Shirin is an Iranian American travel blogger based in the Pacific Northwest and recently started a travel blog to encourage working professionals to explore more of the local area in their spare time. She came to me since she was new to the blogging scene and needed some assistance with her blog page design on Showit. She had the template set up but the blog posts were not displaying correctly. Read on to see how I helped with this blog page re-design.

Since she was a newbie to the blogging world I also offered assistance on how to create an optimized blog. I could see that some of the blog posts needed improvement, especially in terms of SEO so I wanted to help her out! When clients come to me, I get so consumed in their business that I feel compelled to share all my knowledge because I really want to see them succeed!

To start, I provided her with a video tutorial that covered basic blogging tips. For example, the importance of keyword research, how to add alt text to images, how to add meta descriptions, how to add a featured image and how to check Yoast for SEO performance. I also gave suggestions on how to format the post. For example, adding an introductory paragraph with keywords, adding sub headings and images to break up the text and finishing with a CTA to encourage readers to take action on where you want to lead them to next. The great thing about Showit is that it is integrated with wordpress for blogging which is such an SEO friendly blogging platform. 

Then I worked on the blog page re-design in Showit. She needed help in this area since the formatting was all skewed and many of the posts didn’t have a featured image. Here’s how it looked before:

I suggested that we design a side-by-side post layout as that way visitors to her site could easily see 6 blog posts displayed without having to scroll all the way down the page. Instead of a sidebar, we opted for a little intro section with an email sign up followed by the category section. I also tidied up the single post view too.

Here’s how it looks after I finished the blog page re-design:

She also needed some slight editing on a couple of other pages on her website, including the about page and info page which tweaked to make them more visually appealing.

Shirin still has more content to add to the website but it is now off to a great start! 

If you are interested in travelling the Pacific Northwest get in touch with Shirin, she has lots of travel itineraries, hiking suggestions and more to share with you! 

Wishing her all the best with her future endeavors as a travel blogger!  

Here’s some feedback from Shirin on this project:

“I found Claire through the Showit Usergroup as she commented on someone’s post to provide them with some feedback. I reached out to her and about 6 other people and ended up choosing Claire, even though she was the most different from what I was originally looking for. I was originally looking for another travel blogger from the PNW because I thought it would have been better for me to have a guide who knew my interests, however after a quick video chat with Claire I KNEW she was going to be just as helpful! She had prompt responses, provided me with videos to answer my questions where I was stuck, found SEO keyword contents for me, bulletpointed and organized everything I needed to do to get started, had fair pricing, actively reflected on things I said, did frequent check ins, and her accent was a plus! I would definitely recommend her to anyone!”

Are you in need of a website re-fresh or perhaps a completely new website design? I offer Showit template customizations or other website updates as needed.