We typically say proudly on this blog that we only work three or four hours per day. Well that just hasn’t been the case for the past few months! all of this extra time spent on the computer was used to create this new design that you’re looking at right now.
We invested a considerable amount of money and even more time to try to fix things that you pointed out in our last survey, and make the site easier to navigate and more fun to read.
We’ve had nearly a dozen Skype calls with our design and development team in the UK, we’ve spent hundreds of hours sending emails back and forth, creating documents to explain what we want, and replacing more than 1,300 images on the site!
On Friday, the final day before the launch, we actually put in an eighteen and a half hour day finalizing all of the pages! compared to our normal three hour days, this was insane. By 2:00am, we were exhausted, but as you can see from the photo below… we had some wine to help us along.
I know some of you are probably thinking that you liked our design before and it didn’t need a change. but with the Internet changing each day and with new developments appearing in site design and SEO, it’s important that we keep our blog up to date.
The last time we did a redesign (just over a year ago), we were very pleased with the look of it, but many parts of the site were hard to navigate and some of you mentioned that you couldn’t find what you were looking for. We hope to have fixed this, and hundreds of other issues with the new and improved Goats On The road blog.
Please Note: This is a brand new design using all new formats and styling, many of which haven’t been used online before. There are bound to be some glitches, so it would help us a lot if you could contact us and tell us about any errors that you see.
So, What exactly is Different?
Everything.
The new design isn’t just different from our old one, it’s different from every blog on the Internet today. The reason this project took so much time is because we weren’t just changing the look of our blog, we were trying to – as our web designer Scott puts it – “Blow the web apart”.
Coming up with completely unique functionality that helps the user experience is a enormous job. trying to do things that have never been done before isn’t easy and I wouldn’t trust anyone but Eldo web design to do this for our site.
So let’s get into exactly what we did…
An image Based Design
We love photos, but we felt like our images weren’t being featured properly on our last design. all of the images were too small and it made it really hard for readers to get a feel for our photography style. plus the pages were so cluttered with a side bar and floating elements that the eyes were always distracted from the site’s photography.
The new design is heavily image-based, with massive, screen-wide images at the top of every post and beautifully designed carousels that not only showcase our photos, but also allow users to scroll side-to-side to reveal more content and hover to show handy descriptions of each post or section.
We wanted the new design to show our photography in a new and unique way and I think it does the job beautifully.
Our new Logo
We couldn’t stand our last logo, mainly because there was no goat! Our original logo way back when we started this blog in 2012 had a couple of cute little sheep, until we found out that we were sheep on the road and had to change them.
So we made some minor adjustments back in 2014 and came up with this one:
Still a little bit amateur but we were finally goats and we had a nice little tagline going on. We made an other update to the logo shortly after this and it looked like:
But the goats were barely visible. I have no idea why, but our next variation in 2015 was completely goatless!
Now we finally have a logo that is sleek, has a goat, and is fun all at the same time. It suits our current site and looks good on t-shirts, business cards and hats. skontrolovať to!
The home Page
When you first come to our home page, you may not right away notice a big difference. We still have the big video looping in the header and our regular menu items, but we now have a button that says “About Us” with a video play button. This button launches a pop-up with a new video created all about us Goats and our blog! As you scroll down on the home page you’ll see that there are big changes.
Home page before / After
You’ll notice now that the site has a lot of white space. everything is very simple and easy to read. We know that some people like coming toa site with lots of colours everywhere, and that is terrific at first.
But at the end of the day, everyone visits blogs to read articles and look at photos. By minimizing all the distractions, we believe that the new blog highlights these things and enhances the user experience.
The start here Page
This is an important page on any blog because it has all of the best content, and explains more about what the site is all about. Our new start here page has pretty much everything our blog has to offer, all in one place.
Again the design is simple, clean and easy to read.
Reading Posts
This is one of the biggest changes we made to the site. We’ve always prided ourselves on the fact that our site doesn’t have any distracting advertisements.
We absolutely love it when we get emails from readers that say: “I love that your site doesn’t have flashy banner ads anywhere”, or “how do you even make money? Your site doesn’t seem commercial or advertisey at all!”.
We’ve taken this to the next level with our new site design. When you’re reading posts, looking at pages or just browsing our site for the right content, you’ll never have a sidebar (that column of pictures and text on the side of the screen) unless you choose to expose it.
Just look at how distracting these can be:
While our old site never had any ads on the side bar and already was less distracting than most, it still had some pictures and links leading to other posts on our site. We believe that our readers are coming to our blog to read, so we wanted each and every post to have the cleanest reading experience possible.
Now you will only see the sidebar if you click the “Sidebar” button to reveal it, and when you’re done looking at it, you can simply click the “x” to hide it again. We’ve also removed any floating share buttons and bothersome pop-ups that cover the screen to try to enhance the reading experience.
Yes we could make some money from posting up ads in our side bar, and yes we could get more newsletter subscribers by having an bothersome pop-up, but our idea is that if you want to see those things, you can easily choose to do so, otherwise you’re free to read our blog without any distractions.
The “Blog” Page
We appreciate that when people click on “Blog” in the menu bar, they want to see all of the posts that are on the blog. along with our most recent posts, we also included a description of what our blog is about so that new readers can get a feel for the site right off the bat.
Old category vs new Category
And we don’t only show the new posts from our blog on this page, we also guide readers to much of our most important content, including our travel guide series, our personal story and other topics that may be of interest.
