What do you think of the new website?
(If you’re reading this post through email, click here to see the new site.)
Going into the process, I knew I wanted something bright and cheery – but also whimsical yet modern, and youthful yet grown-up. (Contradictions galore.) It’s taken many months of hard work to get here, and I am so excited with how the design finally turned out! Perhaps one of my favorite parts of the new design is how organized it is:
For example, the new recipe page is incredible!
A picture of every recipe! Plus there’s a fancy slideshow on the homepage, and the sidebars are much less jumbled now. If you think I managed these feats by myself… you are giving me way too much credit. Allow me to introduce…
Julie Farber from Deluxe Designs.
Julie is amazing; I wish I knew half of what she knows about web design. Julie can design your entire site for you if you don’t want to worry about a thing. In my case, however, I preferred to be very involved, and she was ok with that, too! I drew up elaborate screen shots in Photoshop of exactly what I wanted—right down to the color scheme and layout—and Julie took it all from screen shot to real-time website without crashing anything, which I would certainly have done if I’d attempted it without help. She was patient and non-judgmental, while still offering sage web designer advice. (You can thank her for the fact that there are no giant polka dots on the top of the page: one of my not-so-bright ideas she talked me out of!)
And those beautifully-organized new photo pages I mentioned earlier? All Julie’s work. I can’t tell you how many things I asked for, while being almost positive she’d come back and tell me such things weren’t possible. Yet every time, she instead responded—quite quickly—she’d made the changes. In short, if you need design work for your food blog (or photography blog, company website, etc.), Julie is your girl! EDIT: Julie will give a 15%-off discount to anyone who mentions CCK in his/her inquiry.
Still to come:
1. The heart logo: The header that you see now is an interim thing, so don’t worry if you’re not big on the heart; it’s not staying! I am not big on it either. I’m a perfectionist and haven’t been able to come up with the perfect logo yet, so I quickly designed this shutterstock-esque heart logo to stand in. The rest of the new design was ready, and I just didn’t want to wait any longer!
2. We’ll probably be making more minor adjustments in the next few days, so give the site a little time to adjust. And Julie is working on perfecting the mobile version of the website as well.
I love the new look! It’s a huge improvement. 🙂
I love the new site! It is so beautiful!:) So clean and fun and yet grown-up! Great job both of you! You both have such great ideas:)
When I pull it up on the smart phone, I have to do a dramatic zoom out to see the full page. I *heart* how all the recipes have pictures:D! Oh but some pictures don’t really match? For example “Spring Green-Saag” recipe has a picture of ice cream? Hehe! It’s funny though:D I was a little bummed when I couldn’t scroll to look at all the recipes under one category and had to click for “Next Page”:/ Also I couldn’t find some things like the “Special Diet” page for the people with allergies and stuff.
But over all well done! It is marvelous:D <3 I love it!:)
Diedre,
We added the dietary needs link back to the recipe page for those who prefer this search and I have made it so that you can view up to 45 recipes on each category page (upped from 36), so this should help you 🙂
Yay! Cool!:D You’re awesome!;D
It looks amazing! I love the way your name is drenched in chocolate on the header:)
I will admit that i kind of miss all the pictures of chocolate on the header, but it looks so professional and awesome now that it doesn’t really matter!!! Amazing job!
This one is a winner 🙂
oh geez, haha, changing all those recipes to be printer friendly sounds like it will take a while! I love the new look though – very modern, clean and fun!
It looks good! Maybe I’m missing them, but I would like it if the posts were dated so we can see when you posted. I agree with other comments, the comment button is hard to find.
We hear you! 🙂 We’ve taken your comments into consideration and added the comment button at the bottom of posts on the homepage!
I love the new look of the website! Very cheerful as you said….I haven’t checked out the Recipe page yet – looking forward to that:)
It’s so great! Nice work!!
Hi Katie,
Thanks for sharing your new design. A couple comments I have though are in regards to searching.
1) Is it possible to move the search box higher up in the sidebar, or even to put it in the top menu bar along with the Recipes, FAQs, etc?
2) Have you considered using Recipage, or something similar? I often search by ingredient and have a lot of trouble doing so on your website.
Awesome new site, I would recommend making the comment area at the top rather than bottom of page…its hard to find this way…peace!