Introducing JohntheGo.com

So you might have noticed that the site is looking a bit different. Or completely different, even. Well that’s because it IS. I went for a full rebrand in January and while there are still a few corners of the site that still need to be freshened up and corrected, I decided it was time to share my new face to the world…

Welcome to JohntheGo.com

That’s right; after five and a half faithful years, Continental Breakfast Travel is no more. Before we go into the reasons why, let’s take a quick look at what is different and what is still the same.

The rebrand in brief: everything you need to know

What’s new?

• Site name and URL: JohntheGo.com
• A snazzy colour scheme courtesy of Sabina Hadiza Schmitz at Brown Leather Book
• My Instagram handle
• My Facebook page name
• Core theme: the new site is based around five different travel themes: backpacking, city breaks, into the wild, off the beaten track and expat life.

Will the content be different? The content and focus of the blog will stay largely the same, but you can expect a few extra photos of me and a more personal take on some posts. You can read about this in more detail below.

Do I need to do anything? It’s a good idea to update any bookmarks. I would also love it if you would consider signing up to my newsletter here. But more importantly, please go and explore the site and tell me what you think!

4 reasons I decided to rebrand my blog

The answer to this one is a bit longer and more complicated than you might realise. The short answer is: it felt like the right thing to do at the right time.

The longer (and possibly more boring) answer boils down to four key points.

1. I have fallen back in love with blogging

Blogging is something I have been doing for almost six years now, but it hasn’t been something I’ve always enjoyed. At the end of 2016, I unofficially went on a hiatus from Continental Breakfast Travel – and never really came back. I let my domain payments lapse, which caused my site to disappear from the internet all together, undoing almost five years of hard work. In early 2018, I got everything back up and running (with a new domain), but I was still very cautious about investing too much time and energy (and money) into the blog.

Then at the end of last year I was thinking about my long-term goals and realised that the blog was part of them. Quite a big part, really. In fact, this was something I really loved and wanted to invest more in. I think of it as falling back in love with blogging, but in a lot of ways it really means a whole new start – with a whole new blog.

2. It was time for a spring clean

I started Continental Breakfast Travel back in March 2013. And as much I would love to say that over the years I have nurtured and pruned the blog as tenderly and lovingly as Alan Titchmarch tends to his garden, I just haven’t. All too often I have very quickly written something, posted it and never looked at it again unless it started bringing in traffic from Google.

Only in the past few months have I seriously started going over my old posts and exploring all the cobweb-filled pages of the blog, which is when I realised just how out of date some stuff was, and just how inconsistent the blog’s development has been. The rebrand was a chance to improve on that.

3. Influencers changed the game

I’m not sure influencers existed in 2013. Or at least not in the way that they do now. I knew a couple of travel bloggers that I followed who had good online personas or profiles, but it wasn’t so common (at least to me) to trust and follow people more than brands. Wow, has that changed.

When I started out, I thought I was trying to build a brand and be the next Lonely Planet. I was cautious about putting ‘too much’ of myself into the posts, never even including photos of myself. Now in 2018, that personal connection is so important. Who wants to follow some faceless entity? People want to follow people…

4. People follow people

The rebrand idea came about because I wanted to change my Instagram handle to include my name. People follow people – and I wanted more followers. I stumbled upon JohntheGo (after just a few failed attempts…) and saw that the domain was free. Bingo – the rebrand was born.

But more than that I realised that I didn’t have a following. I’d spend most of the last few years focusing on SEO and Google rankings (which if I’m being honest is definitely more my thing) and the fellow bloggers and people who commented, read and liked my posts in the early years had all gone their own ways. I hadn’t really realised until I saw the amazing comments I used to get from regular readers back in 2014-2015.

People follow people. So to build up a community of followers again, I need to be a person. So now I’m John the Go.

Rebranding my blog: how I did it

If you’re thinking of doing the same to your own site – or are just really interested in how this all came together, here is a brief overview of what I’ve been doing over the last few weeks.

Firstly I knew I needed a new theme. There was nothing wrong with the old one, but I wanted something that offered me more flexibility. In the end, I chose Saxon via ThemeForest because the demo options really blew me away. (Although in the end it turned out almost all of the cool features are created with HTML coding, which has actually been a fun learning process.)

Next, I knew I needed a colour scheme. And a logo. And some cool icons for my Instagram story highlights that all the cool kids have. Luckily, the brilliant Sabina Schmitz of Brown Leather Book was on hand to help me with all three.

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Sabina suggested a couple of possible colour palettes while I came up with doodles of what the icons or logo could be (it turns out I am basically the Picasso of thumbnail icons). Together we settled on a few options. Building them into the new theme, it became apparent what was going to work and what wasn’t and we finally landed two core colours, and a whole host of different possible icons.

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It might sound simple, but having a colour scheme and idea of what the site (and ‘the brand’ as a whole) should look like really helped me to understand what I wanted the blog to be. In this sense, Sabina was completely invaluable to the process and I am forever indebted to her artistic vision.

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Thirdly, I sat down to think about the site navigation. This is something I had never really done. I spent a long time just checking out other travel blogs I really admire and trying to understand the needs of my own users: what are people looking for when they land on my site? How can I serve them up what they need as simply as possible? How can I inspire people to explore more content?

The finished result is what you see before you. And I’m really, really happy with it.

What should I do now?

If you’ve made it this far, here’s what you should do:

1. Update your bookmarks
2. Make sure you are following the new social channels
3. Subscribe to the newsletter
4. Explore every inch of the new site!

Lastly, I would like to give an uncharacteristically emotional thank you to everyone who has supported, followed, shared or read the blog since its inception in March 2013. I am very grateful.