Redesigning TFP

Thursday, 11 February 2010

Thank you for your patience during the website redesign. For me, it’s been a difficult and frustrating process. Redesigning the site has been even more demanding of my time and energy than the usual blog updates, and I’ve had to think about my work life blog balance and prioritise carefully. But it’s also been very satisfying to rediscover my web monkey self and to design and build the TFP site I’ve wanted for a long time.

The decision to redesign

When I started The Food Pornographer back in August 2005 it was just another personal blog – my blog where I wrote about what I did and posted photos of what I ate. I was doing my PhD at the time and most of the posts revolved around my days at university (of course, featuring the food I ate while I was on campus). But always it was the food posts that people responded to and clearly enjoyed the most. Over time I began to focus the site more on food and less on the posts about my day-to-day life. And my “what I ate today” blog grew and grew.

In the past 4.5 or so years, the site has grown beyond what I’d ever imagined when I first began, in content, in popularity, and even in its significance in my life. My content had completely outgrown my old site template. It was cluttered and messy, both to look at and to work with. I had not changed the template, upgraded my WordPress version, redesigned or restructured the site in any way during this entire time. I had good content, but my sitebhad become stagnant – it was clear to me that I needed to change things.

First, I had to upgrade my WordPress to the current version. I did this at the end of December 2009. I was worried I’d break or kill the site in the process. I was especially worried something terrible would happen to the site’s database, which of course holds all my content – my posts and your comments. I read everything I could find on the Internet about upgrading WordPress. It’s usually not that big a deal, but I was jumping from version 1.5 to 2.9, which is pretty major. The upgrade would include an upgrade of the database itself. I backed up my site and database. Twice. I went through what I had to do a trillion times. I took a deep breath and pressed the button. I guess all my planning and preparation paid off because it went off without a hitch. The next step would be to actually redesign the site.

The work life blog balance

I knew redesigning the site would be a mammoth task, and I guess that’s part of the reason I’d put it off for so long. I would only be able to work on it on weeknights and weekends. Throw in nights when I came home from work too exhausted to sit at my computer to work on the site, add social events with family and friends (family dinners, birthdays etc) and I wasn’t left with a lot of time to work on it. But I knew I had to do it.

It’s great having that friend who supports you and believes in you and will also kick your arse and push you to keep going if you start feeling discouraged. That’s JetGirl. Thanks mate, I really couldn’t have done without you.

Jac was very understanding and left me alone so I could work on the site whenever possible. She knew it was always on my mind, and she knew whenever I wasn’t working on the site, I was secretly thinking about it. She knows very well how my mind works, after all these years.

I was conscious that I shouldn’t bury myself in my project and neglect my relationships. Besides being TFP, I’m also Jac’s partner, I’m a daughter, a sister, a friend. Sometimes it was tempting to sit at my computer all day, perfectly happy, and not see or talk to anyone. But I made sure I did emerge from my study once in a while to be out in the sunshine and interact with real people, even though the little web monkey voice in my head grumbled that I was losing valuable website work time. It was this pesky web monkey voice that made me think about margins, padding and columns when I looked down the supermarket aisles during Thursday late night grocery shopping with Jac. Yes, really – I’m not kidding! :-P

I’m glad I did the things I did away from the computer. Jac and I helped Juji and Jay move house, and we went with them to IKEA and helped transport their boxes of IKEA booty in the back of our ute to their new home – they are always so great helping us whenever we need, I had no hesitation in helping them out too. Jac and I went to the beach with my little nieces Ruby and Zoe. I helped Jac host her birthday brunch at our house for her family and a few friends. Of course, I did take photos at these events, and they’ll be coming up as blog posts. :D

Frustrations

For me, the most frustrating thing was only being able to work on the site at certain times – chunks of time that were just too short. For example, on a typical weeknight, I’d come home from work, spend a little time with Jac catching up on our day at work, have dinner, load up the dishwasher or do other chores, go for an evening walk with Jac and then find I had an hour and a half or even less to work on the site before I had to go to bed (or risk being a zombie at work the next day – which I preferred not to be). The thing is, I love designing websites in PhotoShop, and I love writing code, playing with html, css, php and javascript. You know, there’s nothing more frustrating than having to leave some code unfinished and not quite working right because you have to go to sleep because you have to go to work the next day!

Some evenings I’d force myself to work on the site even though I was really tired, my brain was sluggish and I really didn’t feel like it. A few times I fell asleep on my keyboard. Jac would find me sleeping at my desk and would gently rouse me and tell me I should go to bed. I discovered it is possible to be half-asleep yet frustrated with yourself at the same time.

I don’t mind admitting that during the day while I was at work (I work at a completely unrelated job that can be very demanding on good days) I would find myself thinking about the site and coming up with all sorts of ideas for what I wanted to do with it – design, content and how I wanted it to work. I scribbled notes and diagrams all over scraps of paper so that I wouldn’t forget by the time I got home. I could’ve secretly worked on the site at work, but I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, so I didn’t. My friends will tell you I’m a goody-two-shoes like that. ^_^ When I got home I’d be bursting to get on the computer and start working on those ideas, but of course, I’d have to be a good partner and spend some time with Jac first, have dinner etc. The loving relationship you see in the blog posts doesn’t just happen on its own, you know. :D

