Creating a Site to Document my Adventures
The Team: Team of one. This is a personal project with no real purpose beyond my own enjoyment
My Role: Content Creator, Designer, Writer. if it’s on the site, I did it
This project is ongoing and this page will be updated as I make progress
Some Background
I like to get outside. When I have some spare time I often find myself gathering up a few friends, some supplies, and hitting the open road to enjoy what the natural world has to offer. On my travels, I’ve learned a few things, taken a few pictures, and gathered a few stories to tell. Lately I’ve been feeling a need for a place to put all these together. Sort of a record for my friends and me to enjoy. I thought a website would be a good choice for this because it’s relatively inexpensive, and allows me to update it with new trips and discoveries.
Brainstorming
Once I had the idea for the site my next step was to figure out what the content would be. I knew I wanted the pictures, but what else? how would I organize it? I needed to do some brainstorming. These are the core ideas I came up with.
Each trip gets its own page. I’ll include my favorite pictures from each trip, some maps of the trails we took, and maybe a story of something memorable that happened.
A landing page of some kind. I think the main purpose of this page will be to introduce the project and provide a way to navigate each trip’s page.
Maybe another page with descriptions of the gear we used, and why it did or didn’t work. I remember when I was first getting into this being confused about what I should and shouldn’t bring, and how that has changed over the years.
maybe another page with some general tips and things I’ve learned about backcountry camping. I’m not totally sold on this page yet but I’ll leave it on the back burner for now.
Designing the landing page
The main purpose of this page was to introduce the project and preset each trip as its own unique adventure. To do this, I used Adobe Illustrator to create a cover image for each destination based on pictures that I took at each location.
I then took these images and arranged them in a layout that I Designed in Figma and built using Elementor.
I used the dotted path to connect them to give the viewer a sense that this was a journey being taken
This page is live on the site right now and you can see it by clicking on the view site button
Up Next
The next steps for this project are going to be me creating a layout for the individual trip pages, populating it with content, and then building them onto the site.