How We Built
Our Travel Website
Once upon a time we wanted to build a travel content website. We've written for lots of prestigious publishers, but when you write guidebooks you get paid once and that's the end of it. They call it 'Work for Hire'. Apart from one or two publishers, you don't get royalties. So you write your purple prose and then kiss the words goodbye. We knew a few writers who had published their own websites, so we wanted to try it. But where to begin? You need a dozen different skills to produce a quality website, and we only had a few of them! We knew we could write, but even that wasn't straightforward. Writing for the internet is very different from writing for the printed page. We started to learn about internet writing through becoming Feature Writers at Suite101, Mike writing about travel for the UK and Ireland and Donna writing on travel for the SW USA and Hawaii. We entered the murky world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). They were both a long way from the world of travel. We bought some website design software, Microsoft Expression Web, and scratched our heads as we tried to get to grips with it. Our first attempts at designing pages looked pathetic... as did our second, third and fourth attempts. We learned a little about domain names, and FTP, and sizing photos for web use, and Google Adsense, which made NoSense to us. We realised that writing the site – the one and only thing we felt confident about – was only going to be 10% of the job, if that. We knew we were in for the long-haul, and even a primitive website looked to be at least 12 months away. Then purely by chance we found a website that said 'Powered by Site Build It!' across the bottom of the page. The site looked quite impressive, so we clicked on the link. And our lives changed. We don't say that for dramatic effect, it's just a statement of the truth. We took a look at this page of Successful Case Studies, with a very close look at the travel websites, naturally. It was this more than any other page that made us take Site Build It seriously. If they could do it, so could we. And we looked at this page, about working from home. And this page on how to turn your knowledge into revenue. And finally this page, on turning your travels into an online business. And after a day or two of mulling it over, and wondering what the catch was as it seemed too cheap to be so good, we went to the Order Page and signed up. Within a week we had our domain name registered and our home page started, and within a few days we had several pages online. You're on the site now so you know what it looks like. This is our second SBI site. Take a look at our first, Pacific Coast Highway Travel. That's got much more content, and within a month we were earning money from Google ads. We could forget about keeping up with SEO and HTML and worrying about how to design a website, as SBI does all that for you. We just got on with what we wanted to do – writing about travel. SBI took care of the rest. And all it took was a click. The rest followed like day follows night.
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