This has been a long time coming. Since May of last year, I have been working on re-launching this website, drivetosouthamerica.com. It officially came to fruition last Saturday, and I made some additional adjustments since then, and I’m now sitting very comfortable with the status of my webpage as of today.
I need to thank a couple people who have been more than enthusiastic in helping me out, and actually even pointing out the fact that I could benefit from their help. First and foremost, I cannot thank my friend Larry at Legendary Media enough for all that he’s done. He has been so helpful throughout this process; not only did he explain everything in a manner that a simple person like me can understand, but also worked hand-in-hand with me so that I am not using him as a crutch. As a result, I feel more empowered than before, and he’s truly opened my eyes to things like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and how to best lay out a website so that things are easy to find and easy to navigate. This was a true problem that I faced before in my previous website design. People didn’t necessarily know where the menus were, and broken links were showing up all over the place. But I just simply created it once and never changed it, I felt that it was too much of a bother to maintain a website. Larry’s changed all of that by moving me to much simpler yet even more effective tools, and hopefully the readers will benefit from it just as as I will. Because of Larry’s help, this website won’t be a static one that I never touch. Instead, it will continue to evolve and improve, and I will continue to add new content, and more efficiently interact with readers.
I also want to thank Michael Norcross, for designing the Drive to South America logo you see on top. I simply showed him what my website was about for about 5 minutes one day, and I let his imagination do the rest. The result of what you see is literally what he himself did all on his own, and I couldn’t be happier about it. In fact, I’m so glad that he did all of that himself, because the end result I think is so much better than anything I could have ever asked Michael to do. I think he truly has a gift, not only in terms of his creativity so that he can do all the things that he imagines in his mind, but also understanding how to graphically portray the wants of a website, individual, and/or a company. I haven’t seen anyone like him that can do it so seamlessly and so easily. It really is shame that people like him are so hard to find yet not as many people know of Michael as I feel should.
The end-result of what you see today is a complete transfer over to a new platform, and additional content. First, the new platform allows me to easily add blog entries, move pages around, allow people to comment and for me to respond to comments, fix broken links and any errors as necessary, and add new pages and even more content as a result. Moreover, it’ll help people more easily find what they’re looking for when they search on google due to the introduction of meta descriptions and titles to pages, blog entries and pictures (which I didn’t have at all before), or when they use the search function on my website and blog. Speaking of blog, that brings me to my other point, about additional content. I now have about 650 blog entries that I’ve transferred over from my blogger, xanga, and personal journal account. Though many of them are simple and short, others are thoughtful and long. I’ve read through every single one of them and tagged all of them, which was a long and arduous process. But I now feel comfortable with having a single consolidated place where I can see all that I’ve written and will continue to write.
In many ways, I never thought I’d ever do anything like this. But over the past 3 years since I created the website, a lot more readers than I expected have not only visited this website, but have written encouraging words via email or asked for additional insight that could help them with their own trip planning process. I’m truly thankful for that kind of attention to something I did not only to help others plan and execute their own trip, but also for me to reflect back on the trip to South America and my military deployment, both of which were starting to become distant memories.
I hope you enjoy what’s been done and what is to come.