimately spend more time thinking of a creative name for the website, realizing someone already owns that web address, thinking of another, even more creative name, and registering that name, than you’ll spend building the website’s initial structure.
Building a website starts with creating an initial landing page. You may choose from hundreds of predesigned templates, however, you’ll spend hours, days, weeks, months and years tinkering with the perfect landing page. Complete a basic landing page design and start on the rest of the website. As you become more familiar with website design and are inspired from other website landing pages do what every great internet searcher does: copy. And tweak a little. Then copy again and tweak again. It’s a never ending process.
Don’t wait for the perfect landing page to begin focusing on creating a coherent structure and framework to your website. From the landing page, subpages are accessed via an organizational drop down or direct links. If you never noticed, all website subpages look the same, it doesn’t matter what website, ESPN, CNN or Amazon. That’s why it’s easy to build a website—you create one subpage which serves as a template for all the other subpages. Copy the template for each location you plan to visit and add the content as you travel.
Much of your website build time should be spent thinking how to best organize the subpages. Some travel websites are organized via blog entries and categories which can be searched via hyperlinks and phrases. This approach becomes burdensome once you’ve reached the 100-blog entry threshold and have long-term objectives in mind.
Instead of posting content to blog entries, post the content to individual webpages, using a previously created template. This organizational structure requires more setup time, but the website is cleaner and easier to maintain. Conceptually, navigating this website setup is the equivalent of organizing your personal folders on your laptop or cloud drive like a file tree. There are a few general folders which then breakdown to more detailed folders which then have your files. You should organize your website in a similar fashion.
My website organization approach starts with five primary categories: About, Travel Afar, Travel Local, Know How, and Know Why. Behind-the-scenes of my website, these categories are the primary pages linked to the initial landing pages with related subpages below. Under the Travel Afar page are continent categories: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. The next level down is Sub-Continent followed by Country Level. Destinations are the final level below Country. When I want to find a page on sumo wrestling the navigation is: Travel Afar -> Asia -> East Asia -> Japan -> Sumo. I hide the subpages to reduce clutter on navigation from the initial landing page.
The website may also serve as a planner before arriving at a destination. Add a subpage location prior to arrival, list all the areas you want to visit, then use the subpage as a reference source when you reach the destination. If you are visiting Japan, create all the location and destination pages before you arrive. As you research and find useful links, add the information to your website instead of storing it as a bookmark. Begin adding background information on historical sites and activities. You’ll know more about sumo wrestling before you arrive at the event.
It’s easier to build a website in advance of your travels when you can devote a few continuous, uninterrupted hours on the weekends. You can also return home from work each night and spend an hour or two creating a quality website. Compare this approach with building the website in the hostel. Do you want to save money pretravel (versus dining out) and build a website at home or sit in a hostel to build a website instead of seeing the places you changed your life for? No debate. Build the website in advance.
Building a website in advance allows you to realize the ease of the process. There’s no reason to delay building a website because you think it’s too complicated. If you know how to send an email with an attachment, you can build a website. Developers realized that if their applications are more complicated than “Click. Drag. Drop.” there won’t be mass adoption. Today’s applications are intuitive to operate with no instructions needed. Worst-case scenario, which infrequently happens, if you are stuck, there’s plenty of YouTube videos to help you over specific hurdles.
The initial website setup takes an hour or two. The first thirty minutes may be rough. Just breath. You’ll ultimately spend more time thinking of a creative name for the website, realizing someone already owns that web address, thinking of another, even more creative name, and registering that name, than you’ll spend building the website’s initial structure.
Building a website starts with creating an initial landing page. You may choose from hundreds of predesigned templates, however, you’ll spend hours, days, weeks, months and years tinkering with the perfect landing page. Complete a basic landing page design and start on the rest of the website. As you become more familiar with website design and are inspired from other website landing pages do what every great internet searcher does: copy. And tweak a little. Then copy again and tweak again. It’s a never ending process.
Don’t wait for the perfect landing page to begin focusing on creating a coherent structure and framework to your website. From the landing page, subpages are accessed via an organizational drop down or direct links. If you never noticed, all website subpages look the same, it doesn’t matter what website, ESPN, CNN or Amazon. That’s why it’s easy to build a website—you create one subpage which serves as a template for all the other subpages. Copy the template for each location you plan to visit and add the content as you travel.
Much of your website build time should be spent thinking how to best organize the subpages. Some travel websites are organized via blog entries and categories which can be searched via hyperlinks and phrases. This approach becomes burdensome once you’ve reached the 100-blog entry threshold and have long-term objectives in mind.
Instead of posting content to blog entries, post the content to individual webpages, using a previously created template. This organizational structure requires more setup time, but the website is cleaner and easier to maintain. Conceptually, navigating this website setup is the equivalent of organizing your personal folders on your laptop or cloud drive like a file tree. There are a few general folders which then breakdown to more detailed folders which then have your files. You should organize your website in a similar fashion.
My website organization approach starts with five primary categories: About, Travel Afar, Travel Local, Know How, and Know Why. Behind-the-scenes of my website, these categories are the primary pages linked to the initial landing pages with related subpages below. Under the Travel Afar page are continent categories: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. The next level down is Sub-Continent followed by Country Level. Destinations are the final level below Country. When I want to find a page on sumo wrestling the navigation is: Travel Afar -> Asia -> East Asia -> Japan -> Sumo. I hide the subpages to reduce clutter on navigation from the initial landing page.
The website may also serve as a planner before arriving at a destination. Add a subpage location prior to arrival, list all the areas you want to visit, then use the subpage as a reference source when you reach the destination. If you are visiting Japan, create all the location and destination pages before you arrive. As you research and find useful links, add the information to your website instead of storing it as a bookmark. Begin adding background information on historical sites and activities. You’ll know more about sumo wrestling before you arrive at the event.
