It’s summer time. Not like you didn’t notice with all the heat, sweat and cold drinks, right? Well, what you might end up noticing is that you’ll want to put up a few small websites in the summer… Say what? I’m serious.

While the rest of the year you wouldn’t be bothered with thinking of putting up small and sweet websites, you do have a bit more time over the summer to create something unique, memorable and personally branded with everyone’s favourite little website management system – WordPress! Here’s just 3 ideas:

Your Last Trip to Europe – Blogged!

With more and more smartphones with better and better cameras, we end up taking even more and more (I’m repeating myself, but you get my point) photos of places that we’ve visited.

You might have put your photos on Facebook or Instagram, but those services won’t be online forever – and the memories of your travel adventures do deserve to be online a bit longer, right?

My favorite travel theme currently is wpVoyager, released by Purethe.Me on ThemeForest just this month. It’s a very minimalistic and readable blog theme that nicely integrates a map with pins that indicate places that you’ve traveled to – and links those pins to your posts.

These maps, integrated into wpVoyager, are by no means simplistic. They support KML, a file format that’s used to display geographic data in mapping applications, such as Google Maps for mobile.

While you might use WordPress’ mobile apps to blog your trip while you’re traveling, your visitors will also be able to browse your new travel blog thanks to its fully responsive design, that will fit any new mobile device. Just maybe not a Garmin.

wpVoyager also offers:

• Beautiful Social Media Integration and Sharing Options;
• Advanced Theme Options Panel – create your own homepage using our examples or your own special version;
• Works on Any Device – using the latest design and development techniques makes wpVoyager stunning, on any device;
• Easy Shortcodes – create brilliant pages simply with amazing shortcodes – no coding required!
• Gorgeous Typography;
• Google Maps API integration;
• TravellerPress – our Free Plugin;
• KML Support – KML is an international standard maintained by the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC);
• …

Is Summer Time for Business? Setup an (Independent) Site

While a lot of us might just go on vacation, summer could actually be your busiest time of the year, especially if you run a travel agency, have a yacht charter company or just rent apartments in the seaside like our friends in nearby Budva do over the summer.

While Airbnb, FishingBookers, Booking.com and other services might offer you a platform to reach guests and customers directly, what happens when they decide to Google you to check you out? Or consider coming again, but can’t follow updates on how you’re improving services because you get forgotten among all the other competition on various booking websites. Companies like Booking.com own the market because they own the platform.

While you will continue working with them, you by no means have to depend just on platforms – so create your own little platform, that you can experiment with and test various offer on. Do you want to settle in being just one of a thousand summer businesses or do you want to be memorable?

There are actually a number of great WordPress themes for businesses in general, and tourism businesses in particular. Just search ThemeForest for “travel” and you’ll find dozens if not hundreds or professionally built websites you can use.

If you run a travel agency however, I would personally recommend considering Tour Package, a WordPress travel/tour theme which uses WordPress’ built-in custom posts feature to offer you a “package post type” and other features that rely on the platform’s core functionality.

What this means is that later on, when you decide to maybe change your theme or hire a team to create a custom website for you, they can build upon what Tour Package offers – with fewer headaches for them and considerably less cost for you.

Tour Package also offers:

• Live Color Changer – Theme customizer supported. With this option, you can change colour easily in front end;
• Responsive – The site will look great on any devices;
• Unlimited Color – You can change almost every elements’ colour via colour picker in admin panel;
• Unlimited Sidebar – You can have different sidebars on any pages you need;
• 6 Footer Layouts;
• 3 Blog styles(With Left, Right, Both and None sidebar for each);
• 500+ Google Fonts Available;
• Drag Drop Slider Manager;
• …

Your Summer Event – With a Website

One thing the summer is full of is events – and I’m not talking about the Ultra Europe festival the hundreds of parties or concerts happening on beaches around the world. I’m actually referring to the (hopefully) hundreds of thousands of personal, private gatherings, such as BBQs, family picnics and company team buildings that also might not be satisfied being confined to a Facebook event.

On the other hand, event sites such as Eventbrite will probably be overkill and have nothing to do with the joy of slapping some nice burgers on a grill and having a cold one while the sun sets…

Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of “summer event” WordPress themes so I would recommend, until someone very smart (and dashing!) creates some, using various event WordPress themes that can be customised to suit your needs. Try to avoid the “conference” themes and stick to invitations themes, as well as the more minimalistic one pagers. In my experience, they will do fine to showcase how awesome your summer event turned out!

Travel Businesses Are Peo… WordPress Users Too!

While writing this article I noticed that there was a larger need for a list of great travel website WordPress themes and plugins then we previously imagined. So don’t worry – that’s one of the next themes we’ll cover this summer!