Custom fonts are a disaster in 2021, with issues relating to: CLS (inconsistent ligature sizes, letter spacing, questionable font-display recommendations)Font weights (bold, italic, etc)Pagespeed ...
Blog
Themes vs. Feast Plugin
The themes were designed primarily for aesthetics. While we built in what best practices we could for SEO, the setup was based on assumptions that have been proven wrong, see the themes are dead post ...
Portfolio
Building a recipe photographer portfolio can be done easily and quickly with the Feast Plugin. We'll be building a showcase site, which isn't specifically designed for SEO or accessibility or ...
Subscribe button
The Modern Menu integrates a "Subscribe" button that provides a call-to-action for readers to sign up for your newsletter the entire time they're on your site. This allows you to: increase ...
Full width page
Genesis / Theme layout The version implemented in the themes is a an actual Wordpress "template" in the theme files. Setting a page to "full width" layout in Genesis (as with the Full Width Modern ...
Why you shouldn't make customizations
We frequently get asked about how to make certain customizations, and we recommend against it. Price We don't build customization support into our themes: ...
Migration
When migrating to our theme + plugin setup, we often get asked about how it's done in a single large project. There's often multiple separate projects that actually need to be done, and unless hiring ...
Plugin Audit
With growing concerns over SEO, pagespeed and accessibility, we thought it was necessary to put together a list of plugins we typically see problems with, and do or don't ...
I'm setting up a new site
Congratulations on deciding to launch a "food blog". We'd encourage you to think of yourself more as a publisher in the food industry. What you're building is almost exactly like a magazine: content ...
Blocking Time
Blocking time boils down to the amount of time the users browser spends executing javascript, which is why we recommend avoiding javascript as much as possible. Our current setup uses the Modern ...
728px
Updating the content width to 728px allows for "leaderboard" ads to be displayed, potentially generating more revenue for publishers running ads. In the past, this would have to be implemented via ...
CLS
With the "Core Web Vitals" becoming a larger factor in Google's ranking algorithm in May 2021, we're seeing more questions around this topic. I'd recommend watching the Core Web Vitals for Publishers ...
Lazyloading comments
We do not recommend or support lazyloading comments. Google has said that it will not index anything hidden behind a click/interaction on page, so if you have to "click to load more comments", ...
Pagespeed
There's been a lot of discussion around pagespeed recently and updating themes and theme frameworks, and if you're running our theme + the Feast Plugin: Your theme is not the problem. It's all ...
Branding
Our themes and plugin provide base styling to make your content stand out, but feedback we've had was that people struggled to make it their own. And even after customizing, people were left with ...
Custom list styling
Version 5.0.0 of the Feast Plugin introduced the ability to add custom bullet styling to your lists. We recommend using this in a section to draw special attention or add some branding ...
Disabled emoji rewrites
Certain Wordpress hosting/installation setups have filters enabled that rewrites emoji characters to externally hosted images. This is a poor setup because: it causes an external DNS lookup, ...
oembed
oembeds are a way for Wordpress to integrate content from external websites into your website. By pasting a link to certain networks, the Wordpress editor will attempt to automatically fetch that ...
Icons
Here are some sites for finding icons: ...
Modern Themes
This is currently in development and should be ignored. Stay subscribed to the newsletter to be notified when it's live. Background The themes were designed during a time when styling was the ...
Ingredients & screen readers
Do hyphens change how numbers are read? 2.5 tablespoons salt2 1/2 tablespoons salt2-1/2 tablespoons salt2 ½ tablespoons salt2-½ tablespoons salt Testing spoon acronyms Do fractions change how ...
Convert text to fractions
The Convert text to fractions setting fixes a significant accessibility issue with recipe sites, by replacing text such as 1/4 with a proper fraction, like ¼. Accessibility This is because ...
Branding and consistency on the category pages
The category pages are still something we get support tickets for, with people unsure of how to change the default image size displayed there, despite being covered in the theme setup ...
WordPress 5.5
DO NOT UPDATE TO WORDPRESS 5.5. Wordpress 5.5 contains a number of features. We'll cover off first impressions below. The quick summary is: Update to Genesis 3.3.3Do not update to Wordpress ...