Historical Travel Destinations is a hobby-project meant to combine different disciplines. On the one hand, it gives me an opportunity to develop my web development skills, while doing so on a project I'm passionate about as it's my own from start to finish. On the other hand, it gives me an opportunity to make use of the knowledge I have accumulated during five years of university studies, culminating in a master's degree in Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies.
The intention with the site is to give "the ordinary person" an opportunity to visit historical sites when on vacation, while not having to travel far or know anything about them before-hand. It's based on the suspicion that people on average don't visit historical places outside of the world reknown ones simply because they don't know about them. If everything you needed to do to find historical locations near to whereever you're planning to stay on your vacation was to visit a website and make a simple search for the place, perhaps it would be more interesting to go see the place.
It is also with a firm belief I have set up the site. That belief is that people want to know things about the place they are visiting; after all, a ruin with no context is a heap of stones, with the context it could be Troy - which to be fair is almost a heap of stones even with the context! I want to provide a resource that shows the visitor historical places near them and also gives a short context to them. While pretty much every place have lots of academical works written about them, as well as tons of archaeological material, my studies have led me to the conclusion that most people simply aren't interested in that. It takes too long to read it, it requires too much pre-acquired knowledge and quite frankly, most of it is incredibly dull to read.
Another issue with a lot of historical sites, especially if they aren't that famous, is that audio guides may be rare or non-existant. Therefore, Historical Travel Destination is utilizing an accessibility software for visually impaired - or blind - people, with the assumption that having a robot-like voice read you the content about the site you're visiting is still miles better than reading it yourself, for most people anyway. It's like a budget version of an audio guide, with the added benefit of accessibility settings which are made for those who may already be stuggling with the technology and to a regular person will simply be even more easy to use.