Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hey all,
I've been building a site for my wife's food blog using a Wordpress template, it's been built in a hurry because one of her recipes was selected (from 450 entrants) to be published in an ebook along with Pete Evans and a couple of other well known chefs, so now I'm charged with making it come together and I don't really know what I'm doing. I've got it up (the site) but I'd like to get peoples perspectives on what could be added or changed to help improve it cosmetically and also improve the SEO. Any suggestions would be appreciated. The site is earthenfoodie.com P.S. if this isn't kosher a mod can remove it.. Thanks.

Hi HC,

I can't tell you anything about HTML or the background of website building so this is only about editing. I noticed that the Beauty salad blurb shows up twice on the main page for me and again on another page if you click for page 2 at the bottom of the first page.

Clicking on the 2 also gives you the picture of your wife and a bit about her - so maybe this is just for filler while you get things figured out. If not then place the picture of your wife that's on the bottom of the first page and link the intro about your wife to that picture (so people can see it if they're curious to know about the person responsible for the recipes).

The photos and formatting look great and I'll have to try out some of the recipes but I haven't checked the text of these for errors (just so you know)

Hope this helps

Cheers

Thanks for looking scotty which browser were you viewing with?

Looks good. Very snazy. I haven't gone through with a fine tooth comb but I'll show it to my wife, share it on face book and pass on any feed back.

What is your back groun HC?
Have you done anything like this before?
Was it hard?

Oh that was so funny.

Sarah has looked at your web site and she came into talk to me a bit confused. She didn't think it was my sort of thing and was struggling to come up with words beyond "there wasn't any meat" to describe what she thought I would think.

I helped her out by saying "its all hippy food?". She said yes and then once I explained why I had her look at it she raved for about 10mins about how good the photography was, how well the site drew you in and enticed you to look further, how engaging the text was....there was more but I'm pretty sure she is a fan.

The site is really nice and clean looking with great photos, which is what you want really. However there are a few things I've noticed at first glance. I'll just list what I've seen, chances are I'm just repeating what others have said but I only skimmed the other replies. Viewing in Firefox v29.0.1.

At first glance:

On Page 1:

- It has the expanded recipe for the 'Beauty Salad', as well as the blurb with the 'read more' link.

- The 'Fruit Leather Roll Ups' and 'Delicious Fruit Leathers' are the same, however the 'Fruit Leather Roll Ups' recipe is incomplete, I'd get rid of 'Delicious Fruit Leathers' and complete the roll ups recipe listing as photo for the roll-ups is more appealing.

- All links to 'Charlene' go to the Beauty Salad recipe not the information about Charlene.

- Page 3 goes to no where.

- The photography is great but the quality of the larger images in the recipes could be improved.

- I'd try and make all of the smaller images a consistent size and shape, and maybe centering the images in the recipe may balance the look a bit?

- There is the odd typo, double spacing and lack of capitalization in the recipes and around the site. Not sure of spelling errors but I've only skimmed it.

- The back-to-top button isn't really in keeping with the style of the blog.


Hopefully it doesn't sound like I'm completely bagging it out, you've actually done a really good job, the stuff I've picked apart are simple things. As a whole the website is nice and crisp and the recipes are interesting, I've bookmarked it and will be trying a few of the recipes soon! I look forward to seeing it expand and grow.

Nice looking site HC.

In terms of SEO one of the better things you can do is go to the wp admin and then Settings → Permalinks.

Change these to "post name". This will change the URL (address of each page) to the name of the post, not http://earthenfoodie.com/?p=192 (for example).

Also, (since I was reading about this today) go to godaddy or some other cheap domain name registrar and register the .com.au, .net and .net.au, so that if it is successful, you do not have someone get the same domain name and try to outrank you. (.com.au will usually be easier to optimise in Australia than .com) You can then redirect each of these to the .com site.

Also, if you are hosted outside of AU, you will need to go to your google webmaster tools and state that you are in Australia, so that it comes up in the Australian results (it is very hard to optimise a .com hosted in the US for Google AU without doing this.)

Hope this helps a little.

Thanks Stuart for the comments and the facebook share I've built one website a couple of years ago using a program called Webplus, very much a drag and drop style program with very little need for HTML coding and even then you could use pre-built HTML, put it in a text box (from memory) and you were up and running. My background is in the metal trade, I am a supervisor for a company that builds industrial dust and fume extraction ducting and fan systems mostly for the mining industry.
As for the was it hard question, this new site was built using a Wordpress template, it took a few days of reading and template wrecking before I realized what I was supposed to do and I still have a few more modifications to do but overall it's relatively easy. I don't know how to write code so I need to take the simple route. Your wife's reaction to the meat free site was very funny, we do eat meat but not so often, the site is styled mostly for vegan, vegetarian and paleo foods. The photography is all my wife's doing, she has a Canon DSLR something or other I'll tell the missus she has a new fan, she'll be stoked

I thought meat was a paleo food?

Thanks for the comments Azira

It is, but we haven't got that far yet, the site is only about two and a half weeks old. Having said that I don't know what my wife plans in regards to meat dishes, seeings we eat so little of it there are not that many recipes in the works yet.

edit: I've just been told that we won't be doing meat dishes, the Paleo connection is from the fact that the food (other than the meat) is very similar to raw and vegetarian, let's see if I've stuffed up that comment too...

Thanks for the SEO tips Continuum, it's really helpful to me We've looked at registering the .com.au but apparently you have to have a registered business name and an ABN or be one of various other catagories which we don't fall under (ATM), if we use godaddy are we able to bypass the ABN route?

Edit: just tried godaddy and the same rules apply, we aren't selling anything ATM but will be in the future so will have to get an ABN eventually.

getting an ABN is free. Just go to the ATO website and you should find the online application form.