A New Look for NovelEats.com

I am so excited to finally share with you the new and improved look for NovelEats.com. This redesign has been a process that has been nearly a year in the making. It started out as a project that I thought would take only days or weeks, but as I soon discovered, things don’t always work that way.

Luckily for me, I married a technically savvy and resourceful guru who was finally able to figure out a few days ago how to get the content (blog posts and comments) over from my old blog platform, Drupal, to my current blog platform, WordPress. The design had essentially already been done for a few months, so the last few days have been spent tweaking a few things here and there. There will likely be more tweaks in the near future as I discover things that need to be fixed or updated, but overall this is it!

So, what’s different around here?

For starters, you now have several different ways to find content. There’s the search bar, of course, and all content has now been recategorized to make it easier to find multiple posts in categories like Dessert or Soup. I have also made it so you can now browse by ingredients in case you are interested in all things vegan butter or fresh garlic.

You’ll also notice at the bottom of each post an icon that says ShareThis. If you click on it you will see a variety of options so you can quickly share a post with your friends through sites like Facebook or Twitter. There is also a “Related posts” feature, so that you can easily be directed to other posts that you may find interesting.

I’ve also implemented Gravatars in the comments section of each post, so if you have a Gravatar associated with your email address, your own personal avatar will appear whenever you make a comment.

Finally, the other major addition is the Shop link listed at the top of each page. I have created an Amazon.com store – no, these aren’t my products, but if you go through my store when you shop on Amazon.com a small percentage of your purchase will come to NovelEats.com. Please don’t feel pressured to buy through my store, but this blog is maintained in my spare time and I do appreciate what support you can show.

More exciting things on the way

One great thing about giving your blog or website a redesign is that you can approach how you do things a little differently. My blog started out very humbly almost two years ago, and has now grown to the point that I’d like to provide you all with more blog posts on a more regular basis. The way my blog has been structured up until now is that I create posts that are centered almost exclusively around recipes. It would be great to write other types of  blog posts in addition to recipes, which means you would probably see more like two or three posts a week here.

Before I do that I really would like your input, because, besides this being an awesome creative outlet and yummy recipe resource for me, this blog exists because of you, my readers. I’ve created a quick poll that I’d like for you to take, and please share any ideas for posts in the comments below (or you can contact me privately). The poll is in the first column to the right of this post. –>

Last and not least, I am doing a giveaway in honor of the redesign. To learn more about this giveaway as well to enter, please go to this post.

Thank you to everyone for being such terrific readers for the last couple of years and I look forward to sharing more with you in the coming weeks, months and years of NovelEats.com.