Jenny Garing food blog

As well as Jenny Garing's Ground website I'd redeveloped the previous year, Jenny had a rich and long running blog which she wanted refreshed.

Her blog was set up at a different time. It used the popular Wordpress blogging platform, and that was running sluggishly and her hosting service suspended it. It could no longer be successfully upgraded either, making it a liability. I ended up hosting that site for a time while we worked on this refresh.

Together we chose and adapted a theme (Receptar) in a greenish palette Jenny preferred. We wanted the site to better show off her vibrant food and travel photography. I extended this theme with a timeline and a proper search results display.

We also created three variations of blog post templates matching the different kinds of posts we identified in her archive: travel posts, share posts, and recipe posts, as well as "general" blogposts.

The biggest challenge was importing and cleaning her old blog content, along with all its tags, dates, and splendid colourful photos. That was achieved by both of us by automated and manual processes. All of the addresses of the old site were preserved by redirection. We always need to remember that out in the world, many pages could have links to them, and that existing pages often have established search ranking scores that are worth keeping.

Jenny's site had so much well tagged content that it now really needed a responsive search and intuitive filtering using those tags and categories. Another challenge was making sure there was a way users would find posts containing words with macrons in search, like 'rahui' finding 'rāhui'.

I also spent some time building and refining the blog post creation and maintenance for Jenny, so that she could draft and publish without assistance. A history of published version is maintained so that we can always revert mistakes. (Good to have but hasn't been necessary yet.)

I added hidden extra data called microdata to blog posts, which helps other sites, like Pinterest, display the content in their own format in their own apps. This enhances discovery of Jenny's creative outlet for the culinary world that is her passion.

Jenny continues to blog regularly with quality material.