I love doing web sites.

This process is really amazing because I can see the enthusiasm of the people asking me to help them. They need it for business or just as a hobby. This was the case of a Russian girl who approached me asking to help her to create a travel blog.

Why do you need a blog? What do you want to achieve with it? Do you want to monetize? Or is it just for fun?

Before starting to plan the web site creation I asked her these few questions to understand what kind of design she needs and what are her main goals and needs.

I started the design process looking for a theme which was suitable for us. I decided to use a wonderful theme from Studio press with Genesis framework which makes the code lighter, thus the web site is faster.

I customized the main colour palette modifying the CSS styles in the WordPress editor. I added some pictures and worked on the graphics and illustrations of the blog to customize it even more. I’m still managing this web site updating materials, images and posts when needed.

Special feature added

It was very important for my client to have a section on the web site dedicated to guided tours and also to improve the way they manage orders from the site. I redesigned the travel tour page as you see here and also improved the way they manage orders by adding Caldera forms plugin to the existing WordPress site.

The design is very simple and minimalistic to reduce the cognitive load. A brief description in bold allows the user to understand what they can get to know through the tour. A list would allow the user to see the main points of the service provided.

A simple but appealing call to action would allow the user to fill the form on the web site. The form is minimalistic; the user doesn’t feel bad about filling it out. [/su_column][/su_row]

Goals achieved

My client was very happy about the new web site. She got much more tour requests thanks to the new feature described above. She was also able to see more interaction from visitors as they were willing to leave more comments at the end of each post and also to share the content on the main social networks. Google analytics showed an improved flow of visitors from organic search (especially Google and Yandex).

This experience helped me to see how important it is to keep every interaction item on the site as simple as possible to reduce the cognitive load.