If you have been following Cruise Talk for a while, you may have noticed that things look a little different around here.
Okay… a lot different!
Cruise Talk has been around for many years now. It started simply as a place for me to share our cruises, photographs, ship reviews, destination experiences, and all of the little details that I thought other travelers might find interesting. Over the years, it has grown into a pretty large collection of our travels and memories.
And, after all those years, the website was definitely ready for some attention.
So, welcome to Cruise Talk 2.0!
We have spent a lot of time over the past several months rebuilding and reorganizing the site. The goal wasn’t to change what Cruise Talk is. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. We wanted to make it easier to enjoy everything that was already here—and much easier for me to start adding new stories again.
The biggest change you will probably notice is that the entire site is cleaner, easier to navigate, and much friendlier on phones and tablets. That’s important because I know many people are reading Cruise Talk while traveling, sitting in an airport, or even while they are on a cruise.
We have also reorganized our travel stories into Journeys. Rather than simply having hundreds of posts sitting in chronological order, you can now follow along with a particular cruise or trip and move through the stories from that journey. That makes it much easier to find all of the posts from one adventure without having to hunt for them.
The photographs have received some attention, too. Photography has always been a huge part of Cruise Talk for me, and the new site does a much better job of displaying our pictures and galleries. You can open the photos larger, move through a gallery more easily, and hopefully get a much better feel for the places we have visited.
We have improved search and navigation, cleaned up years of old website clutter, and tried to make the whole site feel more like what Cruise Talk really is—a library of our travel stories.
But perhaps the part I am happiest about is that all of this work is finally behind us!
While we have been busy working on Cruise Talk 2.0, we haven’t stopped traveling. Quite the opposite. We have a considerable backlog of trips, photographs, and experiences that I have been wanting to share.
And now I can finally get back to doing that.
Steve and I are also getting ready to head to Vietnam and Cambodia for an AmaWaterways Mekong River cruise, so there will certainly be plenty more to write about very soon. This will be a completely different part of the world for us to explore, and I am excited to share the experience as we go.
There are also plenty of older adventures that still deserve their turn on Cruise Talk. One of the things I have always enjoyed about writing here is being able to go back through the photographs and relive a trip while putting the story together. Sometimes the posts come quickly. Sometimes life and the next trip get in the way!
That’s part of Cruise Talk, too.
If you’ve been reading for years, thank you for sticking with us while we gave the place a much-needed renovation. All of the old stories are still here, but hopefully they are much easier to find and enjoy.
And if you are visiting Cruise Talk for the first time, welcome. Browse through the Journeys, explore some of the places we’ve been, look through the photos, and come travel with us.
I’m very happy to have our new Cruise Talk home finished.
Now it’s time to get back to the fun part—traveling and telling the stories.