Hi friends & fellow adventurers!
I am incredibly humbled to have reached 1 million lifetime views on this blog, a milestone I wouldn’t have even imagined possible a few years ago. Thank you to EVERY person who’s read, shared, or commented on my posts— it’s a wonderful feeling to know that my words are helping people secure their Australian PR or plan their dream trip overseas, and every message really fuels me to keep writing and sharing.
This exciting achievement has also prompted me to re-evaluate the future of brookearoundtown. As many of you know, this site has been a passion project of mine for the better part of a decade (woo!), and until recently, it actually COST me money (not to mention thousands of hours) to operate.
Now that I’m travelling full-time and in a position to focus more energy on this project, I’d love to take a stab at making it a viable (if small-scale) source of income— monetising the nearly 500 published posts on my site means I can invest more time, energy, and money into making this the kind of travel resource I always hoped it could be!
And with that, I’m super excited to announce that there are some BIG changes in the works, the first of which is a much-needed facelift for the blog.
All my posts should still be accessible during this period, but the home page and some of the category pages might look a little funky while I’m tackling a major theme update and a lot of backend improvements. Hopefully it won’t affect your experience on individual posts, but if you do have trouble accessing something, don’t hesitate to let me know.
Please bear with me while I work as quickly as possible to get everything functional (and, dare I say, a little fashionable!) on the site. I am not a programmer or a graphic designer, so these changes require A LOT of hours, stress, and trial & error— but I’m super excited for what’s to come!
Planned changes
- Updated theme for mobile viewing
- Improved user interface to make finding posts & discovering travel inspiration easier
- Interactive travel map to allow for visual navigation through all of my city and country guides
- Edits to ALL 489 of my published posts to improve consistency and ensure that all info is up-to-date & relevant
- NAME CHANGE: you’ll start to see a new logo on the site pretty soon and that’s because I’m making a slow transition away from ‘brookearoundtown’ to ‘brookebeyond’. I’ll share more about this change in a future update, but rest assured that ALL of the original links to posts on brookearoundtown.com will continue to work now and forever— anything that you’ve shared or saved with STILL function exactly as normal, so it’s unlikely you’ll notice the changes other than a few fancy new graphics 🙂
It’s my hope that these updates will make reading and navigating through the blog easier and more enjoyable for everyone.
Thanks so much for your support and stay tuned for big things to come!
xx bb
