My Cooking Site

Hello,

The good news is that the website has a lot of interesting articles and if you are into cooking (which I’m not) you will find it useful.

You have to work in the design more, it looks like a website design from 10 year ago. In my opinion you should choose a more modern looking template. Also if I were you I would have removed the “====> *RECIPE INDEX*” text at the upper left corner of the page and simply change that to something that looks cleaner, like:

“Full recipe list”

Hope you find this useful.

Thank you for your response lagarder7. I have been going back and forth with those menus. I am at a loss for a theme that is able to do pages with posts and other stuff I want. If you could point me in the direction of what you mean be a more modern template I would really appreciate it.

THANKS

The modern looking template means bootstrap 3 themes or above, check new wordpress themes that are suitable for you.

Lagarder said exactly also you need to remove those Index words from the sidebar and top left upper too.

You should use your categories as menu tabs so that the readers can attracted easily.

Thanks, “index” is gone.

You have a lot of great content and images. It’s the organization that I think is the problem. Also, I’m not sure what you mean by a theme that is able to do “pages with posts and other stuff”. They all, pretty much, handle pages and posts in the same way because that’s WP’s job. It’s how they are displayed that changes. What is it you want them to do exactly?

I can’t tell from your site because your organization is hard to follow. For example, what is the category Food, exactly? How is it different from Recipes? Why are there so many sub-categories and tags so that in your directory, many items have very few entries? Having too many is making it difficult to find anything.

As to the look, I don’t think you need it to be so over-sized (too much scrolling). For one thing, you don’t seem to have many comments, so you might turn those off or at least make them less obtrusive by not requiring all that info to comment.

Some things are dated, yes, but I think you should start by cleaning up the organization, then see what you need to do about the design.

If you answer what you want a theme to do, I can be more helpful, I think.

Btw, why the cryptic domain name?

Sunrader, the massive amount of categories was at the suggestion of “professionals” They told me that categories were more important than tags. I didn’t think about changing that. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. There is too much overlap, but some of the tips and techniques are also about food so that is why the food category. Could probably make it a subcategory of tip and techniques. Reducing that will also make the page shorter. I have yet to figure out how to make the comment box smaller.

The cryptic Domain name is because creative was taken, when I started online. My catering business which started in ’78 is called Creative Catering by Arianne. It is my email address, license and it is short.

THANKS

Well, the whole thing is about food, so a category named that isn’t really helpful. Maybe you want something like ingredients, techniques, and recipes.

Categories should be major topics that are covered on the blog so that the posts sort into them and make it easier for people to find things. Tags are more like search terms. They are not particularly useful as organizers and the tag cloud is losing popularity, too. Think of categories as what you might have on the main menu to help people find things. Then, in addition to the categories, the menu will also have one or two things that make the site work, such as an about page. I also think it’s confusing that your landing page and your what’s cooking page seem to have similar functions but the distinction isn’t clear. You need to decide if you want to land on an about page kind of thing or the blog posts. The term “education” also doesn’t really fit here. If that’s what you are selling maybe make your menu something like this with 5 items.

What’s Cooking (blog landing home page)
Special Ingredients
Tips & Techniques
Recipes
Cook with Adrian

The first is the latest post page. The next three are categories pages, mosts of your posts will be in one of these but they don’t all have to be. The 4th is your sales page and you can include a bio there so you may not need a separate about. Your daughter’s stuff should probably just be blog posts. Everything would fit into one of these areas. Tags aren’t really necessary but they don’t really hurt anything if you like them.

Before you start reorganizing and changing stuff, consider installing the WP Clone plugin. You will be able to make a backup in case things get messed up.

Food is now gone. It was redundant. The landing page is the tip of the week page, while the what’s cooking is the latest recipe. The name of the blog is creative tips and techniques, so I wanted that to be the focus of the landing page. The special ingredient page is descriptions of less known ingredients that I use in some of the pages. There are anchor links in the recipes to that page, so it isn’t a menu item. The education category is not only classes I teach for $$, but the classes I teach as a volunteer ( the my daughter’s kitchen project, etal) . I like to blog about that in order to hopefully inspire others to volunteer. I will look at my site tomorrow with some fresh eyes. The last thing I want is for the site to be confusing. You have no idea how much I appreciate this.

Thank you also to all of you that checked out the site.

I’m not an expert by any means but I like the style and layout of the site and found it easy to navigate.

Love the use of widgets, the black background with light brown sheet turn me off personally, I’d lighten up the background
Also, featuring some articles and setting featured images (https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Post_Thumbnails) really helps with the user experience and lowers bounce rates.
Great Job!

Seca, I was at a loss for a background color, so just went with black. Personally I would like the page not to need a background. I haven’t figured that one out yet. I have the related articles on the posts but can’t figure out how to get them on the landing page. The featured images are the ban of my existence. When they are set, they replace the header with this huge image that give no indication there is anything else on the page. If I set it as a thumbnail so I have a picture with an excerpt, when you click to get the whole article, the thumbnail and first picture are next to each other and it looks really weird. I also have to edit & resave the picture as a thumbnail before I can use it in the article. Unlike when I add a picture to a post, I can not format a picture to be a featured image. VERY annoying. I will read the article you posted.

As for the background, it doesn’t have to look like that. You could just make it the same color as the main content and get rid of the borders to open it up, maybe widening the content as well. eltDOTmobi/cre8ov.jpg Better yet, update the theme to something more modern, but just changing the styling would help considerably. You can change the styling in the style.css if you have a child theme, in the theme’s custom css if it has it, or with a plugin like Simple Custom CSS that will allow you to add it.

As for the featured image issues, it sounds like your theme assumes that the featured image should also be in the post. I have one that does that (I don’t like it that way) so I’ve turned off the display in the post. For mine, I think, it’s
.page-header-image-single {display:none !important;}
Something like this would also go in the css. You should be getting thumbnails automatically if you have that set in SETTINGS/MEDIA that you could choose as featured images, but I think if you turn off the display for the image in the post, you will solve all the issues with that.

I’m not sure I understand the featured article issue. Are you using stickys?

Unfortunately even simple CSS is beyond me at this point. I can figure out some stuff, but were to actually put that code goes over my head. The featured image annoyance, has to be a glitchy thing with the theme. I have checked all the correct boxes, but still agghhh. If I set the featured image to anything less than 940px wide, it doesn’t consume the post. I have seen the term,sticky, but don’t know what that means.

Do you want to know? ??