Hey Indie Hackers I built a travel blogger community, I'd love some feedback.

My wife has run a food and travel blog for our travels for a few years and back towards the start was quite well integrated into the professional travel blogger sphere(you'll want to get on their facebook groups to work with them and you'll get a lot better feedback there then here). From what I saw people travel blog either for memories(in which case Facebook/instagram does typically work well since they just want to picture brag to friends) or to build a profile/make money/get free travel. I think you'll want to target the second since if you build a good service they may even be willing to pay but you'll need to change your site to do it. From what I can see you don't really feature the travellers. Your lander is targeting them to sign up but you should be showing who the current ones are and where they are/what they are doing. Give them a better opportunity to build a reputation/image through your site or else there is little benefit over just getting a wordpress blog. Your focus shouldn't be on the bloggers on the homepage but on the readers.

If you do decide to go after the pros you'll also possibly want to pivot away from being just a hosting play where you'll honestly have difficulty competing with wordpress to being a middleman between travel bloggers and people/places that want travel bloggers to blog about them. If you can become a central point of contact and make it more likely for bloggers on your service to get these offers you'll do a lot better. Even if you are just able to position yourself as a place people will go to read about location x then you'll do better. Like tripadvisor with blogs.

That's harder work though since you'll also need to curate or else you become a quora style "I was wondering how to do X" "How to do X is a great question. My business does Y which is not the same thing and won't help you but here is why people do Y".

Hi Kam. Well done for getting this far! Travel blogging communities is one area that is under-served on the web, but it's a tricky nut to crack with the challenges of social media and existing content platforms like Wordpress.com, SquareSpace, etc.

There are some fairly basic usability issues with your homepage, all of which I stumbled upon within ~10 seconds of landing on your site:

• the Get Started button (which is the only call to action on the page) only fires if you click on the text - the button around the text does nothing. I clicked 4-5 times before I realised why it wasn't working.

• Only the central content is scrollable, not the page. That means that if the mouse cursor is in the whitespace at the side of the content (I'm on desktop), scrolling doesn't do anything

• There's nowhere to go other than signing up. What if I want to know if it's free or paid?

• The titles of the example posts aren't links. It's good that the image and author name are linked, but the title is where the majority of visitors will try to click if they want to see a post.

• You've spelt traveller wrong (you have travler). Note that in the US it's traveler with a single l.

• Don't forget to build with SEO in mind.

Looking at an actual post:

• There's no branding, navigation or call to action. You need to do more to keep people on your site.

• The images aren't being resized for display (let alone for mobile/responsive). One of them is 5.4MB, and the total page load is almost 23MB.

You've said in another comment that you've only built it for mobile at the moment, but if you had a responsive design (which wouldn't be difficult to achieve for this layout) then it would work on any device without much effort.

Plus the design makes the hierarchy of the information shown really hard to take in. The differing line heights applied and the vertical margins interrupt the 'rhythm' of the page, and you're using four different typefaces (the logo - Lobster? - system ui, helvetica/arial and Playfair Display) on what is quite a content-light page.

Design is subjective and there are some awful designs out there which convert very well, but if you're building a blogging platform then readability, hierarchy and rhythm need to be right. See Medium for a great example.

As I said at the start, well done for getting this far and for proactively looking for feedback!

Adam

My first thoughts are: YES! Blogging is a massive arena, but if you can narrow it down to the niche of travellers and make it super accessible, I think you'll find a market.

My wife, whom I met travelling Europe, is a massive adventurer. She's likely travelled more than most people. Whilst she was on her travels she wrote letters, sent big emails about her adventures in a particular town/city/country, and eventually wrote a small, personal book about the whole six months (which included meeting me.) I tried to convince her to blog, but she had reservations.

If I were you, I would make this super accessible via mobile. Traveling a lot often means no access to a computer, but most people have a mobile with them these days, and (free) wifi is everywhere.

(Only built it for mobile web right now*)