PURCHASING A DOMAIN NAME
Purchase a domain name to make your website buildout official. The domain registration companies operate separately from website builder services. Domain registration allows you to be the official owner of a web address. Host Gator and GoDaddy are two of the well-known domain registration companies. I registered www.jimhamill.com through Yahoo Small Business and the cost is about $20 a year. The domain registration companies may offer website building services, however, their product is inferior to the application and host companies listed in the section below (as of 2020 anyway).
SELECTING A WEBSITE BUILDER APPLICATION AND HOST
After purchasing and registering a domain name, you still need to build the website. Four primary website building services available are WordPress, Weebly, Wix, and Squarespace. There are tens of other website building software services.
Each service has tradeoffs between starting template designs, ease of use, flexibility, e-commerce integration, and technical support. Several website application services offer a free component that allows you to play with the application and view their templates before upgrading to a paid version. Therefore, I recommend trying all four services, which is another reason to build the website in advance of your travels—you will have the time to experiment and find the application you prefer. With the selection of your application builder and host, you are making a lifetime decision. The more informed the decision, the more experience you have with the application’s features, the happier you will be long term. Take a few hours or even a few days to play around with each application’s features.
Anecdotally, many travel bloggers use WordPress. Once you’ve visited ten travel websites you begin to understand the features of WordPress and can identify websites using similar templates and structures that are only available through WordPress. I thought that WordPress was slightly more complicated than the “Click. Drag. Drop.” refrain. It took a few days for me to navigate and understand the application’s full functionality, however, there is a well-developed online community to serve as a guide should you choose this service. When I was building my website, WordPress did not have a cloud version which automatically ruled them out since I was traveling with a Google Chromebook. There’s now an option to put your website in Google Cloud but it’s not a natural, native cloud environment as some of the other services.
I use Weebly which has the easiest drag and drop templates available with the tradeoff being there’s not much flexibility or customization (unless you know how to edit code). I like Weebly, however, if I knew more about website design and had experimented more with other services prior to my travels, I think I would have chosen another provider. I think. Weebly is so easy, though. Building, maintaining, and updating my website is a breeze. Weebly’s acquisition by Square, means the service is around for the long term and should see steady improvements. Weebly costs $100 a year.
LOGO DESIGN
When reviewing websites for design and style inspiration you will come across a few sites where the blogger has a unique logo. You may think, I wish I had a logo like that. You may think that person must be creative, artistic, and understand digital graphics. They likely aren’t. Like building a website, the logo design is much simpler once you step behind-the-scenes. It’s easy and cheap to find someone online who can design a logo on your behalf. Websites like Fiverr list hundreds of creative services, from designing logos to book covers to product labels, as well as media and business services, from thousands of people around the world. For $50 a graphic designer in Romania will create a snazzy logo for you in less than a week. You have a logo now.
Your website is official. It will be the best gift from your travels.
Purchase a domain name to make your website buildout official. The domain registration companies operate separately from website builder services. Domain registration allows you to be the official owner of a web address. Host Gator and GoDaddy are two of the well-known domain registration companies. I registered www.jimhamill.com through Yahoo Small Business and the cost is about $20 a year. The domain registration companies may offer website building services, however, their product is inferior to the application and host companies listed in the section below (as of 2020 anyway).
SELECTING A WEBSITE BUILDER APPLICATION AND HOST
After purchasing and registering a domain name, you still need to build the website. Four primary website building services available are WordPress, Weebly, Wix, and Squarespace. There are tens of other website building software services.
Each service has tradeoffs between starting template designs, ease of use, flexibility, e-commerce integration, and technical support. Several website application services offer a free component that allows you to play with the application and view their templates before upgrading to a paid version. Therefore, I recommend trying all four services, which is another reason to build the website in advance of your travels—you will have the time to experiment and find the application you prefer. With the selection of your application builder and host, you are making a lifetime decision. The more informed the decision, the more experience you have with the application’s features, the happier you will be long term. Take a few hours or even a few days to play around with each application’s features.
Anecdotally, many travel bloggers use WordPress. Once you’ve visited ten travel websites you begin to understand the features of WordPress and can identify websites using similar templates and structures that are only available through WordPress. I thought that WordPress was slightly more complicated than the “Click. Drag. Drop.” refrain. It took a few days for me to navigate and understand the application’s full functionality, however, there is a well-developed online community to serve as a guide should you choose this service. When I was building my website, WordPress did not have a cloud version which automatically ruled them out since I was traveling with a Google Chromebook. There’s now an option to put your website in Google Cloud but it’s not a natural, native cloud environment as some of the other services.
I use Weebly which has the easiest drag and drop templates available with the tradeoff being there’s not much flexibility or customization (unless you know how to edit code). I like Weebly, however, if I knew more about website design and had experimented more with other services prior to my travels, I think I would have chosen another provider. I think. Weebly is so easy, though. Building, maintaining, and updating my website is a breeze. Weebly’s acquisition by Square, means the service is around for the long term and should see steady improvements. Weebly costs $100 a year.
LOGO DESIGN
When reviewing websites for design and style inspiration you will come across a few sites where the blogger has a unique logo. You may think, I wish I had a logo like that. You may think that person must be creative, artistic, and understand digital graphics. They likely aren’t. Like building a website, the logo design is much simpler once you step behind-the-scenes. It’s easy and cheap to find someone online who can design a logo on your behalf. Websites like Fiverr list hundreds of creative services, from designing logos to book covers to product labels, as well as media and business services, from thousands of people around the world. For $50 a graphic designer in Romania will create a snazzy logo for you in less than a week. You have a logo now.
Your website is official. It will be the best gift from your travels.