Dou you really need to hire a website designer if you want to be a travel blogger? Hell, yes.
But you need to ask yourself this question; What’s more valuable to you; your time or your money?
Sure, you can design your own website. There are some fantastic themes now, free and paid, that have made it much easier for non-geeks to use.
However, you need to be honest with yourself about your ultimate goals. Do you want to have a blog as a hobby, or as a business? How soon do you want to start blogging? How much time do you have to invest in planning, designing, creating, and maintaining your site? Is it worth it to spend hours and hours (and in my case, years) to save a few pennies?
Most people would love to have a travel blog and imagine they can simply post photos and write a paragraph or two and instantly have a huge following and attract sponsors who will pay them to take fabulous trips.
That is far from reality.
Travel blogging is about 80-90% technical, and 10-20% actual blogging.
According to Stella McGovern, the website designer who helped me to go from having a pretty crappy, hobby blog, to creating what you see today, if you’ve got plenty of time, yes you can probably make a website for yourself without professional help. But, she cautions, there are many things to consider if your plan is to monetize a blog and have it as a full-time career that gives you a livable income.
Stella has seen (and solved) many problems and mistakes people have made by treating a website as a DIY project because they figured that a free Wix or WordPress account would help them achieve their goals. And while it can be done, these DIY website projects can often take years, that is if you don’t give up from frustration, which is what 90% of people end up doing.
Stella has helped many people after they came to her with homemade websites that were draining dollars but never making any money, especially travel blogs.
One client that Stella was working with contacted her after she struggled for a week to get a button on her site to be exactly as she wanted it. The task was something Stella could do in five minutes. While issues like this may seem easy for someone like Stella, she has years of experience and is a professional developer and designer, but for the average, intelligent person, small website tasks can make you want to pull your hair out.
Before Stella took over designing my blog, I had someone helping me for several months, but my website not only didn’t look the way I wanted it to, it was filled with unnecessary plug-ins, the special font that I’d asked her for had been created as images rather than text, and the photos on my site were enormous; all mistakes which caused my site to load much longer than normal, which in turn made Google not even consider for organic search results. In other words, no one would ever find my site because it was buried deep under the other millions of poorly made blogs on the net. Another issue was that although my old premium theme said that it was mobile responsive, it takes a lot of work and time to get a site to look good on phones. Since 58% of my readers are viewing my site with their cells, I needed to fix the mistakes to make it truly responsive.
There are many reasons someone should consider hiring a website designer besides the time-saving factor. I had heard people talk about having custom designs for their sites, but I ignored it, thinking that having something fancy didn’t matter; I simply needed a basic site and my amazing, mind-blowing content would attract readers.
Wrong.
Again, as a travel blogger, you’re competing with millions of other blogs. It is extremely difficult to find a niche that has not already been done. If you do choose something that is already popular, like “solo female travel” or “adventure travel”, well, good luck finding ways to provide fresh, unique content that hasn’t already been covered.
Stella helped me to do a few things to make my site stand out. She coached me with tips on resizing and editing photos to make them more uniform, she guided me in creating my newsletter campaigns, and helped me to create heart-shaped social media icons in the exact shade of blue that matches my brand; absolutely perfect for my site. She’s currently helping me to add a section of testimonials to my site, but the photos will be heart-shaped, again, matching my brand perfectly.
Since my site tends to be a bit too racy and risque when I write about sex or bdsm or kinky festivals, she helped me to tweak minor things that made a huge difference to balance that out; for example, we chose just the right romantic font and photos to “soften” my brand’s image.
I struggled for several years with quite a few tasks I simply could not fix on my own. I tried unsuccessfully to make my site safer, attempting to change my address from http to https, which will make my visitors feel more secure when purchasing items from my shop. I could not for the life of me figure out how to change my logo and favicon. Making sure my affiliate codes, links and accounts were set up properly seemed impossible. Stella’s knowledge and expertise in coding is something that I thought I could get away with not knowing, but I’ve found her skills to be invaluable.
Stella is a perfectionist. I try to brush off her suggestions as something I’ll get to “eventually,” but thanks to her nagging advice and guidance, I’ve been able to go back through my posts and clean up the typos and spelling errors, resize my photos, and to take my site to another, much more professional level.
Can you start a free blog and just do your thang? Yes. Which is exactly what I (and many, many other bloggers) have done. But I wasted three damn years only to start all over from scratch once she began helping me. It was a good experience, I suppose, but honestly, I wish I’d met her three years ago.
Consider hiring a website designer if you’re serious about becoming a professional travel blogger. Ask your friends who they have worked with. If you have a favorite blog or website, ask who designed it for them.
My advice; hire Stella. Although I am an affiliate for certain products/ companies, I’m not an affiliate for Stella, and I’m not being paid to write this. The reason I highly recommend her is that I think she’s a f*ing genius when it comes to designing websites. Anyone who read my blog a few years ago (even 6 months ago) will admit that my site is extremely different from the “blog” I started with. One of the other (many) reasons I like working with Stella and suggest you do, too is because she’s always helping people. She sincerely cares about people and enjoys helping them to achieve their goals by creating the best websites for their businesses. One of the ways she gives back is by organizing meetups where people can come and learn about website design (for free) by coming to one of her events. To find out when the next one will be, click here.
You can go to Stella’s website and check out her portfolio and see a sample of some of the sites she designed, and decide for yourself whether you can do a better job on your own. To contact her, and/ or check out her site, click here.
Whether you decided to hire Stella or another designer, or even choose to create your site yourself, I’d love to check your blog out when you launch it. Email me your link!
Have you ever used a website designer?
Have you built your own website?
Do you dream of being a travel blogger one day?
Tell us about your experiences below in the comment section. (And please, share this post, tell your friends all about us and our inappropriate, scandalous stories, and stalk us by clicking the social media icons below.)
