New Website Design

From everything that I have read over the past two months, we should not being changing our website design.  Readers get used to a certain layout of your blog and they like consistency.  However, Dave and I did exactly that yesterday and I think it is a change for the better.  It is still a work in progress, we have to add some photos and video, figure out how to place our ads better by resizing them and fitting them into the sidebar, (really, the sidebar needs to be fixed all around) we have to rework our headings and categories.  But, I think that now it is far more user friendly and aesthetically pleasing.

We didn’t want to shut our site down for a few days while we iron out the kinks since we are just starting to gain momentum, so I hope that you will bare with us while we refine that small stuff.

Unfortunately, when we first started blogging, we didn’t know the rules to running a website.  We picked a theme that seemed easy to use and easy to navigate and never thought much about it again.  We were just told that people like to follow the Tour d’Afrique, so it is a good idea to keep an online blog. It worked out great and we loved blogging while in Africa.  We were getting huge hits everyday because we had a lot of publicity, we were writing for The Toronto Star and cyclists from around the globe were interested in the TDA. It also helped that Dave and I were performing very well in the race.

Unfortunately when we came back from Africa, we fell into the trap of what most new bloggers fall into and we stopped writing because we weren’t traveling anymore.  Instead we worked on developing our slideshow media presentations, we worked on pitching our travel show and we had gone back to work to save up our money for the next big trip at the end of this year. It was a productive time, but in retrospect, we should have kept up our website documenting our progress of becoming full time adventurers.

When we left for Africa, we knew that we wanted to become professional full time travelers.  We were tired of coming home every year from months of traveling and trying to fit back into our lives. We decided to do this bike race as a way to gain publicity to pitch a travel show. It all worked out just fine. We signed with a producer etc… but TV shows take a while to get off the ground and we don’t want to sit around for too long. We are Canada’s Adventure Couple after all, so we need to be off on an adventure soon!  So while our producer and distributor work on the logistics of making a product out of Canada’s Adventure Couple, we decided to take our travels into our own hands.

In early April, and we decided to get back to the blog.  We have a lot to share from our 10 years of travel and adventure.  Plus, it is fun to share preparations for our next trip, information on how are blog career is coming along and what adventures we will be up to in the meantime.

It has been a whirlwind two months. We have learned an incredible amount about travel blogging in a short time from successful bloggers such as Nomadic Matt, Ottsworld, The Travel Expert and Everything Everywhere.  We have been studying and reading everything we can on gaining viewership, networking and providing interesting content.  We have even added some ads to our blog, but we really need to do a lot more research on that aspect.

Things are coming together nicely and we are slowly drawing readers back to our site.  The travel community is so supportive and we are having a great time learning and being inspired by everyone.  We have enjoyed reading Wild Junket and Travel Fun with Lilliy and we even joined Twitter a couple of weeks ago.  I didn’t even know what twitter was all about a month ago and now I am on it daily! Velvet Escape, TomTravel2 and JetSetCitizen have been very supportive and we have met great new friends in the past couple of weeks like Clearly Enlight IBackPackCanada, the QFamily and Barons Life. There are more of you out there that have been supportive and helpful and I am sorry if I didn’t mention you yet, but I will make sure to mention everyone in future posts.

So, if you have any suggestions on how to make this website better, easier to read, more interesting or if things need to be changed, we would greatly appreciate any feedback. Thanks for your patience while we revamp this site.  It will be much farther along in a couple of days.