We’re off to a good start in 2024 here at the site. We’ve introduced a couple updates in the background and we’re already seeing improvement in navigation and smoother traffic here as a result. The main menu has been trimmed and streamlined to make navigation around the site easier and we’ve now added a section in everyone’s user profile where they can see all their contributing posts and recipes.
Lets dive into some of these updates because this resolves a few issues for us behind the scenes and we’re kind of excited to see it coming to the front end of the site.
One of the first things we tried to tackle here at LuvMyRecipe was the navigation. Many features had to be completed before much of the navigation could be aligned with our vision for the site. Now that some of these features are coming on board, seeing the menus pointing to them solves a couple navigation issues on our end. We’re glad to add the menus and links for a better user experience of course, but we’ve always thought “nothing worse then being at a website and being cornered”.
Having to back out of navigation or be directed to the front page to start over seemed cliché and a bit of a “give up” or copout for navigating. We’ve been trying to tackle that issue but not having all the features available to everyone and actually not having several features live on the website posed an issue. Not to mention, our LuvMyRecipe Beta Group had to have access to these features for troubleshooting.
We believe the end result is a smoother experience for the user and easily moving around the site to the most trafficked areas (My Profile, My Feed, My Recipe Box)
Profile Update
Users will now notice that they have a new tab in their profile called “My Recipes and Posts”. Users will find the recipes and posts they’ve contributed to LuvMyRecipe listed under this tab. We’re still working on the styling but the list is working and was a key critical feature we were trying to implement for the last few months. The creation of the tab and the list wasn’t such an issue coding but integrating the tab with our future and current plans proved to be a harder nut to crack. Without getting into detail, we’re glad to have found a relatively easy solution with more to come in a future update.
Users were previously able to find all their posts by simply clicking on the author link that accompanies every post and recipe here at the site (including their own). We’ve simply put this in a more user friendly location accessible from every user’s profile. We figured most users will be at their profile more than others and we wanted to give them another reason to be there. It’s our goal to make every user’s profile their own little culinary corner on the internet. Seeing a list of all the recipes you created and contributed seemed like a natural progression here.
Sharing Recipes
We realize that creating recipes here at the site has yet to be made available publicly again. As of yet, these features are available but only available to our beta group. We’ve had a few issues and we’re drawing closer to releasing the update publicly but we anticipate a few issues when going live and we’re trying to circumvent theses before it actually becomes an issue.
As a reminder here, even though the recipe contribution feature was already a previous feature, we’ve changed templates and the format for the posting of recipes. This is why we disabled the features in the first place. A key feature, “the canonical URL”, has to be incorporated into the recipe form and tagged correctly for the search engines on the template level.
We believe most of that is done but without testing, we’re asking for surprise issues or being faced with having to take the features down again, which is something we really don’t want to do. More to come on this update soon.
As always, thank you for your interest.
