Refurbished Blog

Hello Readers!

In the last month, I have made some changes to the blog that you will appreciate. These changes will give you a slightly better visual experience, a newer home page with lots of helpful functionality, better readability, faster search results and ability to easily locate content on the blog.

You can see a teaser preview in this post and for a live feel, you can go directly to the home page.

Refurbished Home Page
The earlier homepage was a summary of the latest posts. The current homepage has lots of pictures, allows you to read content by country, find the latest posts and read according to your area of interest. The older top navigation bar has been retained as it was well received by many of you. I intend to make it more helpful.


The idea was to make the homepage more visual and to bring out the beautiful world travel photos. As a future traveler, you can get to know the story behind the photo by clicking on it. To make this happen, I have put in two photo containers so that you get to see lots of gorgeous travel photos.


You can also selectively read content and see photos by country. This feature was there earlier, but it remained hidden. Now, it is right on the homepage. The top 3 latest blog posts can also be seen in this section.


If you have been reading my blog posts regularly, you will know that I typically write on 6 broad focus areas. These are ‘Travel Tips’, ‘Visas for Indians’, ‘Adventure Travel’, ‘Vegetarian Food’, ‘Wildlife Holidays’ and ‘Unique Cultures’. Earlier, this content was fragmented. Now, everything has been categorized into these 6 broad areas that double up as the blog focus areas and my areas of interest. If you connect with them, you can directly read content under those respective headers.


To read the latest posts on these areas of interest, all you have to do is hover on the respective header. You can continue to read more by clicking on ‘More’.

Faster Search Results



We all know the importance of a good search feature. Keeping that in mind, I have made my earlier search much faster and more accurate. This will help you easily search within my 1500+ blog posts that I have been writing over the last 5 years. It continues to remain on the top right. Do give it a try and discover more of my blog’s hidden treasures.

Cleaner UI for Blog Posts

Earlier, there used to be some clutter in my blog posts with overcrowded side bars and lots of Ads. This time around, I have tried to make it cleaner and give you more interesting content instead of Ads and other trash. The font sizes have gone up, the color theme is uniform and the right side bar shows information that you might be interested in, such as. ‘Related Posts’, ‘Currently Trending Posts’, ‘All Time Favorites’ and the likes.

Request: I would really appreciate if you could give my refurbished blog a look and a try. And do let me know if you have any positive or negative feedback for me. I will try to incorporate those feedback into my next blog update.

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Launching Email Newsletter

The new year of 2014 is bringing a new entry to the blog. It has been one of those things that I have procrastinated for a long while and I know a lot of you have hated me for it. But, as promised last month, I am launching my blog’s very own email newsletter in the new year. I am calling my newsletter the ‘Travel Club’ as it will cater to all our interests that revolve around Travel and the many sub categories under it. And the best part is that this email newsletter (Travel Club) is available for free and anyone can join.


The one thing that I plan to keep special about this newsletter is that it will showcase information that will not be available on the blog. So, in its own special way, it will be unique. So, the people who are not subscribed to the newsletter will miss out on that awesome travel information.

To start with, I plan to keep this newsletter a fortnightly affair and depending on feedback from you readers, I will either make this weekly or monthly in the future. Through this newsletter, I plan to share the following with you. It might be just one of the below or a combination.

1) Unique destination stories

2) Pertinent travel, visa and photography tips
3) International Destinations that are either super special or friendly to Indians (visa, wallet, etc.)

4) Vegetarian delights from around the world. I want to prove that a vegetarian like me can also easily travel around the world

5) As has been the norm, I will bring in my collection of special world travel photos
6) Going forward, I intend to run competitions and contests and there will be a lot of goodies to be won at the end of it

7) I am planning a lot of launches in 2014 and the newsletter subscribers will be the first ones to hear about it

8) As I keep traveling, I come across insane travel offers and flight deals. The newsletter subscribers will be the only ones to hear about it.

A lot of you (my readers and fans) do not find the time to regularly follow my frequent blog updates. Hence, for you, I plan to keep a section on my newsletter that gives you a snapshot of the key things that have transpired in the blog in the last 15 days. This section will be in addition to the overall unique newsletter content.

As with most other newsletters, if you like it, you can share it with your friends, family and social network and if you don’t like it, you can go ahead and unsubscribe from future mailers. It is as simple and transparent as that.

I want to keep every version of the newsletter different and unique and will look to your comments and suggestions to keep it improving.

If you are interested, go ahead and sign up to the email newsletter and get ready to enjoy the travel club benefits. I plan to be super kind to my newsletter subscribers, so make the most of it

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Featured as a Top India Blog

It gives me a lot of pleasure to say that my blog has been voted as one of the top blogs in the Indian blogosphere across all categories. India Travel Blog put me on their platinum list last year too, but this year, the list has shrunk and now I am one of the top 37 platinum bloggers across diverse categories. These kind of features egg me on to write more. Again and as always, thank you for all your support. You have made it happen.




I will aim to create more immersive content for all you travelers out there and hopefully the blog will see a higher ranking.

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Blog gets a new search

After a long wait, I have finally moved from Google’s default, yet functional blog search to the more powerful Google custom search. Apart from giving me the functionality to customize the search function completely, it allows you to search easily through a whole bunch of helpful features.



Below are a list of helpful features for the user and the blog owner:

User Features
1) Auto suggestions as you type in your search text
2) Accurate content search with thumbnails of each post
3) A superb images search, like Google image search that leads to the respective post
4) Ability to search by relevance or date
5) Search box always located on the top right corner of the site

Blog Owner Features
1) Ability to make money through Google Ads within search results
2) Ability to customize the look and feel of the search box, results n all to a large extent including styles, themes and all
3) Increase in traffic through search due to more visual and helpful features
4) A reporting interface that integrates very well with Google Analytics and show search related data

Auto Suggestions as you type


Web Search with thumbnails that link to each post


Image Search (similar to Google Images Search)


I hope you like this search feature and are easily able to find interesting travel information and more photographs from my blog that has close to 1000 posts.

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My blog gets a new look

I am sure most of you would have noticed this by now that my blog has got a new look.


It now sports a new header, a sticky top navigation menu (always stays on top) with easy access to information on India, a prominent search bar, my location coordinates, a crisp footer, larger post sizes with clear demarcation of colors, a set of uniform style, colors and fonts, and an interactive accordion to help my readers navigate through my collection of travel experiences and photos by country.



The idea behind this re-design was to make my blog look cleaner, make it more user-friendly, make it more interactive, load much faster, make it more seo-friendly and to make sure it followed the industry UI/UX standards to the extent possible. Basically, the idea was to create a noise-free, clutter-free reading experience for my readers, while allowing them to search other content easily.

What do you think of it? Do you like it? I would really appreciate if you could share your feedback and suggestions with me so that I can continuously aim at giving you a better experience.

There are still some small chinks that need ironing out. Hopefully, they will get sorted out in the next week.

And for this website revamp, I would like to thank my designer friend Murugan Thirumalai without whose help and insights, I would have never been able to turn this design into reality. Thank you Muru!

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