Take notice, I am doing things a little out of order here, as I really should worry about forming my LLC with the state, getting my CLIA or IATA number set and even opening a bank account long before the website. But, as mentioned, the website has actually been “live” for about 9 years. I didn’t want it sitting there with old information anymore. I needed to get all the old information off of the site (as well as my social media accounts) and populate it with some current data. I am not open for business yet, but I didn’t want anyone to see a dead site.

I have used WordPress for years. I am very familiar with it, having built over 100 sites using it. It works really well for what I need, and the software is free. For Tiki Room Travel, I really wanted to use Ghost. Ghost is similar to WordPress, but has a few pretty big differences. Ghost is great at email and email newsletters, and it creates really fast and beautiful sites. However, Ghost is awful at some things, like forms and themes. It is really hard to run a travel agency without a good and trusty form, as all of our requests come in from the website through the form. I tried to use Ghost, self-hosted it, created the website, transferred the domain over, worked and worked on it, and gave up after 2 full days of trying. It just won’t work. I probably could have made it work, but with all the special hosting and add-ons I would have needed would have been too expensive compared to the nearly free WordPress option.

So, back to WordPress I went. I resurrected my old WordPress site for Tiki Room Travel, changed the theme, layout and deleted all the old posts. Basically started over. I then wrote new blog posts for the current Disney discounts available (2 for Disney World, 1 for Disneyland and Aulani) plus wrote some blog posts about 2024 packages at both WDW and DL. I posted these to my newly clean social media accounts and pinged all the posts out to Google and Friends. This process took me about 5 hours from start to finish, and my site is up and running with basic information included. When I get read to actually launch, I will write a bunch of blog posts, so I have a backlog of information to add to the site over the first few weeks as I am advertising.

As it sits now, the site is ok, it will do. It is very likely I will redesign the site in the next week or so. I just needed it to be presentable right now, I can fine tune later.