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Tweaks and Touch-Ups
by Guest Writer, Valerie WhitmoreWe've been busy little bees so far this year at CDKitchen. I've been doing tweaks and fixes to various parts of the website. Nothing earth shatteringly noticeable, so I thought I'd point out the changes.
You might (or might not) have noticed that I've been moving some of the recipe categories around a little. It felt like we had too many. And some just seemed too obscure. Did we really need separate categories for Double Chocolate Cake and Triple Chocolate Cake? Yeah, I didn't think so. I merged many of the categories so if you are looking for chocolate cake, they are not all separated. And if you really specifically want a triple chocolate cake, you can use the search box located within the chocolate cake section to find it quickly.
I also changed the layout of the holiday & party category landing page. It now displays the holidays by month so you can more easily find whichever holiday you are celebrating. Previously it required manual updates to promote whatever holiday was current. And, well, I just wasn't good about keeping up with it. This way it won't still be featuring Valentine's Day in August
You might have noticed we're promoting our newsletters more on the site now. We changed newsletter providers which gave me a lot more flexibility in what, and how, we send out each day. There are currently four newsletters available to subscribe to. Two feature daily recipes (one is a crockpot recipe). The other two are a "what's new" kind of update. One is sent daily and contains a list of some of the new recipes, my latest cooking adventures, new articles, and anything else that is "new" on the site. The other one is a weekly compilation of pretty much that same info, but it's only sent out on Fridays, not every day. You can sign up here (hint hint).
Lastly, I did a small but geez-why-didn't-I-do-this-before tweak to our recipe search engine. I noticed the other day that someone was searching for the word "lime" but clearly wasn't finding what they were looking for (and yes, there are times where I do nothing other than watch live what terms people are searching for!). I traced that person's activity and found that they ultimately ended up writing a review for a lime bars recipe. So I set out to figure out why they weren't able to find that recipe right away. I ended up changing the relevancy weighting of the results just a little and it made all the difference. I was able to find the recipe they looked for using the terms they were entering. So, sorry about the sucky search engine for those of you who have been frustrated with it in the past. I think it's better now. I still have an all new one in the works but haven't had time to really get it working yet
I haven't been cooking much so you might have noticed my reviews are few and far between lately. Between my techie projects and not quite getting back into our regular routine after the holidays we've had a lot of "fend for yourself" dinners. I just made a new recipe testing menu for us though so hopefully I'll have some yummy recipes to share soon.
You might (or might not) have noticed that I've been moving some of the recipe categories around a little. It felt like we had too many. And some just seemed too obscure. Did we really need separate categories for Double Chocolate Cake and Triple Chocolate Cake? Yeah, I didn't think so. I merged many of the categories so if you are looking for chocolate cake, they are not all separated. And if you really specifically want a triple chocolate cake, you can use the search box located within the chocolate cake section to find it quickly.
I also changed the layout of the holiday & party category landing page. It now displays the holidays by month so you can more easily find whichever holiday you are celebrating. Previously it required manual updates to promote whatever holiday was current. And, well, I just wasn't good about keeping up with it. This way it won't still be featuring Valentine's Day in August
You might have noticed we're promoting our newsletters more on the site now. We changed newsletter providers which gave me a lot more flexibility in what, and how, we send out each day. There are currently four newsletters available to subscribe to. Two feature daily recipes (one is a crockpot recipe). The other two are a "what's new" kind of update. One is sent daily and contains a list of some of the new recipes, my latest cooking adventures, new articles, and anything else that is "new" on the site. The other one is a weekly compilation of pretty much that same info, but it's only sent out on Fridays, not every day. You can sign up here (hint hint).
Lastly, I did a small but geez-why-didn't-I-do-this-before tweak to our recipe search engine. I noticed the other day that someone was searching for the word "lime" but clearly wasn't finding what they were looking for (and yes, there are times where I do nothing other than watch live what terms people are searching for!). I traced that person's activity and found that they ultimately ended up writing a review for a lime bars recipe. So I set out to figure out why they weren't able to find that recipe right away. I ended up changing the relevancy weighting of the results just a little and it made all the difference. I was able to find the recipe they looked for using the terms they were entering. So, sorry about the sucky search engine for those of you who have been frustrated with it in the past. I think it's better now. I still have an all new one in the works but haven't had time to really get it working yet
I haven't been cooking much so you might have noticed my reviews are few and far between lately. Between my techie projects and not quite getting back into our regular routine after the holidays we've had a lot of "fend for yourself" dinners. I just made a new recipe testing menu for us though so hopefully I'll have some yummy recipes to share soon.