Many travelers enjoy traveling so much that they like to spread that joy to others through a travel website. If that resonates with you, you should create a travel website. That’s why in this article, we’ll cover tips on how to start your travel website soon.
Choose your niche
You need to have more than just the standard travel website. It’s a good idea to pick a niche to make it easier to stand out among the many other travel websites online.
Luckily, though, there are many niches that you can choose from under the general umbrella of travel. Here are some you can choose from:
- Budget traveling: Here, you can cover tips on how a traveler can have a great time traveling to places despite a limited budget.
- Luxury travel: If you want to cover the best money you can buy, luxury travel niches might suit you.
- Sustainable/Eco-tourism: This niche fits your principles with your favorite activity.
- Food travel: When you combine two good things in life (food + travel), you can become a foodie traveler.
- Solo Travel/Solo Female Travel: Solo travel is an exciting niche, especially for solo female travelers who like to keep safety issues in mind that usually aren’t covered by the glamor of standard travel blogs.
- Digital Nomad Niche: Since digital nomads are about traveling while sustaining their work lifestyle, this might be a great niche if that’s the same wavelength you’re on.
There are different ways you can niche down aside from the choices here. You can even go deeper. For example, some people have a travel website for a continent or even a country. That’s a great way to go in-depth into your travel tips since you can focus on just one place.
Understand your audience
While at the beginning of your travel website journey, most of the input you will consider is from yourself. However, as you build more of an audience, you need to incorporate their feedback in the future to nurture a sense of community among them. That’s how you create a strong community and a loyal audience for your travel website.
Reading the comments can be a great way to stay in touch with your audience’s thoughts about your content. Incorporate other feedback avenues, like a survey or a poll, on some of your content.
You should also look into what your competitors are doing, especially if their target audience is similar in demographics. Maybe they’re doing something that’s getting more engagement from their audience that could also work for yours.
Choose a domain name and web hosting
If you want to legitimize your website, consider a firm domain name and a web host provider. Your domain name should be the name and title of your website. It should be easy to remember and spell since that’s what people will type in when they look for your website. Ideally, it should be short and sweet so that when someone sees it for the first time, they’ll remember it fast.
Once you’ve settled into a domain name, you should look for a reputable web hosting provider. There are different hosting packages, and while the cheaper options are undoubtedly viable at the start, the bigger your website becomes, the more you may need to scale your web hosting provider package.
Select an appropriate content management system
Aside from choosing your web hosting provider, another crucial step to setting up your travel website is selecting your content management system (CMS). A suitable CMS should accommodate all the types of content that you plan to post on your travel website.
You will be relying on your CMS a lot since the heart of your travel website is the content you create. You can ask your website developer if you have any and what CMS they recommend, but you can always go with the industry standard CMS choices. Some examples would be:
- WordPress
- Wix
- Magento
- Squarespace
- Drupal
- Joomla
The more comprehensive your website is, the more you may demand from your CMS. That’s why it’s a good idea to consult a web design professional or developer to inform you of the best CMS choice for your travel website.
Design your travel website
Once you have your website’s foundation in place, it’s time to start thinking about the design aspect.
According to Sytian Productions web developer Philippines, if you have the budget, you can hire a web designer to create a customized travel website based on your preferences. This way, rather than using whatever templates are available, you can establish a stronger brand and have more control over the appearance and functionalities that you want on your website.
However, if you don’t have the budget for it, you can stick to the pre-set themes and then upgrade in the future. Ensure you have a consistent color scheme, especially if you plan to spread your brand’s presence anywhere outside your website.
If you have consistent branding, it becomes easier to associate and recognize your brand with that imagery in the future. However, don’t go overboard with the colors. After all, if they’re all bright colors, they can be challenging for your website visitors to look at.
Since your website will be a travel site, you’ll add images of your travels anyway, so using fewer colors will help readers focus on the pictures you have.
Your design should also make reading the text of your blog posts more accessible. Proper spacing and formatting are helpful, but your typeface can also affect that. Avoid cursive typefaces, for example, as they are inconsistent in readability.
Share your knowledge, experiences, and tips
If there’s anything that will make your content stand out from the rest, it would be your knowledge, experience, and advice.
When readers know that you’re not just writing travel content to promote a product or service, that makes your content feel more genuine. If there’s any content that requires direct experience, it would be travel content. That’s why your first-hand experience will be the most valuable here.
Use eye-catching images
You rarely see a travel website that has zero pictures. That’s why investing in great cameras to capture high-quality images for your travel site is mandatory.
The more pictures you take, the better. Not because you’re going to use all those photos in your content, but it’s just that it gives you more choices, which is more challenging if you don’t have lots of pictures in the first place.
Include an interactive map
Many people who visit your website are most likely planning to go to the places you’ve been. To accommodate their itinerary, it’s a good idea to add an interactive map widget that pins exactly where your locations are. Plugins are available for you, or you can have your web developer do that again.
Make it mobile-friendly
Nowadays, most people browse the Internet on their phones. That’s why it’s a mistake not to accommodate mobile users when creating a travel website.
Some plugins automatically make your website more mobile-friendly, but if you want to be sure, consult a web designer to ensure all the features work as they should, no matter what device a web user uses.
Conclusion
If you follow these tips well, you should have a travel website that is as much a pleasure to read as it is to manage. If creating a travel website is something you’ve always wanted to do, these tips should help you get on the right path to your next adventure.
