The Wheeling Gourmet

  • Hello!

    I would like to ask for reviews, feedback and comments on my very first WordPress theme. I did my first ever install of WP 4 days ago (boy that was easy!), and created this site:

    https://cook.becanz.net

    It is a website, not a blog.

    The purpose of the site is clearly explained on the site itself, but in a nutshell, it’s “tips and tricks to cooking with a disability” (though there’s going to be loads of content about cooking in general, with or without a disability).

    The theme is not based on any other theme, it was made “from scratch”.

    Note that I still have to build the content up, I have a lot of content in reserve, I just have to upload it to the site itself. I also need to expand the Navigation a little bit as my content expands, obviously.

    There are obviously things to refine still, but as is, I’m pretty happy with it. It works exactly as designed in Firefox. It works mostly well in Explorer, however there is a troublesome font-size issue in IE that I haven’t chased down yet.

    Still to be included are meta keywords/description (looking for a good plugin that works on 2.0.x, suggestions?). Also hunting for a good breadcrumb plugin (found two, neither did exactly what I wanted).

    I obviously would like to hear “oh wow, nice site”, but I’m particularly interested to know *why* you like it. Or why you don’t, if you don’t ?? Any suggestion for improvement would also be greatly appreciated. Finally, I hope you won’t run into problems, but if you do, please outline them for me. Keep in mind that while I’m fairly comfortable with CSS/HTML, I *am* very new (less than a week) to WordPress, so if it’s a possible WP issue, please explain solutions.

    Thanks

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 16 total)

  • its a cool look, keep it up

    Regarding Meta – https://guff.szub.net/2005/09/01/head-meta-description/

    Nice site, looks clean and approachable.

    Thread Starter vavroom

    (@vavroom)

    Thanks ??

    Surely there’s more to say about it than “looks good” ?? Or maybe not ??

    Re meta, thanks HandySolo, I’d looked at that one, and discarded it because it only did descriptions, and didn’t give me enough control. I’ve opted for XFish, which seems to do the trick. Only downfall to it is that it piles all desc/keywords for all posts on a category page. Solution to that was to design the site so that tag didn’t show on home, category or archives. I think that’s done ?? Of course, I have to still manually enter all the desc/keywords ??

    To me, your site looks clean and simple with very good contrast. That’s good for me because I am almost totally blind, and must very close to the screen to see anything.

    Thread Starter vavroom

    (@vavroom)

    Thanks Dread. Have you tried the High Contrast option? This should give you a white-on-black approach. You can also obviously use your browser’s built-in function to increase font size.

    The site really looks good and seemingly you already corrected the font size in the footer – now I can read it ??
    [yesterday I couldn’t]
    However, the comment links on this page: https://cook.becanz.net/category/cooking-tips/ are still very tiny, hardly readable…

    Thread Starter vavroom

    (@vavroom)

    moshu, I’ve set the font size of the comment smaller on purpose, though from what you say it seems it’s too small. I don’t want the “Comments (0)” to have the same visual weight as the rest of the text. Looking at it in IE, it seems a reasonable size compared to the rest, and in Firefox it might be a little too small, though it doesn’t appear so for me. Strange.

    What browser are you using? Screen size? Resolution? Help me troubleshoot it ??

    FF 1.0.7; 17″; 1024×768; normal/medium fontsize

    Thread Starter vavroom

    (@vavroom)

    Hmm, funny, same here. Right, well, I’ll put “increase comment font size” on my to do list for the next upload of changes to the live server. Thanks

    Thread Starter vavroom

    (@vavroom)

    Bit of a bump on this thread! I’ve made several changes to the site (including content). I’ll be developing more content, obviously, but I’m coming near finished in terms of site design/features.

    I added a couple plugins to get a glossary going, and each time a term in the glossary appears on the site, it links back to the glossary (thanks for the tip Shanta!).

    I’ve used a few conditional declarations along with stickymenu plugin to deliver navigation to sub categories for some categories.

    I’ve customised wp-login and wp-register to make them look more like the rest of the site.

    So, what do y’all think?

    nice nic ??

    Now the glossary thing .. you can have like wiki links within posts? items that you can link back to a glossary item in the event you think they might not know the term? sweet idea! ( pardon the pun ?? )

    Thread Starter vavroom

    (@vavroom)

    Thanks Cherie ??

    Yeah, the glossary thing is kinda neat. I wish I could claim it as my own, but it’s not ?? Shanta describes the technique here: https://shantarohse.com/wordpress/create-a-glossary-for-your-wordpress-site

    In short, it uses two plugins: WP-SNAP ( https://www.nateomedia.com/wares/downloads/wordpress/wp-snap ) which handles the Glossary itself, and Ubernyms ( https://www.huddledmasses.org/jaykul/ubernyms-20/ ) which handles the auto-linking. It took a bit of fiddling with it to see how it works best, but if you look at: https://cook.becanz.net/recipes/free-recipe/beef-kumara-mash/ you’ll see that the following terms are automatically linked back to the glossary: “mise en place”, “deglaze”, “reduce” and “medallion”.

    Kinda neat, yeah ??

    Nice site! One thing I noticed that’s a bit distracting, especially in Glossary mode.

    When the content in the main frame is not very long, the footer jumps up past the bottom of the sidebar. While I realize that this is somewhat of a pain to fix, it seems distracting.

    Other than that, I really like the site. Clean and easy to use.

    Thread Starter vavroom

    (@vavroom)

    thanks mjwood. I actually liked the footer to appear at the bottom of the main content area, but you’re saying it’s distracting? how so? I’m willing to listen to reasons to change it, just need to understand “the user’s frame of mind” ??

    Cheers

    I guess I find it distracting that by clicking different letters in the glossary area, the footer jumps around. Perhaps I’m old fashioned or something, but a footer should be unobstrusive — ie. not move around too much. Just my $0.02.

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 16 total)
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