If you want to monetize your love for traveling or simply share your exciting stories with a global audience, there’s nothing better than starting a travel blog. However, after a while, you may notice that your blog isn’t as popular as you believe it ought to be. And yet, you’re certain that your content is more than interesting, but website traffic simply isn’t confirming your opinion.
In that situation, there’s one thing that you need to focus on more — you need to improve your travel blog design. Though you may not be aware of this, the design of your website is an equally important part of the overall user experience when compared to the content itself. If you don’t have a well-designed website, your visitors may be confused and leave in frustration without even experiencing the content that you’ve prepared.
With that in mind, we’ll share some of the most crucial tips to improve the design and usability of your travel blog!
Simpler Navigation
What is the point of your website in the first place? That’s right — providing your audience with valuable information. Sure, that information may be found in the form of tips for buying the right camping equipment or something more organic like an after-action report on your latest adventure. Regardless of the specific type of content, however, this information needs to be presented clearly enough for it to be useful.
That’s why simplifying your website navigation is crucial in this process. You don’t want to have dozens of different categories and tabs if they’re not actually needed to make your content distinctive; you need to make sure that the layout of your website is concise.
Don’t allow yourself to get lost in layers and layers of content. Instead, limit yourself to something like two levels that will contain clear and simple labels that the users will be able to access from the header menu.
Website Layout
When trying to improve your travel blog design, you need to have one crucial trait in mind — utility. In other words, is your page layout doing the work you need it to do? Many people make the mistake of focusing more on aesthetics than on content presentation, and that’s a pitfall you have to avoid.
Professional designers like wpfullcare.com have a few tricks when it comes to approaching website design from the right perspective. Mainly, this revolves around making sure that your design solutions bring enough value to the end-user by putting yourself in their shoes.
Imagine that you’re an outside visitor arriving at a page on your travel blog — if you’re distracted by a website element that draws you away from content, this is a problem that needs to be solved. Remember, your travel blog’s bread and butter is the content that you post, so the layout of the website needs to correspond with that.
What does this mean in practice, though? Well, there are a couple of design solutions that bring your content as much visibility as possible. For instance, a single-column blog layout is always a good idea. It brings your stories front and center, allowing website visitors to experience them with little distraction.
On the other hand, you could opt for a two-column approach as well. In that layout, you have a sidebar next to your main content area, usually to the right. If you decide to go with this, you need to make sure that the content column is larger than your sidebar. This will help your audience avoid any confusion.
Image Optimization
It’s crucial to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to web design. That’s one of the most important tips to improve your travel blog in comparison to the competition. You surely don’t want to stay behind. For instance, you need to consider how people will be accessing your website in the first place.
/caption: The right visuals can improve your travel blog, but make sure you choose images carefully! /alt: An analog Zenit camera and pictures on an ancient map.
The days of a desktop-dominated Internet are long behind us. In 2022, more people are accessing websites through mobile devices in the vein of smartphones, tablets, and laptops. All of these devices have different screen resolutions and even browser software. That’s why responsive design practices are crucial; you don’t want your website to appear garbled or cluttered when viewed on a phone.
Considering that, image optimization is one of the most important things that you’ll do while trying to improve your travel blog design. When you’re creating a travel website, you’ll always be tempted to fill it with gorgeous pictures of all the incredible vistas that you’ve visited and seen. However, in terms of image optimization, that’s not a good idea.
If you’re going to use a lot of images nonetheless, make sure they’re optimized and not too high-resolution. Otherwise, they will significantly slow down your website, adversely altering your user experience. Also, a lot of high-resolution images also mean that your users will have to spend more bandwidth on visiting your website, which is a potential issue for mobile users with limited data plans.
Search Button
As we’ve mentioned above, your website’s content is the most crucial aspect of your travel blog. With that in mind, there is one website feature that you absolutely must pay enough attention to, and we’re talking about your search button.
Travel blogs often contain a myriad of different stories, advice columns, and basically all other varieties of content. Coupled with the prospect of geographical diversity, your users may have a hard time finding the content that brings them enough value.
For this reason, a good search feature is crucial. If you don’t want to spend time and resources on designing this feature yourself, you could always implement the custom Google search bar for your website. This will allow your users to use Google’s search engine in a more focused way — solely for searches on your website.
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