FAQ

This page is more of an off-the-cuff FAQ and doesn't reflect the actual policies of Feast. This is for educational purposes only.

Feast vs Feast+

All functionality (homepage, recipe index, menu, sidebar, footer, post layouts, post templates) lives in the Feast Plugin. We want everyone on the Feast Plugin to have a fully functioning website.

Feast+ is literally only aesthetic changes - mostly colors and fonts. You can do this yourself and have it look terrible (90% of bloggers including me) or outsource it to someone who knows what you're doing.

We know this because we used to support font and color customizations in the classic themes, and 90% of sites looked like hot garbage, then we got blamed for all the issues those sites had, when it wasn't us that was responsible.

Design is an incredibly difficult skillset that takes a lifetime of dedication to get good at. That's not a knock at anyone, because nobody should believe they're intrinsically skilled at anything without TONS of practice. Aesthetics aside, there's so many technical issues when it comes to SEO, accessibility and user experience that it's a never ending black hole of problems to fix and compromises to make.

What we've tried to do with Feast+ is elevated the styling to a cohesive package by focusing everything around defining your "brand" which nobody does, and which is what Melissa is an expert at.

Will there be a white glove service available for Feast+?

Yes, see the Feast+ Full Site White Glove service.

How to get support? Everytime I go to the Feast site I get stuck in a loop and never get to a contact form

Head to Admin > Feast Plugin > Support

We removed contact forms on feastdesignco.com because:

1. they're spammed to death
2. we require the plugin/version/settings information on the admin screen to answer your questions correctly

Also 90% of people who submit a contact form for a question don't even bother to include their website. That makes answering a ticket take 400% longer than it needs to because of useless back and forth emails to just get basic information down.

Advanced jump to links- when I replaced the recipe card heading the link to my card disappeared completely from the table of contents

I'd need to see a support ticket and a live link to look into this.

Should we no-index our social links landing page?

I don't see why not, if you're not linking to it from within your actual website. If it's

We have a social links landing page coming out in (hopefully) a few weeks.

Is there a way to customize the leave a comment section?

Depends what you mean by "customize". You can stylize it with CSS, but changing the functionality requires a developer.

It's one of the more messy parts of WordPress.

If you want to follow up on this question with more specifics about what you want to do I can maybe comment on it.

Can we delete themes 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024? Do we keep the most current one?

If you go into the WordPress health check, they recommend deleting unused themes/plugins because of security risks.

I assume that the WordPress people who made this recommendation know more about security than I do, so I follow their recommendations.

With all these technical issues, listen to people if they know more than you do. If you do your research and feel confident you know more than whoever is making a recommendation, don't listen to them.

Can the search show similar results when people have typos?

This would require a massive library of typos, or calling third party services to retrieve typos and search for each typo. Neither would be particularly performant or cover the majority of cases.

SearchWP has a fuzzy search feature but almost nobody uses SearchWP because it kills website performance and bloats the database (often being larger than all of WordPress combined).

Can you explain what genesis is?

Genesis is a framework.

Frameworks are basically 1/2 of a theme. For all intents and purposes let's say they require a child theme which is the other 1/2 of a theme.

That's why you need 2 themes installed (the framework and child theme) but only the child theme active.

The theory when they became popular was that it allowed each company to specialize in it's area of expertise - design and development are two totally separate skillsets that often contradict.

So now you have 2 companies with two skillsets and little overlap that break things for each other.

The industry has moved away from frameworks as a failed experiment. It's no longer seen as responsible to offload 50% of your work to a third party that isn't 100% aligned with you. That's why no good custom theme developer is using a framework anymore.

The reason we still have Genesis is because they stopped updating it, which means they stopped breaking it, which means it's stable. The fact that it doesn't get updates is a good thing, not a bad thing. Framework updates are liabilities.

Any functionality that at one point would have been released through Genesis is now something that we do directly through Feast. It's just one hand on the wheel, which is safer for our users.

Looking at the bigger picture, frameworks and themes and plugins are just an erratic combination of functions, which makes them impossible to compare as a whole. You have to break down individual features and implementations if looking at themes and frameworks and plugins, which is nearly impossible.

The Feast Plugin is a collection of features that are optimized and geared towards food blogs.

Best way to add videos to posts

In the recipe card so that the schema gets transmitted to Google.

AdThrive and Mediavine have their own video solutions that enable monetizing and integration with WPRM so you'll want to ask the ad network you're on.

Common mistakes you see food bloggers make

The same issue that any business/entrepenour makes: focusing on non-revenue generating activities

If you own a business, the only thing you should be working on is sales.

For food blogs, you're selling ads on a content/recipe so you should be exclusively focused on getting eyeballs on your recipes. Not hosting/design/tech/etc - that should be outsourced.

Thoughts on the future of food blogging and how to future-proof our sites?

Diversify your income.

• sponsored content
• photography services in your city
• private chef services in your city
• meal plans
• start a food brand
• monetize social (eg. YouTube)
• connect with other bloggers through masterminds

Any Feast/Feast+ features we can use to engage better with our readers?

The group blocks with icons help to break up the content and make it more engaging.

In terms of having them reach out or comment or subscribe, that's something best left to third party solutions that specialize in this. Both Raptive and Mediavine are working hard on this and they're likely the best ones to follow for now.

Remember: the only thing you truly own besides your website is your email list.

Do you think AI chatbots are good to have on food blogs?

Not personally, no.

I hate chatbots and have literally never once in my life used one that was useful. Would you want to engage with a chatbot on the Feast website?

I don't see them on any large sites either.

There's also a liability concern - if someone says they have a family member allergic to nuts or something and it recommends a recipe that contains those allergens, you're responsible.

Air Canada got burned by this recently.

My recommendation is to just survey your audience - ask them if they want a chatbot.