Food Blog Design and Appearance

What are the latest design trends in food blogging? How do you get your photography and navigation set up for success, like the top food bloggers? Check out these posts for tips and tricks to keep you looking fresh and modern.

Create your logo

People get hung up on creating an eye-catching logo, when it’s really not important. When you’re first starting a food blog, the most important thing is to get those first 20 recipes up and posted. With any theme from Feast Design Co., you’re ready to hit the ground running as soon as you’ve finished the…

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Contact Forms

Feast does not offer support for contact forms. Our themes are designed to affect styling, not functionality, and this is outside the scope of our expertise. The three most popular contact forms that we know of are: Gravity Forms Contact Form 7 wpforms We use Gravity Forms on FeastDesignCo.com, which does not have a free version….

Why we removed the banner-top on mobile

Modern versions of the themes have the “Before Header: Newsletter” widget area set to display:none; on mobile. This is an update to bring the themes in-line with search engine requirements to provide a better user experience, by displaying as much content above the fold as possible. This comes down simply to user-experience, which is a huge…

Future of Food Blogging

Food blogging has come a long way in the past few years, and I’m sad to say that our themes had fallen behind the times. These will be the changes moving forward: Mobile is King Most customer sites we’ve dealt with over the past few months have one thing in common: mobile traffic. Food blogs…

Rethinking the Featured Image

It was recently brought to our attention (2019/07/14) that Google’s requirements for featured images have changed on articles and recipe posts. We’ll be looking into adjusting our featured image recommendations (which control the thumbnails generated on the homepage + category page) to by compliant with search engine requirements. Specifically: Only a marked-up image that directly…

Font Styling

The customizer can only ever have a limited set of the possible CSS options. If looking to customize your theme beyond what’s built into the customizer, you’ll have to learn to use inspect element and learn some basic HTML and CSS. IMPORTANT: Do not ever edit your style.css or functions.php file. All changes should go…

Rethinking the Header

Update 2019/05/14: we’ll be taking this another step further in 2019 with rethinking the nav menu. A very common question we get from customers is how to edit the header image, what’s the best practices for sizing, and why is it so complicated. The truth is, it shouldn’t be. This isn’t a bashing of how…

Food Blog Sitelinks

Probably one of the least capitalized-on opportunities for food bloggers is sitelinks. What are sitelinks? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en The Feast Plugin Sitelinks inserts navigation code into your page’s content, adding links to your headings, and turning your headings into hyperlink anchors. This gives you the possibility of generating MULTIPLE hyperlinks in search results, with different anchor text,…

Theme Update Philosophy

We’ve had some questions about why certain features are implemented, or modified, or dropped when it comes to theme updates. There are a number of factors that go into the decisions, but the most important one is: If a new blogger were to install this theme today, what would be the best configuration to get…

Food Blogging Trends

Visitor Participation What do all the top recipes in the search engines have in common? High visitor engagement. This isn’t a coincidence – factors such as time on page, and pages-per-session are counted towards a blog’s quality score, influencing it’s position in search engines. Make 2019 your best year yet by boosting engagement on your…

Here’s a Holiday Gift Idea: Why Not Publish a Food Blog Cookbook?

Have you made your Christmas shopping list yet? Let me guess. Golf balls for Dad? A new pair of kicks for hubby? Maybe a Sephora gift card for your best friend? Yeah. Okay. Maybe that’s our garden-variety list. But, I think we can all agree that it’s easy to run out of creative gift ideas….

Recipe Page Guidelines for Food Bloggers

Wouldn’t it be nice if you knew exactly how your food blog was evaluated for quality, and what you might be doing wrong (or right)? Well, you actually can know. [Update 2019/03/31: you can find a deep dive into this with the SEMRush webinar with Casey Markee at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChBRsRpT1kc] The online world is constantly changing,…

Why we don’t support pop ups (interstitials)

Pop ups are claimed to increase conversion rates of newsletter signups, and actually, they do. But people hate them. You may increase your newsletter signups from 0.1% to 1%, but you’re going to REALLY anger 99% of the people visiting your site. This is a poor tradeoff in usability. Search engines are acutely aware of…

Why we don’t support pagebuilders

We do not recommend that bloggers use pagebuilders to create pages on their website, and we don’t offer support for it. Below is an opinionated take on pagebuilders, and why we don’t support it. As always, bloggers are free to customize their theme in any way they see fit, if they’re willing to take on…

Why we don’t support taglines

Taglines are not included in our themes by design. Taglines are a “default” feature of the WordPress platform, originally built over a decade ago, when designs and visitor behavior was different. New bloggers confuse the presence of this area with something “mandatory” that “must be used”. This is not correct. The only reason taglines are still…

Gutenberg Blocks for Food Bloggers

What’s a “recipe”? There’s confusion sometimes about what a “recipe” is on your blog. A recipe is a wordpress post in it’s entirety, which includes not only personal information about you and why your readers will benefit from your particular version of a recipe, but also the recipe data itself. The line can be blurry sometimes, but it’s…

Why You Should Always Buy Your Themes From The Source

If you’re shopping around for a WordPress theme, it’s easy enough to find many of the popular ones available for free – but there’s a dark side to these “free” themes. It’s technically legal for third parties who didn’t create a theme to sell it themselves, if it’s done within the terms of the GPL license,…

Comments

Note: this post is in progress. The comments are getting a refresh in the Feast Plugin. Why Comments can help bloggers rank for keywords not found in their actual content. Comments contribute to main content. Visitors reading your article will naturally have questions about things that aren’t covered in your post – these questions and…

Launching or Re-launching A Website? Get In On This!

Whether you are a designer, developer, business owner or have any involvement with running a website, this guide provides a fresh perspective on wringing the last drop of ROI from your website.

6 Food and Lifestyle Blog Trends to Take Your Site to the Next Level in 2018

With so many blogs available in the digital world, it can be tough to be heard through the noise. With these easy design tips, though, your blog will be the hottest on the web in no time!

Occam’s Razor: Simple Design Is Better Design

Have you ever pioneered a quicker way to get somewhere than by following Siri’s directions? Discovered an ingenious way to shorten the time it takes you to get ready for work, or the kids out the door, in the morning? What about creating a clever system for accomplishing your work tasks in a simpler, more…