Travel Like a Local Vermont: travel guides on a custom publishing platform
Travel Like a Local has pointed visitors to Vermont’s back roads since 2014. The rebuilt site gives its guides, towns and places a real content model, and runs the shop and partners from the same admin.
- Client
- Travel Like a Local Vermont
- Year
- 2026
- Platforms
- Web
- Our role
- Design and engineering
- Stack
- WordPress, PHP, custom theme and plugins
- Status
- Pre-launch, travelikealocalvt.com
The problem
A travel publication runs on more than articles: there is a shop, partner advertising, Instagram and a newsletter.
A stock theme treats every guide as a plain post, with nothing a search engine can read as a restaurant, a brewery or a place to stay.
What we built
A custom publishing theme with destination pages for each town, seasonal sections, and a Places directory where every listing carries its address, hours, price and a local tip.
Thirteen plugins put the rest of the publication in the same admin, including the shop, the partner media kit, Instagram planning, email and SEO.
How it is built
WordPress with a custom block theme and custom plugins, built so the same platform can serve another destination.
- Theme
- A custom theme with theme.json, block patterns and blocks for maps, route maps, collections, visit cards and newsletter sign-up
- Content model
- Town pages, a Season taxonomy, and Places marked up as Restaurant, Brewery, TouristAttraction or BedAndBreakfast
- Guides
- FAQ markup and an automatic In this guide table of contents
- Plugins
- Shop, partners, Instagram, email, editorial, SEO and AI visibility
Results
Pre-launch.
- Design and engineering
- 802.software
- Project lead
- Baris Taskiran
- Verified
- Against the running code on
Related service: Web applications and SaaS