This is an updated set of recommendations as of late 2019, for recent versions of the theme (4.2.0+): These are our recommendations and if you have no idea what you're doing, you should follow them. See: why am I making this change? If you're a professional web designer and are happy spending hundreds of hours...
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.
How to use Categories
Note: this is a work in progress Categories allow you to organize your recipes in a way that's good for your site visitors, as well as search engines. This is an opinionated post, based on what we see happen to the majority of inexperienced food bloggers. Your most important pages are your posts, and every...
Types of Customizations
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...
Feast Plugin: Add Yoast Breadcrumbs
This is a feature of the Feast Plugin 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...
Feast Plugin: Sticky Mobile Menu
This is a feature of the Feast Plugin This featured is outdated, and has been replaced by the Modern Mobile Menu.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...
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...
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....
Feast Plugin: Disable Google Fonts
Implements the Disable Google Fonts tutorial without editing code. This will fall-back to the default font in the theme. Recommendation: unless you have a compelling reason for doing this, outside of what you've read from us, don't use this. This also removes the theme's Google Fonts section from the customizer. Why disable custom fonts The...
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
Note: this is still a work in progress and has not been finalized. It was recently brought to our attention (2019/07/14) that Google's requirements for featured images have changed on articles and recipe posts. A minimum 300,000 pixels square image translates to a 548x548 image. We'll be looking into adjusting our featured image recommendations (which...
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,...
