Launching an expedition is difficult and time consuming. Often you will need to raise sponsorship to fund the trip. With this in mind I thought I would put together a series of articles with lists of tips and resources on how to go about setting up the web site and marketing it to get your message out there.
I would like to caveat this list with some points. I’m not an expert web designer, nor am I an expert at search engine optimisation. Nor too am I an expert at marketing on social media.
But for what it’s worth I will share my experiences of setting up the CrazyJourneys site and the methods I have used to market it. This hopefully will provide a basic framework for you to use and develop for your own expedition web site. It’s not numbered in priority order, simply as I thought of the item. This list is Part 1 in the series.
Expedition and adventure travel web site design
- Use a wordpress blog for the basic site. You can host with them for free, but I recommend you get your own domain for example www.myexpeditionname.com and find a hosting company. I use just host and it cost about $45 for 2 years. This included the domain name and unlimited sub domains
- choose a theme for your blog design. I use hybrid-news. i strongly recommend using hybrid which is the main architecture and then you have option af various child themes of which hybrid news is one. Hybrid and child themes are free and fully customisable with great search engine optimisation features already built in. Hybrid has an excellent support forum where the designer Justin always responds to questions you post within a few hours. Cost is $25 per year
- Choose some plugins to make your wordpress blog work better. I use
- contact form 7 so readers can contact me.
- hybrid hook extra functionality for hybrid theme
- my blog recent visitor widget gives live visitor data, where they came from and what outbound links they clicked on when you visit your profile page on myBlogLog
- subscribe to comments allows users to receive an email of follow up comments
- wordpress backup and wordpress database backup for that nightmare time when I lose all my data!
- wp super cache makes site load faster
- yet another related post plugin which put a list of related posts at end of a post
- wibiya puts toolbar at bottom of browser with links to facebook page twitter translations etc
- Customise your theme to make it look as you desire. Full details of this are beyond the scope of this article. However I have included a list below with code snippets where appropriate of things I did on this site that were a hassle to work out
- Amended the template.php file for yet another realatet post to display a what’s next section and the social media buttons for “become a fan, share on facebook, retweet, digg etc.
<h4><strong>Follow CrazyJourneys on Facebook</strong> <a href="http://www.facebook.com/crazyjourneys" title="CrazyJourneys on Facebook"><img src="http://crazyjourneys.com/wp-content/themes/hybrid-news/images/fb-fan.gif" width="113" height="23" style="border:none;" alt="Facebook" /></a></h4> <div class="alignleft"> <h3>Whats Next</h3> <ul> <li><a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/crazyjourneys">Subscribe to CrazyJourneys</a> </li> <li><a href="<?php get_permalink(); ?>#respond" title="<?php the_title_attribute(); ?>">Please comment..</a></li> <li><script type="text/javascript" src="http://w.sharethis.com/button/sharethis.js#publisher=99e0a522-d065-4875-ab1b-8ca581783317&type=wordpress&buttonText=ShareThis%20Please"></script></li></ul> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"></script> <script>var fbShare = {google_analytics: 'true'}</script> <script src="http://widgets.fbshare.me/files/fbshare.js"></script> <script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script><br/><br/><br/>
- Add share on facebook and reteet buttons to the post title. This was done by adding the following code to the theme functions.php file
add_action( 'hybrid_before_entry', 'my_tweet_button', 1 ); function my_tweet_button() { if ( is_single() ) { ?> <div class="tweet-button"> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"></script> <script>var fbShare = {google_analytics: 'true'}</script> <script src="http://widgets.fbshare.me/files/fbshare.js"></script> </div> <?php } } - Add a video introduction. I have been amazed how often this get viewed. CrazyJourneys has been live for 6 weeks and this vid has been viewed about 500 times. One thing though and I have yet to action this on my site. I would put a screen capture image of the video then open the video when it is clicked. One problem with the way I have done it is that it is in widget sidebar on every post and page which is good BUt because it is embeded and has to call the code from Youtube everytime a it slows down the load speed of the site.
I hope that this list is useful. If you have any questions please leave a comment and I will do my best to help. Also if you can see any ways in which I can improve the crazyJourneys site or if you have had any problems with it then I would really appreciate your feedback as well.
Related posts:
- A travel blog with credibility. This traveller has a message to share
- The Lesson from 2 expeditions seeking sponsorship to fund their next adventure
- trekking – Trekking Adventure Travel
- The Adventure of a Lifetime – Cycling, Walking and Mountaineering
- An intelligent travellers adventure as he cycles around the world