It’s been very quiet around here recently – sorry about that. My most recent posts were stories from my trip to California – which was in April – and I haven’t managed to post at all in July. But it’s all ok, it was for a very good reason which, if you’ve been here before, is probably immediately apparent.

My brand spanking shiny new site design!

I’ve been planning to move The Wayfarer Diaries over to a self hosted site for months now – wordpress.com is great for blogging but for someone who is obsessed with design it was driving me mad not being able to get the look I really wanted for my site. Not to mention the e-mails I kept being bombarded with from ‘marketing agencies’ telling me my site is losing traffic because it’s not responsive, SEO friendly or particularly attractive.Thanks, I know.

So for the past couple of months I’ve been busy developing design concepts, researching literally hundreds of themes and planning the exact look and feel of my new site. And finally, today it went live! One big difference is the awesome gallery layouts for photography posts, which let me indulge my preference for reading things with nice big pictures, and the clean navigation from post to post. You can now navigate by category tag via the main menu, making it easier to find what you want to read about, or browse through featured or most recent posts on the front page. The whole thing now looks much sleeker too and is fully responsive for mobile devices, so I can focus on hopefully sharing some great writing and photographs in a space that you actually want to visit!

There’s been other things going on too; I’ve been working on some exciting design stuff for other people which will be popping up around the interwebz some time soon and of course ploughing through my last couple of months (!) at work. I was also absolutely thrilled to be included in the very talented Ed Graham’s post for Go.See.Write on ‘what makes a good photograph’ along with some amazing and inspirational photographers.

And of course, the biggest news – today marks four weeks until I land in Bali to start 12 months of travel (more on my travel plans coming up in the next post). For the next few weeks you can expect lots of travel preparation posts sharing ideas and tips on packing, planning and almost certainly panicking.

I really hope that you love the new site as much as I do – I’m always happy to talk travel (or anything else for that matter) so please feel free to get in touch through the contact page and share your own views in the comments, hit me up on Twitter or come join the party on my Facebook page for unique content and more frequent travel updates once I hit the road.

I’d love to know what you think of the site – good or bad, let me have it in the comments!