Friends – I am THRILLED to share with you that my blog redesign is officially live!
This redesign has been over a year in the making and I’m so happy that it has finally come to life. I hope it will make visiting my blog a more pleasant experience for you because useful previous posts and recipes will be much better organized and easier to find!
As you’re reading this blog post, open up a new tab with my homepage so you can follow along on a mini-tour. 🙂 And if you are reading this on your phone, I hope you’ll stop by on desktop to see the new design in its full glory!
On my homepage, you’ll find one featured seasonal post front and center (I’ll swap this out frequently), followed immediately by all my most recent posts, so it will be just like my old blog design where you only have a quick scroll and one click to read the most recent post in full.
My homepage will also now feature some previous content that I felt was worth highlighting.
If you scroll down past my most recent posts, you’ll see a featured recipe section (right now it’s “favorite cozy meals”, but for spring I’ll switch it out for some fun salad recipes), followed by my top posts by category. You can click around to see the top posts in each of the categories highlighted: nutrition hot topics, motherhood, running, and healthy eating tips. There’s a similar feature to this on my About page, but that one also includes some “best of” and “big life moments” posts, too.
Next are some recipe category quick finds, followed by a popular on Pinterest section (simply click on the picture to be taken to the related blog post – and be sure to follow me on Pinterest while you’re at it!).
I hope the new more content-rich homepage will make it easier to view some of my best past content, while also remaining quick and easy to find my latest blog posts.
And now, I’m especially excited to introduce you to my new recipe page, which is by far the biggest highlight of the new design and has been a HUGE labor of love.
Why is my new recipe page so awesome? Because it’s 100% searchable!
On the recipe page, on the left, you’ll see a TON of different categories: dietary, meal type, method, and holiday. Select any category (or a combination of categories, for example “gluten free” + “vegetarian”) and all the recipes on my blog that fit into those categories will come up.
That recipe page is the reason why this redesign took SO freaking long to bring to life because I didn’t want to do things half way. If I was going to redesign my site, I didn’t just want it to look pretty – I wanted it to be way more functional and easy for you guys to navigate.
Over the past year, I’ve manually gone through every single one of the hundreds of recipes I have on this site, selected which ones are good enough to feature in my new searchable recipe page, and put them into a new standard recipe template (because when I started blogging, recipe plugins/pretty recipe formats weren’t a thing, so my recipes were all in different formats and a big ole mess).
Once I decided which recipes to feature and got them into a consistent format, the next step was to tag them into categories, one by one, so that the recipe search function would actually work. Huge thank you to fellow RD Emily who I hired last fall to do the recipe tagging… and for her patience when it took a billion times longer to have the recipes ready for her to tag than I thought it would. 😉
The other thing I’m really excited about this new blog design, besides the fact that it looks clean, bright, and professional, is the category pages!
I have so much content on the blog that was basically completely buried, so the category pages are a great way to feature previous content, but in an organized way. The category pages I have on my main menu bar are: lifestyle, fitness, and nutrition.
I hope these category pages will make it easier to reference old posts!
Each category page features different subcategories. Lifestyle subcategories are: blogging tips, day in the life, travel, wedding, pregnancy, and motherhood. Fitness subcategories are: sports nutrition, fitness tips, marathon training, race recaps, and hiking. And nutrition subcategories are: nutrition hot topics, healthy eating tips, intuitive eating, and sports nutrition (this takes you back over to fitness).
When you are on a category page, simply click on any of those subcategories to view all the blog posts I have within that subcategory!
I’d love if you took some time to peruse the new blog layout and let me know what you think! And if you notice any issues/bugs or things that are confusing or don’t make sense, please let me know. 🙂 I’m sure we forgot something!
Have a great day and I’ll see you guys back here on Friday as usual!
Accolades:
- Beautiful new site design is by Katelyn Calautti
- Rachel EH Photography took all the great new headshots for the website for me last summer
- Dan Miller Coding is the developer who brought this site to life… I appreciate that he stuck with it even once he saw how much of a massive hot mess it was. 😉
p.s. Happy National Registered Dietitian day to my fellow RDs! Seems very appropriate my new site launched on National RD Day. Here’s a fun old post you might enjoy in honor of the “holiday”: Confessions of a Registered Dietitian.
