A while back I joined Pinterest and am really loving it*. I had seen lots of friends using it but thought it was the same thing as Tumblr & was non interested until Sara opened my eyes with a post about it. Basically it is a visual way to store your bookmarks/favorites, using photos for each link (and text), and I desperately needed something like that to sort through all of the recipes & projects that I've marked. And you can see what your friends add for even more ideas. I already have over 500 'pins'!
Having all of those lovely photos has made it a lot easier to find inspiration, and I've been cooking & creating so many of the new things from those links. But I've found that whenever we start to make our weekly grocery list I automatically go to Pinterest now and completely ignore our old favorites. It made me realize just how important those pretty pictures can be.
I considered adding our favorite recipes there, but since the majority of them would be from my own site I thought that would be a little tacky (like I'm pinning my own stuff for exposure). Finally I decided what I really needed to do was add photos to my recipe index, instead of the boring text links. The old page looked like this ~
>I did like the 'recipe binder' feel of the old page, especially since I used a photo of the actual binder I use, but there was just too much text to read through. The new page is pretty plain, but the photos are such an improvement!
While working on the recipe page I came across some horrible photos that really needed to be updated! I realized I had already taken new pictures for two of them but never gotten around to switching them out ~ the Greek Chicken and the Polynesian Chicken. (Normally I would post about the new pics on here, but you can check the links if you are interested)
The recipe page's new look had me itching to makeover my website's front page. It had been on my to-do list for a long time but was never really a priority, regardless of how ugly it was! Here is the old front page ~
That layout was very outdated, I haven't used my Etsy shop in years! (It was vertically centered on my old computer but screens are generally bigger now. Unfortunately there is no good way to center it for different sizes) The new page is pretty clean & simple & uses another one of my fabric designs for the background ~
I'm not desperately in love with either of the new pages but definitely think they are in an improvement! Not too shabby, considering I threw them together in a day.
*While I do love Pinterest, the site is a little too glitchy for my liking. I have one recipe that I can not remove or edit, sometimes photos will not show up (which is the whole reason I'm using the site!) or changes you make to your text will not update. I contacted the customer service and they said that it was a problem with the cookies not updating quick enough or something & they would work on it. The problems seemed to be fixed after that, so I was happy, but now they are back. It's not enough to make me regret using the site, but they kind of need to get their act together!
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