Bespoke Wordpress theme
for travel blog start-up

Introduction

One of my biggest passions - outside of technology - is travel. My wife and I have been fortunate enough to work remotely for the last 3 years, allowing us to work from many different countries around the world.

As such, we'd amassed an enormous wealth of knowledge that, we believe, would be really handy to other travellers facing the same challenges that we did. Our heads were full of things that we wish we knew before arriving somewhere, amazing places we stumbled upon only by being on the ground, and stuff like that.

That's when I had the awesome idea to combine both my passions and create our very own travel blog, Laws of Travel.

As a designer, it was important to me that the site was visually engaging, aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate, and overall user-friendly. On the developer side of my brain, I was focused on building a platform that would be flexible and grow with our content as we continued travelling, be easy to update behind-the-scenes, be optimised for speed and SEO, and plenty of other things.

It was also important to me (and my wife) that the site was a reflection of our personalities and didn't feel like a template we'd just picked out for ease.

Solution

As the sole designer/developer, I obviously handled the full design and development process, starting with iterating on mockups using Figma. Eventually I settled on a design I was happy with that was clean, modern, and had a bit of personality to it. The style was centred around high-quality imagery, bold titles to capture attention, and a clean layout to ensure users felt comfortable navigating the site.

Once the design was finalised, I moved on to development, choosing WordPress as the platform due to its flexibility and scalability. Wanting full control of the underlying architecture, I built a custom theme from scratch - hand-coded. This gave me ultimate control over the entire architecture: I could optimise for performance, ensure it was mobile-friendly down to the pixel, and tailored specifically to our needs.

As always, the main focus during development was focusing on creating a seamless user experience and ensuring that visitors could easily find the content they were looking for.

Outcome

The end result is probably one of my favourite sites I've ever created or worked on (although I may be a bit biased, being so heavily invested in it and all...)

The site feels very 'us' to me, and serves as a valuable resource for other travellers looking for tips, guides and itineraries. We've received heaps of positive feedback from users who appreciate its design, ease of use, and the quality of content - exactly what I set out to achieve!

It's been super rewarding working on this project, tinkering here and there as well as building out new features as we get more creative with what we want to share, and I'm sure there'll be plenty more where that came from in the future... watch this space!

If you want to read more about our travels, check out one of my favourite pages on the site: About the Laws of Travel.