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A Case of Wanderlust: 5 Effective Travel Website Design Tips

Laptops, Wifi, and hostels have all helped to spur an age of digital nomads. These young, eager individuals travel the world, working from anywhere they choose.

Many of these modern nomads have chosen to document their travels through websites and blogs. On those sites, they share stories of their travels and offer advice for others looking to see the world.

Whether you’re a digital nomad or just a travel enthusiast, creating a travel blog is a great way to share your story and connect with others.

If you’re thinking about launching your own blog, check out these 5 travel website design tips to help you get started.

1. Start with Stunning Web Design

Up to 90 percent of people who visit your website will visit once and never return.

If you want to keep visitors coming back for more, you need to start with stunning web design.

Many tourism websites make the mistake of trying to throw as much information as possible at readers to get them hooked. But the best travel-planning websites do the opposite.

Rather than overwhelming readers, they utilize clean, minimalist designs to create web pages that relax and calm visitors. This simplistic design won’t distract from the content of the site.

This means readers will get distracted while reading, giving you a chance to hook them with your words and photos.

2. Focus on Photos

Once you have a simple, beautiful site, it’s time to start adding your content. 

Your content is definitely important. Your blog posts should be clear and easy to read, free from errors, entertaining, and informative. 

But if you want readers to actually read your content, you need to draw them in. Eye-catching photography will help with this.

Beautiful photographs of the locations you’re describing will catch readers’ eyes and inspire them to read your posts. It’ll help ignite their wanderlust. They’ll want to know where the photos were taken, how they can get there, and what they can do, see, and eat once there.

Unless you travel full-time, though, you might not be able to provide your own photographs of the places you’re writing about.

Luckily, stock photography websites can help you fill the gap. Be sure to invest in high-quality photos.

Poor photography will leave your website looking unprofessional, and won’t inspire readers to keep coming back for more, no matter how great your content is.

3. Learn SEO Tactics and Put Them to Work

It won’t matter how great your website looks, how beautiful your photos are, or how perfect your content is if no one ever makes it to your website.

The first page of Google results sees more than 90 percent of all traffic for any given search.

If you want to land on that first page of results, you need to learn SEO tactics and put them to work on your site.

Cross-linking, keywords, and optimizing your site for search engines are a few important examples. With more and more web traffic coming from mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly website is another important SEO tool.

You’ll need to put SEO tactics like these to work when first creating and launching your website. But you’ll also need to use them in each new blog article that you post.

4. Put Relevant Information in an Easy-to-Find Spot

Over time, if you write great content, take stunning photos, and update your site regularly, you’ll build a loyal following. These readers will check back often for updates. They’ll become invested in your story, eager to read about your latest adventure.

But when you’re starting out, and even after you have a following, a large number of visitors will come to your site looking for answers.

Maybe they are planning a trip and want travel info about a certain spot. Or they’re looking for inspiration. Another important element of travel websites and blogs, though, is answering questions and concerns about travel.

Providing information about staying safe traveling, exchanging money, and dealing with visas are all useful to travelers.

If you want to stand out as one of the best tourism websites, you need to provide this kind of information. If you do, you also need to make sure that’s it’s easy for your readers to find. 

Adding a menu option that includes important travel information like this can help. 

To start figuring out what kind of information your readers might want to learn, read more about U.S. travel visas and the application process here.

5. Make it Easy to Search

Important information about obtaining visas or staying safe on the road aren’t the only things that should be easy to access on your travel website.

You never know what an individual will be looking for on your site. For this reason, every part of your website should be easy to search.

Start by dividing your content into sections. This includes categorizing your blog posts. 

You might include a category of posts that are updates on your own adventures, one with travel advice, and one with recaps about things to do in different destinations.

Next, create pages that include important information. This includes an “about me” page and a contact page. You might also include a FAQ page if you think that visitors will have common questions you could answer in one place.

Once you have your different pages and blog categories, make it easy for visitors to your site to bounce between pages. This could mean creating a search bar that includes links to each page or putting the pages in a drop-down menu.

Making the Most of Your Travel Website Design

If you want to create a successful site, you need to put these travel website design tips to work. 

But while these are a great starting point, they aren’t the only tips you need to consider.

Other graphic design and web design tips can also go a long way towards helping you create a stunning, professional-looking website.

Check out this article next to learn how to choose the right color scheme for your travel website.