If you are a touring enthusiast who travels from one place to another, we highly recommend you to start your unique travelling blog for sharing your great journeys to the public. This can, on the one hand, memorize the unforgettable timing and some spectacular scenes. And on the other hand, a travel blog is effective for you to set up the booming business for tourists.
In the following WordPress tutorials, we’d like to share a detailed guide about how to create a travel blog using WordPress, with which you can show your adventure tips, display the hotel booking information, recommend some reliable travel agencies and share your travel experiences with much ease. Here, we need to mention that there is no all-in-one solution to create a professional and comprehensive travel blog. This means you may need to install multiple separate plugins to achieve different purposes.
Step 1 – Finish Some Basic Preparations
For the successful creation of a WordPress travel blog, you should finish a lot of basic preparations. Among these tasks, the selection of a reliable WordPress hosting is your first task. You can choose from the market on your own surely. But here, we sincerely recommend you to have a try on one of the below options. Each of them is carefully selected based on our reviews, comparisons, personal tries and customer feedbacks.
In addition to the web host, you also need to decide the blog domain and blog name. Personally, these two options should be the same. Also, you’d better try your best to make them as memorable and short as possible, without the unnecessary hyphens and numbers. If you feel this step is different, you can try brainstorming by writing down the keywords that can describe your blog the most based on the aspects of travelling types, travelling aims, touring places, seasons and many more.
Step 2 – Install and Activate the Perfect Travel Template
We have collected a series of the best travel WordPress themes here to help WordPress fans easily build up beautiful and functional travel websites. All themes below are specifically designed for travel websites, suitable for customers who want to have tour or travel business, build a travel oriented city or country portal, create a website guiding travel, or just want to share their travel experience with friends online.
In order to build a travel website, you can easily utilize WordPress and select a travel specialized theme. With some specific travel features such as map, get tagging functionality, review / rating systems, photo galleries, and Google map integrated, the best Travel WordPress themes are helpful for non-technicians to build up professional and powerful travel websites.
Midway – Responsive Travel WP Theme
Website: http://themeforest.net/item/midway-responsive-travel-wp-theme/3559006
This is an excellent WordPress theme for all travel websites. It comes with helpful tools for searching, managing, booking tours, and so on. With the custom post types, customers can easily edit each post type to have their own fields and tools, like gallery and destination based categories. Overall, this theme is quite easy to use and customize, suitable all kinds of travel business.
Tour Package – WordPress Travel/Tour Theme
Website: http://themeforest.net/item/tour-package-wordpress-traveltour-theme/5360508
This is a premium theme designed for WordPress travel business. It includes post type that enables users to help their clients to browse on all packages with ease. In addition, it is also along with booking forms and packages with filtering system. Besides, it is completely responsive and fully ready for retina, which makes your website looks well on all sized devices.
Magellan
Website: https://www.wphub.com/themes/magellan/
Magellan is an ideal WordPress theme that is perfect for booking everything, such as travel tours, portals, travel blogs, hotels, bed and breakfasts, and so on. It includes rich features, including package filtering system which allows your clients to easily filter packages by parameter like price, stars, rating, and more, working booking system. Availability checker, vacancies based on date, etc. Moreover, the theme is completely responsive, which means your website can adjust its layout based on the viewers’ devices.
BoardWalk WordPress Theme
Website: http://www.wpnow.com/view/themes/boardwalk/
BoardWalk is a premium WordPress theme for travel websites. It is WordPress 3.0 ready, supports for 3.0’s custom menus and intuitive theme options panel. Besides, it is also built-in with SEO-friendly title, Meta tag, as well as easy to use ad locations. With 2-column, widget ready and customized weather feed, this theme is great for travel companies or a personal blog for travel lovers.
Cousteau
Website: http://www.cssigniter.com/ignite/themes/cousteau/
This is a premium Woo Commerce theme for hotel, travel, tourism, travel blog, and even adventure websites. Be compatible with all screen resolutions, it is a completely responsive design. With new comprehensive Buddha panel and appearance builder, it is a perfect choice to adventure travelers, nature lovers, travel agents, consultants, etc. You can peel the travel part of it, and it can be used to build eCommerce stores, Retro blogs, hotel websites, in minutes.
Step 3 – Tell Your Story
People are more likely to trust your travelling suggestions, tips and recommendations if you can prove that you are the blog owner who really has experienced these excellent journeys. In this case, you firstly need to create an “About Me” page to tell your touring stories.
Here, we do not only mean a large phone about you and some plain words about who you are, where you are and what you have done. These are not enough. Instead, we highly recommend you to think about adding a timeline into this page, which is a visual storytelling option to introduce where you have travelled and what happened here.
Step 4 – Showcase Your Journeys using Multiple Albums
One of the core aspects of a travel blog is the elegant images for different sight spots. In this case, we highly recommend you to try the Gallery Bank plugin that helps you create as many image albums as you want using different designs and layouts, such as grid, list and the masonry option.
After installing it, there is no need for you to set up the color, size, opacity, border, margin and many more for the photos, thumbnails, lightbox and album cover, for these settings are configured properly by this plugin based on your webpage design.
Now, you simply need to navigate to the plugin dashboard and click the Add New Album.
Here, you should give it a title and we suggest you using the location of your journey as the album title. If you want, you can also enter some descriptive words for this album.
Next, you can click the Add Files button to upload the images. Even, you can upload the videos if you have.
Note that this plugin allows you to enter the title and description of each image. This is a great option for you to better explain and introduce your journey. In addition, do not forget to set one of these images as the album cover.
Even, you are allowed to decide the number of images in each role and their display order.
You can repeat these steps to add multiple albums, each of which shows the images for a particular journey.
Now, you can add it to your site. To do this, you can leverage its Gallery Bank button on the page editing screen. Then, you can choose which album to be inserted in what format.
Check the sample in the following. Note that this plugin integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Google+ so that you can easily promote your travel blog via different social platforms.
Step 5 – Showcase the Travel Search Box
The travel search box can bring much convenience for your readers, especially for those who are looking to start the journey right after reading your stories. In this case, we recommend you to install the Travel Search plugin that allows you to showcase the search box for readers to search and compare the most cost-effective flights, cars, cruises, travelling packages and hotels.
To use it, you only need to click the Travel Search button from the WordPress admin after installing this plugin. Then, you need to decide the format of the date, the default departure and return date and the color schemes used for this search box. Here, you’d better sign up with Travelgrove affiliate program and offer your affiliate ID. This way, this plugin can track your commissions when people purchase the flights, hotels and many others from your site.
After that, you can click the Get Shortcode button. The generated PHP shortcode can be pasted into your theme file or a particular blog post directly for box display. Also, you can use the Travel Search widget to showcase this special box on the website sidebar.
Step 6 – Integrate Your Blog with a Map
This practice is pretty useful if you have recommended some hotels, restaurants, cafe, shopping centers and many more during your touring. By integrating with a Google map, your readers can find the right places easily after adopting your suggestions.
This part, we highly recommend the Stellar Places plugin. This is an intuitive option that does not require you to configure it. After installing this plugin, you can navigate to the Places tab and click the Add New button.
In the next screen, you can edit the place by entering the location name and the general introduction. In the bottom section, there is a custom field, from which you can point out the exact location via two ways.
One is to enter the name of the location. If the auto-search function cannot find out the exact place, you can choose another method by entering the detailed information of city, state and street address.
Now, you can publish this map by clicking the publish button, and then, use the [stellar_places_map post_id=”xx”] shortcode to insert it into your webpage or a blog post.