4 weeks before departure, an adventure of a life time, 75 days overlanding through East and Southern Africa.
Al and I thought it would be really cool to create a website and document it all. We started doing some research, and decided that a blog would be the way forward. How hard could it be....?
Everything is easy if you know how! Creating a website is something we both had never done before. It took us an evening of brain storming and bottle of wine to come up with a few potential names. The next question was "What domain names were available"? Most names we came up with were taken and we did not have the budget to buy them as some were over a $1000. We needed more wine... After many hours of various variations of names we came up with Explorers Cafe and it was available!
The next step was choosing a host. The easiest is to keep your domain and host company the same, as we found out the hard way. Now we had a domain with GoDaddy and Arvixe as a host, but we had no clue how to make them work together. We were lost and no closer to building our website. So, Al decided that the logo was the most important thing while I started searching the web for answers.
When we finally downloaded wordpress, it was the beginning of total confusion. "What is a plugin? CSS? Widgets??" It was the start of online tutorials!
After many hours of tutorials and lots of research, 2 weeks later our website was taking shape but for some reason we could not get it live. If you don't have a clue about website building, don't go to your settings and change URL's, you could lose everything with a touch of a button as we did! This was the end of Al's website building days... But I was determined and started building our website... again.
If you have never created a website I recommend watching tutorials as they are very helpful. The one that I found the most beginner friendly was WP Apprentice. The quick start course is free and very informative but as you advance there is a fee which is well worth it.
1 week before departure Al wrote our first blog, we did not like the layout and felt that the overall design did not suit our requirements. So I started looking for new themes, we both love photography, that is what I concentrated my search on and found our current theme by Photocrati.
It took another 3 days to customize our new theme (this is something to take into consideration when changing a theme design) the original website content remains but does not automatically configure as every theme has a different layout.
The result is what you see today. We are continuing to develop our website and learn more with every update. In the beginning it all seems very complicated (it was), but once you get the basics it's becomes much easier.