Finally I am officially launching my “blog” about my vanlife experience. I am only ten months late. My goal was to have the website ready when I moved out of my apartment and began living full time out of my van. That would have been March 2025.
I vastly underestimated the learning curve on creating a blog site and my own affinity for procrastination. I’ve always prided myself on being able quickly pick up new software programs. After researching various hosting sites and web creation programs, I decided to use Hostinger as my host and WordPress to generate content. I believed the hype – “No coding required, get your site up in hours.”
WordPress, however, is not intuitive. It is a good product and if I would have been satisfied with using one of the themes and templates, I could have maybe launched the blog site relatively quickly. I, however, need to know how things work and I found myself going down “rabbit holes” as I explored the software’s capabilities. As I learned more, I got a clearer idea of what type of tabs (pages) I wanted to create and how I wanted to share information.
Because I procrastinated and was preoccupied with learning to live as a nomad, I didn’t really devote a lot of time to the blog until September 2025. In addition, I wanted to go back and document the months of travel I had already completed. This took some time even though I had kept a calendar that documented everywhere I had visited and stayed overnight.
The short story is that after and a lot of experimentation I’ve finally decided to organize the website into six (6) sections or “tabs”, as follows:
- About – general information about the website
- Design – drawings of the van’s design
- Build – information on the van’s build out including the equipment and products
- Travels – maps showing where I have traveled in the van
- Media – photos and videos of the place I have visited
- Journal – location of all my current and future journal entries
