A New Home for Smells Like Home!

The address hasn’t changed but the look sure has!  Welcome to the new Smells Like Home!  After over a year of planning and tweaking, I’m proud to share with you Smells Like Home’s new brand and design.  In this post, I’ll walk you through the changes so that it won’t take you too long to familiarize yourselves.  I hope you love this new design and the new features here as much as I do!

1. New Logo and Branding.  A huge thanks here goes out to Ryan from Second Street Creative for working with me on this whole rebranding and redesign (and to Annie for so highly recommending them to me).  Ryan took what was in my head about how I wanted the site to feel and put it in graphic format.  He nailed it.  I know it wasn’t easy to convey the sense of smell without it looking too kitchen-y but he sure made it seem easy.  I wanted my brand to reflect the feeling of our home and kitchen and our feelings about cooking from scratch.  I told Ryan to think “vintage-industrial-farmhouse” and I think he thought I was nuts but he stuck with me.  And I love what’s he’s done here.  I hope you do too.

2. Navigation Bar.  The navigation bar now includes some new features, including Topics, Categories, and an FAQ page.  The Topics and Categories pages are full visual indexes of the posts here, broken out in different ways.  I’ll explain more further down.

3. Featured Posts. Here you’ll find 5 featured posts that you can scroll through by using the double chevrons/arrows on either side of the photo.  You can click anywhere on the feature to access the recipe link.  These photos will change throughout the year; sometimes they will be seasonal picks, sometimes holiday-centric, sometimes classics.  You get the idea.

4. Connect. These are my social media connections.  Click on any of the usual suspects to follow and connect with me.  The Pinterest link now links directly to my blog and personal Pinterest boards.  The RSS link gives you the option to follow Smells Like Home through a reader.

5. Subscribe.  If you would like to receive Smells Like Home’s updates via email, just enter your email address here and hit enter.  Follow the instructions to verify your subscription.  If you’re already an email subscriber, you don’t need to do anything – you’ll continue to receive your updates this way.  The look of the emails has changed a little as of today, but it’s still the same concept.

6. The Sidebars.  In the sidebars, you can now find a list of my favorite blogs (Blogroll), the archives (at my mom’s request!), and Popular Posts.  The Popular Posts are automatically generated based on site traffic so they will change periodically.

7. Topics.  The Topics page is a visual space organized into to topics.  If you click on the drop down menu, you’ll see I’ve categorized some posts a little differently, into topics such as DIY [foods] and Farmer’s Market Recipes (and others – check them out!).  Posts that land on the Topics page will also be posted on the homepage but instead of searching through Categories or via the Search box, you can also find them quickly here.

8. Categories. The Categories page functions similarly to the Topics page except that it includes a full listing of all the categories on the site.  Click on the drop down menu to access the categories then on any of the photos or their respective titles to access the recipe or post.

9. Recipe Format.  With this redesign, I’ve started using ZipList for my recipe formatting.  It’s a clean and standardized way for me to present my recipes and the ZipList functionality will give you the opportunity to not only print recipes but to save the recipes to a recipe box.  You’ll need to sign up for this feature (just click on Save Recipe) but it will enable you add the ingredients from my recipes to a shopping list as well.  If you’re already signed up with ZipList or use it on another blog, you’re all set to start using it here too!  I’ve enabled the new format on about 40 recipes so far but have a long way to go before most of them are converted – it’s all done manually by me – so please bear with me during this transition.  For now, the recipes without the ZipList format remain in their original format with the Print This! feature.

10. Recipe Format Part 2.  At the bottom of the recipes, you’ll find a box of posts that are similar to the present recipe.  Click on any link to take you to that post.  Under that, you’ll see more social media buttons.  Here you can share the post through Pinterest, Facebook, or Twitter.  This is the easiest way to share what you love, especially on Pinterest, which can be finicky sometimes about Pinning from certain sites.

11. Comments.  Comments are now being hosted through Disqus.  You’ll currently see that 0 comments are showing on just about all of the posts and that’s a short-term thing.  All of the old comments from all of my 650ish posts are being imported and will show up here in a day or two.  (Fingers crossed!)  For now, you can continue to comment on any post you’d like and if you have a question about a recipe that you may otherwise have been able to find the answer for in the comments, send me an email through the Contact Form.