In an afternoon. Ten stops, around ninety seconds of narration each, reached by scanning a QR code so nobody has to download anything.
The technology stopped being the hard part some time ago. What still takes judgement is choosing the right ten stops, writing narration people will actually listen to, and walking the whole thing yourself before you let a visitor near it. The ten steps below are the ones that matter, in the order we do them.
This works whether you build it with us or not, so we have put our own way of doing it near the end rather than the beginning.
Decide what the trail is for
Before a single stop, settle what job it is doing. Keeping visitors on site for another hour is a different trail from bringing new people through the gate, which is different again from giving families something to do when it rains.
Then pick one theme and hold it. A history walk, a wildlife trail, a ghost walk, a kids' hunt, a beer trail. Any place, any story, but one story at a time. Trails that try to be everything end up being nothing in particular.
Choose the route and the stops
Eight to twelve stops is the sweet spot. That lands at roughly sixty to ninety minutes of walking and listening, which is long enough to feel like a proper outing and short enough that people finish it.
Order them the way a person would actually walk rather than the way the history runs. Check the route works in the rain and with a pushchair, and avoid any stop where somebody has to stand in a doorway or a road to listen. Finish somewhere useful: the tea room, the shop, the car park.
Write the narration
Around ninety seconds a stop, which is roughly 200 to 240 words. One idea per stop. Written to be spoken, so short sentences and nothing that needs reading twice.
The test that matters is this. Read it aloud standing where the visitor will be standing. If it does not point at something they can see in front of them, it belongs in a book instead. The best stops reveal the thing that was there all along and nobody noticed.
Check your facts
Dates, names and attributions all deserve a second source. Your local history society or records office will usually help, and in our experience they are pleased to be asked.
Be fussy here. A trail is a public statement about your place, and one confidently wrong date is the thing a local will remember and mention.
Sort photographs and access
Use images you own or have clear permission for. Archive photographs are wonderful and usually have rights attached, so ask rather than assume.
Check access at the same time. If a stop sits on private land, or behind a gate that shuts at four, you need to know that now and not after the posters are printed.
Turn the script into audio
Record it yourself in a quiet room with a decent microphone, or use generated narration. Both can work well.
Whichever you choose, listen back through a phone speaker while standing outside. That is the real listening environment, complete with traffic and wind, and it is unforgiving of anything mumbled or over-produced.
Walk the whole thing before you publish
This is the step people skip and the one that saves you. Walk it end to end on an ordinary phone at ordinary walking pace.
You will find that two stops sit too close together, that one direction is ambiguous, and that something you wrote makes no sense when you are actually standing there. Every trail has these, ours included. Much better that you find them than a visitor does.
Put the QR code where people already are
At the natural starting point, at eye level, with one line telling people what happens if they scan it. "Scan for a free 60 minute audio trail" works. A bare code does not.
Then put it on everything you already print: the leaflet, the ticket, the window, the noticeboard. A trail nobody knows about is just a document.
Tell people it exists
Front of house mentioning it as visitors arrive is worth more than everything else on this list put together. After that, your own website, local Facebook groups, the tourist information point, and the businesses on the route, who have every reason to help you.
Keep it current
Walk it again each season. Places close, routes change, and a trail that sends somebody to a building that is no longer there costs you more goodwill than the trail earned.
Why no app
Asking a visitor to download an app before they can start loses most of them at the gate. They are standing outside, possibly on patchy signal, and they did not come here to install something and then delete it on the train home.
A trail that opens in the phone's own browser removes all of that. No app, no download, just scan and go. It is the single biggest difference between a trail people use and a trail that sits there with good intentions.
Be honest about the limits while you are at it. A browser trail needs a signal, so tell people to start it at the gate if part of your site is a dead spot. An hour of audio flattens a phone that was already low. Most people will not have headphones, so write for a phone speaker held in a hand. And some of your visitors will not have a phone at all, which is a good reason to keep a printed version at the desk.
How we would do it
StorieD takes steps two, three and six off your plate. You name your place and pick a theme, and it surfaces the local points of interest, drafts the narration, finds photographs and writes three visitor facts for each stop. You review every word, reorder the route and swap anything that is not right.
Steps one, four, seven, eight and nine stay with you, and they should. Nobody else can decide what your trail is for, or walk it with your visitors' eyes.
Free to build, pay to publish. Build the whole trail and walk it on your own phone before you spend anything. Publishing starts at £59 a month for ten stops, fully narrated, with your first month free. No hardware, no app for visitors, no contract, and you can have it live by the weekend.
One thing to know now rather than later: StorieD is English only at the moment. Other languages are on our list, and if that is what is stopping you, tell us, because that is how we decide what to build next.
Two things people usually want next. If you are still comparing suppliers, we have put every published price side by side in how much an audio guide costs a small attraction. If you want the trail to cover its own subscription, local sponsorship is how most operators do it. And if you run a visitor attraction, here is how StorieD works for attractions.
Walk one before you build one
The quickest way to work out what you want yours to feel like is to walk somebody else's. Our Hereford trail is live and free and takes ten seconds to start, and Hammersmith shows the same format in a city.
Walk the Hereford trail. Mark and I wrote, recorded and built both of them ourselves, which is where every mistake described on this page comes from.
Questions we get asked
How long does it take?
An afternoon on a self-serve platform if you know your stops, plus an hour to walk it. Months for a studio-produced guide. Years for a commissioned build.
Do I need to write it myself?
Not with a platform that drafts it for you, though you should read every word before it goes live. Nobody knows your place the way you do.
What if I am not a historian?
Most trails are not written by historians. Check your facts with a local source and you will be on firmer ground than a good number of published guidebooks.
Can I change it after it is live?
On a self-serve platform, yes, in minutes and at no extra cost. That is the main practical advantage over anything recorded in a studio.
If you are working out whether a trail suits your site, email us at team@thesetupcrew.co.uk and we will tell you straight. Most places have more worth walking than they realise.
About the author. Louise Stevenson runs marketing at StorieD, which she built with Mark Stevenson. They wrote, recorded and published the Hereford and Hammersmith trails themselves.