Category Pages
These are pages that list a series of posts like each individual continent & country pages, or topic pages like travel blogging & Couples Travel. These are still the basic list of posts that you expect to find when you click on these types of links, but from here you can also find other topics on our blog and a simple opt-in for our newsletter and free eBook.
Note: The new site offers a free travel eBook which will be available soon. If you’re already subscribed, don’t worry, you’ll get one in your inbox this week.
Make money For Travel Page
This is a very important page on our website because it is one of our most visited pages, but it’s also the theme of the entire website: “how to make money on the road, so that you can travel for as long as you want”.
On our previous site, the styling was a bit awkward and made it hard to find what you’re looking for. We simply had 4 boxes that listed text links leading to individual posts, but users weren’t able to see any inspiring images for each post before clicking them, and the scrolling boxes didn’t work on mobile devices.
The Old Make money For travel page (Sustaining Travel)
The new Make money For Travel page has the same stunning carousels that slide the content left to right. now you can see 16 posts from each category (Travel Blogging, house Sitting, teaching English, digital Nomad lifestyle & more travel Jobs) by sliding the carousel left to right. When you hover over each image you’ll see a description of the post to get an idea of what it’s about.
If you don’t find what you’re looking for in those 16 articles, you can click the button below the carousel that says “See All Posts” and it will bring you to a list that includeS každým príspevkom na tejto téme.
Nové zarobiť peniaze na cestovnú stránku
Toto je úplne jedinečný spôsob zobrazovania obsahu na blogu a myslíme si, že to vyzerá bezproblémové oženil s funkčnosťou, obrazom obrazu a jednoduchosť používateľa. Tieto ľahko posúvajte stranu na strane na mobil s potiahnutím prsta.
Stránka destinácií
Táto stránka je veľmi podobná stránkam destinácií na našom predchádzajúcom dizajne. Začína s šikovnou, kliknuteľnou mapou, takže si môžete vybrať, ktorú krajinu chcete prečítať, a potom ide do zoznamu krajín oddelených do regiónov.
Nové ciele
Opäť sme použili na displeji karuselu pod tým, aby bolo jednoduchšie vidieť viac obsahu, s krátkym popisom a inšpirujúcim obrazom.
Stránka videa
Ak ste nás dlho sledovali, budete vedieť, že strávime veľa času a úsilia na našom kanáli YouTube. Nanešťastie, na predchádzajúcej stránke, videá sa veľmi dobre nepreukáľali. Jediný spôsob, ako vidieť videá, bolo kliknúť na každý jednotlivý príspevok, otvorte ho a potom stlačte tlačidlo PLAY NA VIDEO.
Stará video stránky
Videá neboli organizované v žiadnom prípade a ak ste nevedeli, že v príspevkach boli skryté videá, pravdepodobne ich nikdy neuvidíte.
Teraz sme zorganizovali všetky naše videá do rôznych krajín, takže keď kliknete na “videá” v navigačnom menu, budete priviesť na novú vlastnú stránku.
Táto stránka má na začiatku mapu, takže si môžete vybrať krajinu, ktorú chcete zobraziť, alebo môžete prejsť a vybrať si krajinu z nižšie uvedeného zoznamu. Keď kliknete na jednu z krajín, budete privedení na novú stránku so všetkými našimi videami zastrelenými v tejto krajine.
Kliknite na niektorú z videí a voila! Budú hrať priamo na obrazovke v peknom veľkom pop-up okno. Ak chcete vidieť veľa videí priamo z hlavnej stránky videa, stačí kliknúť na tlačidlo, ktoré hovorí: “Pozri všetky videá” a budete sa priviesť do nášho kanála YouTube, kde sa môžete prihlásiť a pozrite sa na všetky naše videá jedno miesto.
Päta
Toto je oblasť na samom konci každého jednotlivého príspevku, stránky a kategórie na našich webových stránkach. Chceli sme, aby sme boli jednoduché a nepoškodení, ale stále ukazujú všetky informácie, ktoré čitateľ pravdepodobne očakáva od tejto oblasti na webovej stránke.
Veľká vec tu je “Ja chcem …” sekcia. Toto je časť našej stránky, ktorá bola navrhnutá 100% s vami, čitateľ, na mysli. Čo chceš robiť? Prečo ste prišli na túto stránku? Dáme vám 5 hlavných možností, ktoré vám pomôžu nájsť to, čo hľadáte.
Dali sme to v dolnej časti každej stránky v prípade, že sa dostanete na koniec príspevku, stránky alebo kategórie a neviete, kam ísť ďalej. Dúfajme, že táto časť vám pomôže navigáciu na najcennejšie časti našej webovej stránky, aby ste mohli nájsť viac cestovnej dobroty!
Nižšie, čo máme Instagram Feed, takže môžete vidieť naše najnovšie živé fotografie.
Celkovo …
Napriek tomu, že sme vyčerpaní z pozerať na rovnakej webovej stránke a robiť menšie zmeny v neustáleho mesiaca, sme veľmi spokojní s výsledkom doteraz. Ale toto nie je hotový výrobok.
Naozaj potrebujeme vašu pomoc, aby sme sa uistili, že stránka vyzerá, beží a funguje v najlepšej možnej miere. Naozaj by sme ocenili vašu spätnú väzbu a ak ste narazili do akýchkoľvek chýb, problémov alebo ťažkostí s webovou stránkou, radi by sme to, keby ste nás mohli kontaktovať a povedzte nám o tom.
Vytvorili sme tento nový blog, aby sme lepšie slúžili všetkým ľuďom, ktorí si to prečítali a čerpali