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 like the new look as well but I can’t see the header either, it’s all white with a box in the top left corner (sign up) and boxes @ the bottom (home, about, recipes, FAQ). I use Google Chrome.
LOVE IT!
Hey CCK readers! Thanks so much for your constructive and gracious comments! We are continuing to iron out the kinks and appreciate your feedback. Be sure to use the most updated version of your browsers in order to view the site properly and try to clear your browser cache if you still cannot view it properly.
We will continue to take ALL of your feedback into account and help to make the site even more incredible!
– Katie’s designer 🙂
So far, I am not experiencing any viewing problems, but just for general knowledge if I ever do run into problems on any site, how exactly do you “clear your browser cache”? And What does this do?
Great work here!
It depends on your browser, but here’s a pretty good list for common browsers: http://kb.iu.edu/data/ahic.html
There are several reasons to clear cache, but in this case, computers tend to “remember” the way a site looks, and when changes are made, sometimes you can’t see the new changes. The cached version of the site will be removed so you can see the updates. The more important thing is actually to make sure your browsers are updated. It is hard to make sites compatible with every browser out there, but virtually (ha ha) impossible to make it compatible with both outdated and updated browsers. Good question!
i am probably one of the ones who doesn’t really like it. ;(
awesome job… perharps the background is a tad too shiny-and-white, but I reckon that white-and-simple stuff, Apple-like, is very trendy now, so I think i’d better get used to it 😛
Ps. just wondering, why no polka dots? I like them! Everybody loves them!! 😀
I love ittttttt~~ it’s absolutely beautiful! :3
I actually love it!! Even the heart =)
I love It!!!! I love change and i think it looks great!!! ♥
I LOVE it. Absolutely love it. Congratulations 🙂
Everything looks great! I love the new recipe page. Some funny, nit-picky things though. Some of the pictures don’t match up with the recipes (I think there is a picture of gumbo for a pudding should be?). Also, I don’t know if this was on purpose or not, but when viewing blog posts, I liked being able to see the date that post was published under the title. As far as I can see, the posts don’t have the dates on them anymore. Just a thought!