---
title: Creating a travel blog using wordpress
type: article
date: 2011-01-13
source: website
original_url: "https://navveenbalani.dev/index.php/articles/creating-a-travel-blog-using-wordpress/"
topics: ["architecture"]
legacy_categories: ["blog-cms"]
tags: ["wordpess-blog", "wordpress", "wordpress-travel-blog"]
summary: I have been working for some time on creating my travel blog on word press. Here are some insights on my experiences on creating a travel blog on word press that you may find helpful - Selecting a theme for travel blog Wordpress offers numerous free themes, but finding the right…
draft: false
---

I have been working for some time on creating my travel blog on word press. Here are some insights on my experiences on creating a travel blog on word press that you may find helpful -
**Selecting a theme for travel blog**
Wordpress offers numerous free themes, but finding the right theme is always a challenge. I was looking was a 3 column type layout, where I could configure categories and posts on the home page dynamically – more like a newspaper theme.  Goggled through Top 20 , Top 50 travel themes and you would find loads of them ..Some of the short listed themes which I evaluated were – [Gorilla Travel Magazine theme](http://gorillathemes.com/traveler-magazine/) which offered a magazine style layout , [Global new themes](http://www.instantshift.com/2010/08/10/global-news-a-free-wordpress-news-theme/) which was freely available, which had a good magazine layout but I had to customize it heavily to covert it to travel blog. Finally, I bought a theme and customized it, as it offered a magazine style layout and I was able to use it for my travel blog[.](http://naveenbalani.com/travel) Though I need to add lot of stuff and contents on my site, but using the theme, I am able to organize my content effectively.
**Image Gallery**
A travel blog needs to have a good Image Gallery. For Image Galley, I went with two plug ins, [**NextGen Gallery**](http://alexrabe.de/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/) plugin which is widely used and [**Photo Gallery FX**](http://www.flashxml.net/photo-gallery.html) plugin a Flash XML based plug-in. Along with NextGen Gallery, I used [**WordPress NextGen Gallery**](http://hybridindie.com/) **[View](http://hybridindie.com/)** which offers JQuery showcase for my Image Gallery.
I liked the the NextGen Gallery widget which I have used as a side-bar for my sideshows, picking up the required images from the Image Gallery. I also found the Photo Gallery FX plugin gallery very attractive and have used this in the Image Gallery category sections, Have a look at the Image Gallery section at [Image Gallery section](http://naveenbalani.com/travel/index.php/category/discover/las-vegas/lasvegas-image-gallery/).
The Photo Gallery FX plugin can be used with multiple post, but only drawback is you need to manually create the XML files required by Flash plugin.
**Editing Images**
Cutting down Image size and creating thumbnails for my images was other daunting task. I went with Picasso to cut down the image size without comprising much on the image quality. I also used the thumb nails from Next Gen Gallery plugin to good effect where ever required. (mainly on my home page, to optimize loading the home page)
**Videos Editing**
I decided to host the videos of my site and created flash videos for optimizing space and bandwidth on my site.  For editing video, I used [Any Video](http://www.any-video-converter.com/products/for_video_free/) converter, which is capable of creating snippets of videos and provide an option to export it as Flash videos.
Embedding flash videos was done through **Easy Flash Embed plugin** which required the URL of the flash video. Have a look at the Video gallery created so far at  - [Video Gallery](http://naveenbalani.com/travel/index.php/category/discover/las-vegas/lasvegas-videos/)
 **Selecting the right sub domain for travel blog**
Once I had the theme customized and working locally, next was to upload it to my subdomain. Since I was using wordpress 3.0 , I used the multi site feature for creating a new subdomain to host this.
Hope this gives you some insight if you plan to create your own travel blog. Enjoy: )