Another really frustrating thing was not being able to keep updating the old blog while I was working on the new one. It simply wasn’t possible to keep doing both – the old site would continue to grow in posts and comments, I’d never have an up-to-date copy of the database and I’d be forever behind. The comments and emails I received from you guys were so encouraging – it was fantastic knowing you were all looking forward to the new blog. But at the same time, I felt the great weight of your expectations – I wanted this site to be an improvement, I wanted you guys to like it. I wanted you guys to feel it had been worth the wait. It’s hard working on something when you’re constantly questioning your efforts and wondering if it will be good enough. I wasn’t just changing the site to please myself, the changes needed to please my readers too – and in fact, that is much more important ultimately than pleasing myself. I was also a little worried if I took too long with the redesign I’d lose all my readers because you’d all get tired of waiting. I guess if you’re reading this, it means you’re still with me! :D

The design

I wanted a cleaner, less cluttered design, with more white space and a template that was very plain so my own images and my own content would be the main focus. I wanted a template that would be easy to customise, both from a design/layout point of view and a functional perspective. I looked at a number of magazine-style blog layouts which seemed more dynamic and interesting than the traditional blog/journal layouts.

The real burst of inspiration that really got things moving came from my friend JetGirl, who designed The Food Pornographer logo one evening for fun. The colours she used happen to be my favourite colours for design – yellow, orange and red, all fiery, warm, bright, fresh, delicious colours! I liked the logo instantly and felt it was very me (not just “TFP” but me, the person who behind TFP). I added the bubble with my tagline “Food at its porniest” and to me it felt like we’d unexpectedly achieved something awesome – we’d worked together and somehow filled a gap I hadn’t thought about that much before – TFP now had a real logo.

After a lot of research and agonising over which WordPress theme to use, I stumbled upon Chris Pearson’s Thesis Theme for WordPress. The more I read about it, the more I realised it was exactly what I was looking for. I’m not going into details here (I can, at a later date, if there’s enough interest – let me know). There is a lot of information about Thesis on the Internet too, a lot of people using the theme, and a lot of help and support – which is part of the reason I chose the theme.

With a new logo, a theme chosen and my head full of creative ideas, I set up a new site on a separate domain which I password-protected so no one would accidentally stumble on the “new” TFP while it was under development.

Key changes

I’m not going to list all the changes to the site here, as you can simply explore and discover them yourself. But here are some of the major changes I’m particularly pleased about.

Fewer categories, more tags

I’d let my categories run wild at the old site. There were far too many. I’ve decreased the number of categories but made better use of tags. I’m still in the process of re-tagging and re-categorising the old posts. So far I’ve done the posts from 2009-2010, still working on the rest. I have a feeling I’ll be doing that for months to come. I could’ve waited until it was all done before I launched the new site, but I had a feeling you guys would go mad waiting, so I took pity on you and launched the site anyway. :-P

You can find posts on a particular subject by clicking on the tags in the tag cloud that appears in all the sidebars of the site. The bigger the tag text, the more posts there are about that subject.

Tag trivia (just for fun)

For 2009-2010 the top 5 tags are:
1. home cooking
2. savoury
3. dinner
4. lunch
5. chicken

Because am always thinking about food, I thought it would interesting to look at the top 5 protein tags:
1.chicken
2. fish
3. sausage
4. pork
5. prawns

I expected chicken to be way out in front (which it is), but I was surprised that fish beat sausage and pork!

Better integration with social media

Back in 2005 when I started the site, there was no Twitter, I hadn’t really heard of Facebook (I confess, I only joined Facebook last year) and social media was nowhere as popular as it is now. But now there are so many ways for bloggers and readers share and interact through social media. My individual blog posts now all have a footer that includes social media buttons so you can easily share posts that you like. But if you’re not into social media, it’s easy enough to just ignore the buttons. :)

I started promoting TFP’s Facebook page last year and it’s going strong. If you’re on Facebook but haven’t checked out my page, you should! I update the page whenever I publish a blog post, I post status updates at the page that you won’t see at the blog, and I have fun discussions with readers on all sorts of things. It’s great, and I love having another way of interacting with you guys.

You can also follow me on Twitter. Once again, you’ll get status updates you won’t see on the blog – when I’m out and about, especially – as well as updates whenever I publish a post at the blog. You may also have noticed at the top right corner of each individual blog post there is now a tweet/retweet button.

Recipes page

Let me say right away – The Food Pornographer is not a recipe blog and I have no plans to make it one. To be honest, although Jac loves to cook and create dishes, she doesn’t write down or think about a recipe at any stage of the process – she just cooks. She supports me in my blogging pursuits but has no interest, desire or time to start writing recipes for blog posts, nor would I expect her to. So as before, there won’t be recipes for many of the dishes you see at the site. When I do have a recipe to share, I will certainly post it. I’ve now created a new Recipes page where I’ll maintain a list of the recipes available at this site.

TFP says…
The article you are reading now, “Redesigning TFP”, is the first in a new regular column where I’ll write about anything I feel like, not necessarily involving food or food photos. It could be about food blogging, web design, life or something more personal about me. Feel free to suggest topics if there’s anything you’d like to read about. I’m not promising I will write to order, but I’m happy for you to let me know what you’d be interested in.

And yes, you may have noticed there’s a little picture of me at the top of the sidebar. That’s me. I’m not a freak and I’m not fat. Heheheh.

What do you think?

There’s plenty of new content for you to catch up on (go back to the Blog home page), and lots more cool stuff to come – I’ll surprise you as we go – I’ll leave you now to explore the new site.

Feel free to leave a comment below and let me know what you think!

Read other TFP SAYS… articles

Share/Bookmark