End of Summer Cleaning, New Navigation, and Search Revamped are done. The end of summer has us doing some end of summer cleaning up on the database a bit more. We have several areas in the database we’re trying to improve and some areas we’re trying to move on from. It’s been a slow transition and it still continues. We have way too many images related to posts, recipes, and now defunct areas of the site. Many images of different sizes are sometimes needed for websites like ours because you never know what device a visitor may use at any particular time to visit the website.
Our website needs to provide the images for all the image sizes, or at the very least image sizes that are compatible on all devices. The website does that at the time of the visit. If the website doesn’t have the image size needed, it will generate the size needed. A process that takes some time. Milliseconds really; but enough of a delay to notice for the visitor who likely says “this website is slow”. There is a more efficient way of providing these images quickly and we’re moving to that kind of model.
Our regular visitors will have noticed a cleaner front page with a more narrowed focus on featured recipes and navigation. Navigation has been a focus of our efforts because we have an enormous amount of resources and not enough of a flow for navigation. This is something we have recognized for a while but it has been difficult for us to fix or amend with our database needing the work it did.
We are now starting to crawl out of that hole and as a result we’re able to make progress on other fronts. Navigation throughout the website being one of them. Stay tuned for more changes and more resources to come online as we complete more tasks in the coming weeks.
One complaint we’ve consistantly received is the way our website “search” function works. To be quite honest, we’ve always relied upon the embedded search that comes bundled with “WordPress” as a function of their software. We’ve learned that was a wrong decision. The results from that kind of a search will bring up everything from just images to certain segments of the site that are invalid to the search entirely.
We’ve always recognized we had the problem but with other areas of the website that needed help, there were always other priorities to take care of. Those other priorities have eased. We now have several community members that have become beta testers for the LuvMyRecipe website.
These people are long time visitors to LuvMyRecipe and are testing the functionality of our website in all areas. Our “search” function was the top of the list for all of them. Not one of our beta testers liked our “search for a recipe” function. The function was constantly coming up with garbage and we couldn’t agree more. Time for a change.
We decided to code the search functionality ourselves. While it may not be a final answer to the search problems we’re having, this should give better search results than the standard we’ve been using. Website search should now be available on every page as the search query field has been added to the header of the website. The “Search Page” functionality has come online and will continue to improve as our website starts to streamline.
Specific searches are coming up just fine and “related” searches are also returning favorable results. This search issue isn’t solved on our end, as we have future plans to bring regarding search. However; yielding better results for search queries combined with better navigation throughout the site will allow us to see where the improvements need to be moving forward.
More to come for sure.. We’d again like to thank our community for hanging in there with us while we work through these issues. New registrations are still temporarily disabled and the “Share a Recipe” page is still disabled as well. We expect both of these functions of the site to be returned soon.
However, if our beta testers reveal more issues, the timeline may be pushed back a little further. The good news is that we are in a beta testing phase for that part of the site. The bad news is the very definition of “testing” means you expect issues and we certainly do.
Again.. we thank everyone for their patience and patronage.
