Base work for Travertine Stairs?

[toffeeapple]

Hi all,

I am putting stairs in instead of the stepping stones for our front yard and hoping to extend it to the door which means to change the current tiles to the same Travertine.

Would someone be able to assist in guiding me on the base work prior to and if it's best to lay timber sleepers as a base instead of concrete?

This is the inspiration 

   

[Dave-1]

Good Evening @toffeeapple 

Going through the steps that have been mentioned I would head towards @JacobZ and @MitchellMc's suggestions.

My main reason for shying away from bessa block bases is because my old steps/retaining wall was made of Bessa blocks sitting on compacted soil. They had developed cracks in the mortar and even tho functional I fear that having tiles on top will lead to the tiles cracking unless you have a concrete foundation as @JacobZ, @MitchellMc  and @Nailbag have mentioned.

When I was trying to work out step heights and depths for a set of steps I actually carried a tape meausure around with me and "meausured" a whole bunch of steps. You havnt mentioned the distance and drop of your steps so its a but hard to figure how many you need. You could have a longer top path to accomodate the steps (compared to a deeper depth of each step) that can be a pain to use.

Dave