Combinations can turn out to be awesome.
Pie and ice cream.
Netflix and chill
Diet Coke and Mentos
Sweaters and autumn
How about traveling and writing about it? Eleanor Gates is the new proprietor of www.thisgirls.guide, a wonderful combination of her travels and a desire to share it with the world. Her passion is sharing her acquired wisdom and hard-earned advice with other women who dream of their own Great American Road Trip.
Eleanor's new site features a trip she took in 2014 entitled "Cross Country." She is at this moment embarking on another epic adventure called "BBQ, Bluegrass and Bourbon," from Charleston, SC to Tennessee and back.
In addition to blog entries along the way, Ms. Gates shares travel tips, sightseeing ideas, health advice for travelers (you know what it's like to drive for a few hours fueled by fast food), access to a map of her progress in Nomad Maps, and now, a travel planning service for her audience!
The plan is to use ThisGirl'sGuide as a focal point especially for women who want to travel, but would like the unique advice and ideas from one of their own. She hopes to eventually offer customized trip planning with researched information and guidance on how, when and where to go for an unforgettable journey.
One of the first things you notice about Eleanor's new site is that the URL extension (what comes after the "dot") is that it's not the usual dot-com or dot-net or dot-org. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has lately been expanding the list of eligible extensions for use in website addresses. As you might guess, buying and squatting on possibly valuable website addresses is a cottage industry now.
In 2010, Insurance.com was sold for $35.6 million. Whisky.com, Vodka.com and Candy.com each sold for around $3 million. Why? Because URL addresses are sold by middleman sites called registrars like YourDomainPick.com which are ICANN accredited and licensed to make website names available to the public. All you do is type the name you want into a search on a registrar's site and you'll see if a) the name is available, b) if someone owns is already and wants to sell it and c) how much it will cost to grab it.
As you might guess, the .com, .net and .org extensions, being familiar to most of us, go quickly. However there are hundreds of allowed extensions available inexpensively, like .food or .news or in Eleanor's case, .guide!
The main intention of the website was initially a place to publish blogs from her travels about the country. However when we proposed the project to her, it went way beyond expectations. She discovered what a purpose-driven website could be. She came to United WebWorks because of her old site (we get a lot of refugees from old, ineffective websites). She realized that WordPress wasn't as user-friendly as she hoped, and realized that a new site was going to require some help.
We presented a finished product to Eleanor in two weeks. At this point there was not much SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to perform on it; that will come later, and we trained her in the basics of doing it on her own. In addition to massive improvements on the usability of the site, we added contact info, internal links, and a spacious gallery for all that road trip photography.
Another feature that cannot be overlooked is its link to all of Eleanor's social media accounts. Facebook and Twitter are integrated to make it easy to promote a new blog entry, new photos or any news from the road that appeals to her followers.
This Girl’s Guide Blog Info Website link will be www.thisgirls.guide Eleanor Gates is the owner of This Girl’s Guide. She is a traveler/blogger. Her last long trip was from 2014 and is called 2014 Cross Country in her blogs. She is going on a trip on May 1st (not sure how long it will be) and she is calling that one BBQ, Bluegrass, and Bourbon. She will be spending a lot of time in Tennessee but the trip starts in Charleston, SC.
She is interested in sharing her website with female travelers and sharing her knowledge of traveling with them. She has many health and travel tips that she would love for people to know. She has decided to also offer her services to people for her to plan their next trip. This is the first time she is offering this kind of service and doesn’t know if it is going to get her any revenue just yet. She’s interested to see if people would really like her services first before she fully commits to selling her services.
She is totally in love with her website from the logo to her new pictures she had taken by a local photographer. She didn’t really like her old site because she did not know enough about Wordpress before starting one and slowly realized she was going to need help setting up a website.
We got her website done in 2 weeks as she requested and she sent her website to a few family and friends who also seemed to really love her website as well. For us, it was a pretty cool challenge to get a website done in 2 weeks but Eleanor was so easy going we pretty much made it the way we wanted to and she loved it. She only had a few requests to change a few things but overall she was a breath of fresh air to work with.
The first thing that Eleanor wanted was a place for her blogs. We wanted to give her more than just a blogging site though. We added a really awesome front page that links to all of her other internal pages. We also talked her into trying the travel agent job so she can help other people set up their future travels.
We did not do any SEO for Eleanor’s site. It was to be a really quick site but she is probably going to want some down the road. We gave her the basics of how to set up SEO on her site so she could do it if she didn’t want to have to pay us to do it.
There are some HUGE differences between her old and new site. Her old site was mainly just blogs, nothing really else was on her page at all. Now, she has many pages and contact information. She also has a really sweet gallery from her trips.
As far as social media marketing , Eleanor has plans to share all of her blogs across her social media outlets. Currently, she has Facebook and Twitter set up through her new site. Her content will be different with each blog because she is experiencing different cities and towns that have totally different traditions and different activities going on. Eleanor usually post blogs every few days during her travels. She usually posts once she leaves the city she is visiting and will add the pictures she really likes from that specific location. Eleanor will be using Nomad Maps to map out her travels and show her audience where she is traveling each day. It’s super neat. It shows a line from city to city and you can follow her as she travels.
A typical customer for Eleanor would be someone who is looking for tips and tricks on road traveling. She also now has the option for her to plan out their trips if they request for her to do so.