It's encouraging to see so many Founders and business owners part of this travel community. I often wonder how the overall experience in establishing, managing and growing a tech company on the road is different to if you were stationed in one city.
Do you have access to the same resources?
Can you validate the same way?
What are the differences in raising capital?
How will you find a co-founder?
What if all your customers and partners are in one country?
I was recently invited to be part of a startup accelerator program in my home city of Sydney, Australia. And while the idea of a product I built helped me get into the program (not the only reason), the program itself was more focused on developing new ideas through finding a co-founder, conceptualizing an idea, validating said idea and eventually (potentially) getting a term sheet.
Ultimately, aside from the in-person co-founder matching activities, I found there was no real need to be physically present. However, If you...
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I'm curious what blogging platforms people in our community are using these days.
Wordpress.org still has a huge representation, but there's other platforms such as Ghost, Webflow, Wixx, Squarespace to name a few.
👇 Share your blogging platform (and why you chose it) below!
This would be really interesting to know. I manage a blog on behalf of a client on their website and their site is Joomla. My own site for I AM CAPE TOWN is with WordPress and I have not started my blog section yet but have jotted down some notes of ideas for blogs I would like to do.
I work for Awin US. We own two affiliate networks in the US. I can tell you from my personal observations that the vast majority use Wordpress. On another forum I keep seeing posts about "How do I convert my ...... blog to Wordpress?" Wordpress is by far the leader here, and countless developers focus on creating new plug-ins and designs for Wordpress rather than for other platforms. I'm not saying the others can't work well, but you'll have a far greater array of options with Wordpress than with anyone else.
I'm old school and use Wordpress. Easiest platform that I've used over the past 10 years.
I only use Wordpress and 90% of my blogging friends also do. I think it allows the most flexibility with little tech knowledge 🤘 That said, I've still always needed someone with more tech skills to help out with my WP.
Still old school .... wordpress for me
Wordpress for me too. It's not perfect, but it's pretty user-friendly.
Wordpress, I have friends that started with others but later converted to Wordpress.
I've been using WordPress as my preferred blog platform for nearly 18 years!
So quick update on this thread — not surprising to hear everyone is on Wordpress. However, I am a little surprised that nobody has mentioned other platforms.
I've lost count of how many Wordpress blogs I've set up / helped with over the years!
Squarespace for my personal travel coaching site; and WordPress, Joomla, and Prismic for my work with Vacayou Wellness Travel.
I too use Wordpress.
Here are some of my top picks for managed websites... I clearly got too into this topic, and feel I should have a character limit to stop this getting any longer lol 🤣
Who knows, maybe helps someone 🤷♀️
1) Squarespace
It's an easy to use page builder and shop integrations, SquareSpace is a good choice for companies with a relatively simple and straightforward product lineup. I use it for my tour business and consultancy clients. However, while Squarespace is wildly easy to use, its capabilities are slightly limited compared to other options in terms of page layout and customisability. Of course, this lack of customisation keeps pages looking clean, crisp, and well laid out as a result. You can use their calendar function (paid additional fee) or your booking reservation platform widget for the product side of your business.
2) WordPress
While WordPress has traditionally been known as a 'blog' website, that is a relatively small view of its capabilities. Unfortunately, along with the unique features available comes a bit of a learning curve. If you are looking to have complete creative control of your website and you have plenty of time to invest in learning the platform’s ins and outs, then WordPress might be the platform for you.
3) Shopify
Are you blogging... and then also selling merchandise, add-ons, and tickets in addition to your tours and experiences? Then, Shopify is a good shout. Shopify doesn’t offer the same customizability as WordPress but still provides a solid site through different layout options. Again, there there are additional apps you can use for the tour selling side, but if you want an app that also has distribution options then there is only one currently; indie Experiences app, but for non-distribution, there is a large choice of apps to handle that.
4) Wix
What we built the front-facing indie website on; While Wix might not be a standout to many, it produces a solid site that is easy to use and allows for a fair amount of customisation for a beginner site. One of our favourite perks of Wix is that it has plenty of tools and features to help you grow your website further down the line.
The downside of Wix is its integration and syncing of other business tools, and it can be a challenge to get the necessary tools to link correctly and update in real-time. Other platforms certainly have a leg up in this department. However, if you are a custom or private tour company where you don’t need a calendar in real-time or a booking portal, Wix might be a great fit for you! Then just use a booking widget from your chosen reservations system, and double-check with them that the widget functions on Wix, it seems to be the forgotten platform on occasion.
5) Ghost
We use this for our Knowledge centre, it works well but is limited in terms of templates and customisation. Blogging is easy, but we wouldn't use it for much more at the moment given the other choices on the market. If you do take customer data, such as newsletters, it does have a nice emailing function.
For more on this topic: bit.ly/38FGGFj
I'm a new travel blogger and I opted to use Wix! Since I created my blog partially on impulse (story for another day), I went with the template designs that drew me in first and I foudn those on wix. Since I use wordpress for my 9-5, I wasn't opposed to trying out something new either.
Wordpress; have been using it for 10+ years, although customer service is dicey.
I blog everything on my website - so people can come back to my site to give it better SEO. I use Weebly for all my sites.
I submit blogs for an organization I belong to that uses Weebly. I use Wordpress for my own blog and Weebly has similar capabilities but at least for me Weebly is much more cumbersome. Very likely because of lack of familiarity. I am a content person, not very techy. my guess is that I simply need to google tips for using Weebly more effectively. Intersting discussion.
I use Wordpress but I am more active on Instagram on a daily basis.
All the platforms are pretty hard work to setup & use. We tried squarespace, wix, Shopify, WordPress and straight html sites. We ended up using a lightweight WordPress site in classic mode mainly for it's inbuilt SEO structure. Keeping it lean of fancy plugins meant onboarding time for new bloggers, interns & staff is greatly reduced.
I started my travel blogging with Blogspot. Now, I use WordPress.
I use Wordpress because I think it has the widest range of support in plugins and themes, but I don't love it. It has two major flaws for me...
1) I dislike being coralled by editors and I loath Gutenberg. Fortunately, thanks to the Classic Editor (TinyMCE) plugin I can still write the way I've always written; in a code editor, marking it up the way I want it as I go, and then pasting it wholesale into WP.
2) Unpublish. This is amazing to me. I can't believe that WP can't unpublish elements or posts at a selected time/date. Joomla can, and Joomla isn't a blog CMS! Furthermore it doesn't have the status for it; a post is either in draft, or published, or binned. There's no unpublished/archived status. More detail: www.linkedin.com/pulse/glaring-hole-wordpress-functionality-alastair-mckenzie/
Imo unpublishing content can lead to bad UX (broken links if you shared it, or it got indexed on search). That’s why WP probably didn’t implement it, as it’s additional complexity (even for plug-in writers) to deal with.
Maybe a simpler solution is to update the content with a placeholder / redirect once it’s expired.
I'm not sure that's a critical issue. 301 & 410 codes can do the job and if WP were to implement it, you can bet that 3rd parties like Yoast would have redirects sorted in a heartbeat. I'm more concerned about the issue of unpublishing elements like photos. Too many PR/DMO supplied images come with 'licence ends' dates these days. I don't like having to put reminders in Google Calendar, to manually delete them.