Explore Java: a travel site built to be found

Before anyone books a week on Java, they want to see the volcanoes and the temples, read about them, and know that real people are behind the trips.

So the site had three jobs. Show the places at their best. Be found by people searching for them. And let a visitor ask about a journey in a minute, from any phone.

Each destination, journey and story has its own search title and description, which the team can tune in the editor. Left empty, they fall back to the page's own name and summary, so no page goes out without one.

Structured data declares the travel agency once and points the rest of the site at it. The sitemap lists every page with the date it last changed, and its photographs too, so the pictures can turn up in image search.

When the team publishes, the site tells search engines that support IndexNow straight away instead of waiting for the next crawl. Everything a crawler needs is in the HTML before any script runs.

Photos and short videos go into one media library. From there the team adds them to destinations, journeys and stories, and picks which ones play in the home page slideshow, and in what order.

Visitors filter the gallery by pictures or video and by place. A video slide downloads nothing until its turn comes, so a phone that only reads the headline never pays for it.

Stories are where Explore Java sounds like itself: the miners of Ijen, a week of batik in Kotagede, what nobody tells you about the Bromo sunrise.

The editor takes photos by button, drag and drop or paste, along with links and YouTube videos. A draft can be previewed exactly as it will look, and publishing rebuilds the public page within seconds.