In this article
Finally!!
I started MilesTalk in May of 2016. It wasn’t intended to be a full-time endeavor. I’d just done my first session at South By Southwest that March and many of the attendees coaxed me into starting to do some writing again. I’d written about travel deals and credit cards for my first travel venture in 2008 – HotelMagician.com – but hadn’t in at least 5 years.
The coaxing worked and I downloaded the first WordPress theme I saw that I thought looked good, spent a few hours styling it, and MilesTalk.com was born.
The downsides of that hasty site build were evident ever since. The theme I chose wasn’t great for a blog with so many different spheres of content. It wasn’t very malleable and it had a ton of limitations.
While traffic has steadily grown over the years, one thing persisted: I got constant feedback (and Google Analytics backed this up) that it was too hard to find anything on the site. The navigation got quickly cluttered. If you didn’t know exactly where to look for something (and really, nobody but me did!) you couldn’t find it without a Google search.
I had no way to easily categorize and display all the various topics of interest people cared about. I had no way for you to easily see, for example the most recent Reviews or deals related to Airline Miles. It was just a page of all the most recent posts and then they sort of vanished.
MilesTalk 2.0
Over the last year and half, and with the introduction of my companion website Your Best Credit Cards, MilesTalk has decidedly and intentionally become more than a hobby. I love this stuff too much. It was a natural progression.
But I needed to get the content to work for all of you. For MilesTalk to truly be a resource to you, you need to be able to easily find what you came for or fulfill a curiosity.
The first thing you’ll notice is the new homepage, with the 4 most recent articles on top, then all of the most recent articles by topic.
Built into the top navigation is a big search bar, so you can easily search the site for anything not jumping out at you.
The top navigation is neatly broken up into all the types of information I cover and shows you the latest articles in each topic at a glance.
The site is much “lighter” with code, so it should load significantly faster.
I didn’t think it was time for a new logo, but I’ve coined a new tagline for the logo space:
Travel More. Travel Better.
This speaks to my love of using miles for premium / high-end redemptions for experiences I’d never pay for (the Travel Better part) along with my acknowledgement that many readers just want to use miles and points to Travel More.
Whichever kind of reader you are, I’ve got you covered.
Let me know what you think!
As you use the new website, you may love things, you may hate things, or you may find things that appear broken. Please use the Contact form (or chat or tweet or group) to let me know. If there’s more work to do in order to make sure I’m serving you the best that I can, then I’ll do some more work.
Thanks for stopping by and I hope to see you around here even more now…
Dave
