The single biggest question we get when someone is looking to update their theme is “what about my customizations”. The problem is that we have no idea what customizations you’re talking about – how they were done, when they were done, why they were done. Our recommendation is always let go of your previous setup and install…
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.
Feast Plugin: Add Yoast Breadcrumbs
Yoast has a feature which enables adding breadcrumb schema to your website, creating a more complete schema graph, which search engines love. For the full writeup, see: Yoast SEO Breadcrumbs However, due to different setups with different themes, Yoast is unable to automatically insert its own breadcrumbs into a theme, so it relies on the…
Feast Plugin: Sticky Mobile Menu
Keep your mobile menu pinned to the top of the page as the visitor scrolls down. This makes it easier for your visitors to navigate your site (and jump to the search) while scrolling through your posts. Note: Does not currently work for Seasoned Pro and Cravings Pro, which use a different header setup.
Feast Plugin: Mobile Browser Color
Set the browser color in Chrome to your brand’s color! Currently only supported on Android devices. We’ll update this feature for additional browser and devices as support is enabled for it.
Feast Plugin: Previous + Next on Posts
When your readers reach the end of a post, they face the choice of either leaving or looking for more content. This has a direct impact on your income as a food blogger: if you can keep them around and generate another pageview, you’ll earn more ad revenue. With the click of button, you can…
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…
Protected: Feast Plugin: Advanced Jump To Links
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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…
