Our Brand New Website & Why Things Have Been So Quiet on the Blog
Welcome to our new home! We haven’t shared too much about our behind-the-scenes blogging issues these past few months (we didn’t want to bore you!) but we’ve been working away at building this new site!
When we launched our blog almost five years ago, we didn’t want to use Wordpress — for a few different reasons — but over time, I’ve started doing more of the back-end work on our blog and the fact that we didn’t build our site on Wordpress made it more difficult for this non-coder. Scott fought me on the idea of migrating our site to Wordpress, but in the end, he understood it will free up more time for both of us. So here we are, joining the masses with a Wordpress website.
But… migrating a site is never easy and we certainly ran into loads of issues.
I won’t torture you with the details, but the first two people we hired to do the migration didn’t know what they were doing and gave up a few weeks into the project. We got lucky and found someone competent on our third try, but it also meant that what should have only taken a few weeks, took almost three months. In those three months, we were busy working on the back-end of the website — while traveling — which left very little time to keep up on our posting schedule.
We haven’t had a personal post on the blog in a while, so I thought I would share an honest post about the state of our lives and the truth behind travel blogging. Since I have been making my living online for the past year and a half, I’ve had some major ups and downs and to be perfectly honest… I’m exhausted. It’s a lot of work and my stress levels are through the roof.
This site migration and redesign certainly didn’t help. If I thought I had a mountain of work before, well, this took things to a whole new level. I even bordered on losing my mind, giving up completely, and living under a rock. It’s not pretty.
Now that the site has launched, the work is only halfway finished. As you can see, our travel resources page is a work in progress, the work on our destinations page has only just begun, and I still have about 1,500 images where I need to go in and re-enter the data that didn’t migrate over.
I’m trying to learn to let go of feeling like everything has to be completed NOW, but it’s tough with a Type A personality. Not to mention, this blog is my livelihood and when I fall behind, that means I fall behind on income as well.
I have so many articles to finish from recent trips that in reality, I could stay home for three months and still not be caught up. We just returned from a weekend in Baja, followed by a whirlwind of a travel conference in Los Angeles, so the plan is to stay put until our trip to Puerto Rico for the Thanksgiving break. I know, that’s only three weeks away!
After Puerto Rico, we’re taking a road trip to Central and Northern California over the week of Christmas — which may be cut short due to how burnt out we are both feeling with work and constant travel. We have some exciting travel plans in the works for spring of 2015, which I can’t wait to announce! One of the destinations is a place I’ve been dreaming about visiting for years. Stay tuned for those announcements!
In the meantime, we’ll be catching up on posts about Molokai, Maui, St. Maarten, Newfoundland, Mauritius, and Puerto Rico — as well as making updates to this new site.
Take a look around. Let us know what you think and please feel free to make any suggestions or let us know if something isn’t working correctly.
We hope you like the new site!
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I migrated my site from joomla to wordpress about a year ago now, so I can sympathize with you on how much work it took. It all looks good though, and hopefully will help to increase your success!
Thanks! I’m so happy the bulk of it is done!
I just came across your site, so I don’t know what the previous one looked like, but this one is beautiful! 🙂 I’m so excited to read more about your travels!
Thank you, Natalie! That’s so nice of you to say. Thank you for following!
Congrats! It all looks beautiful! I still am very jealous of you and would love to have your traveling life-stress and all! lol
Thank you so much! Haha… well, we all have our stresses in life, huh?
I just started following your blog. Love the lay out clean and easy to navigate. Look forward to future exciting updates.
Thank you! We really appreciate the feedback. Thanks for following!
The new site looks absolutely fabulous! Congrats on the new look and site!
Thank you, Renuka!
Congratulations, Christy. I feel for you, I really do. Like you I’m a type A and getting ready for a redesign too. Great, clean look you have here, and if you didn’t point out the site’s shortcomings we probably wouldn’t have noticed. 🙂
Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so Type A. Oh, I had to point them out because I’m too much of a perfectionist. haha. Good luck with your redesign!
Congrats and welcome to the WP website corner of the world. I hear you about not being caught up on writing assignments. Looking forward to slowing down in December.
I am too! December will be my month of writing and editing photos. 🙂
Gorgeous. Add me to the list of currently (and continually) rebranding. Way to go!
Thanks! Websites are just a constant work in progress, aren’t they?!
I’m about to start a redesign and am looking forward to it mostly because I’ve been thinking about it for so long. Your site looks great! I love white space on blogs 🙂
Thanks! Besides the fact that Wordpress doesn’t have some of the same capabilities as our old CMS, I think the benefits will outweigh the negatives. I absolutely love this theme. I can even change it around quite a bit to get a different look if I get tired of this one. Good luck with your redesign! It’s such a great feeling when it’s live.
Congratulations! I know migrating a site is a ton of hard work and I feel your pain. I’m entirely re-branding and re-designing my site. Not a day goes by when you don’t ask yourself what the heck you were thinking. It’s looking snazzy and I can’t wait to see the final product.
Well, this is pretty close to the final product besides the work we need to do on our travel resources and destinations page. We miss our little header from the old site, but I like clean-looking sites and decided to go that route this time instead. I don’t anticipate working too much on the design anytime soon, that’s for sure.
My only salvation is that I didn’t have to change my URL structure, even though it was suggested that I do. Haha. I just can’t fathom that right now! Good luck with your rebranding!!
I really do love the clean new look!
Thanks! 🙂