My Cooking Site

Hello,

The good news is that the website has a lot of interesting articles and if you are into cooking (which I’m not) you will find it useful.

You have to work in the design more, it looks like a website design from 10 year ago. In my opinion you should choose a more modern looking template. Also if I were you I would have removed the “====> *RECIPE INDEX*” text at the upper left corner of the page and simply change that to something that looks cleaner, like:

“Full recipe list”

Hope you find this useful.

The modern looking template means bootstrap 3 themes or above, check new wordpress themes that are suitable for you.

Lagarder said exactly also you need to remove those Index words from the sidebar and top left upper too.

You should use your categories as menu tabs so that the readers can attracted easily.

You have a lot of great content and images. It’s the organization that I think is the problem. Also, I’m not sure what you mean by a theme that is able to do “pages with posts and other stuff”. They all, pretty much, handle pages and posts in the same way because that’s WP’s job. It’s how they are displayed that changes. What is it you want them to do exactly?

I can’t tell from your site because your organization is hard to follow. For example, what is the category Food, exactly? How is it different from Recipes? Why are there so many sub-categories and tags so that in your directory, many items have very few entries? Having too many is making it difficult to find anything.

As to the look, I don’t think you need it to be so over-sized (too much scrolling). For one thing, you don’t seem to have many comments, so you might turn those off or at least make them less obtrusive by not requiring all that info to comment.

Some things are dated, yes, but I think you should start by cleaning up the organization, then see what you need to do about the design.

If you answer what you want a theme to do, I can be more helpful, I think.

Btw, why the cryptic domain name?

Well, the whole thing is about food, so a category named that isn’t really helpful. Maybe you want something like ingredients, techniques, and recipes.

Categories should be major topics that are covered on the blog so that the posts sort into them and make it easier for people to find things. Tags are more like search terms. They are not particularly useful as organizers and the tag cloud is losing popularity, too. Think of categories as what you might have on the main menu to help people find things. Then, in addition to the categories, the menu will also have one or two things that make the site work, such as an about page. I also think it’s confusing that your landing page and your what’s cooking page seem to have similar functions but the distinction isn’t clear. You need to decide if you want to land on an about page kind of thing or the blog posts. The term “education” also doesn’t really fit here. If that’s what you are selling maybe make your menu something like this with 5 items.

What’s Cooking (blog landing home page)
Special Ingredients
Tips & Techniques
Recipes
Cook with Adrian

The first is the latest post page. The next three are categories pages, mosts of your posts will be in one of these but they don’t all have to be. The 4th is your sales page and you can include a bio there so you may not need a separate about. Your daughter’s stuff should probably just be blog posts. Everything would fit into one of these areas. Tags aren’t really necessary but they don’t really hurt anything if you like them.

Love the use of widgets, the black background with light brown sheet turn me off personally, I’d lighten up the background
Also, featuring some articles and setting featured images (http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Thumbnails) really helps with the user experience and lowers bounce rates.
Great Job!

As for the background, it doesn’t have to look like that. You could just make it the same color as the main content and get rid of the borders to open it up, maybe widening the content as well. eltDOTmobi/cre8ov.jpg Better yet, update the theme to something more modern, but just changing the styling would help considerably. You can change the styling in the style.css if you have a child theme, in the theme’s custom css if it has it, or with a plugin like Simple Custom CSS that will allow you to add it.

As for the featured image issues, it sounds like your theme assumes that the featured image should also be in the post. I have one that does that (I don’t like it that way) so I’ve turned off the display in the post. For mine, I think, it’s
.page-header-image-single {display:none !important;}
Something like this would also go in the css. You should be getting thumbnails automatically if you have that set in SETTINGS/MEDIA that you could choose as featured images, but I think if you turn off the display for the image in the post, you will solve all the issues with that.

I’m not sure I understand the featured article issue. Are you using stickys?

Do you want to know? 🙂