Hi everyone! As you may have noticed, things are looking a little different around the blog.
We’re SO excited to announce and launch our new site design today.
Don’t panic! It’s the same old Woks of Life, with all your favorite content. It’s just much prettier and easier to navigate! Let me give you a quick tour.
New Site Design Tour
1. A More Informative Homepage
Our old homepage was a simple blog format, with a scrolling view of our latest posts—and not too much else. We’ve redesigned our homepage to make it much easier to discover and locate your favorite recipes.
Right from the homepage, you can browse recipes by Category (Beef, Chicken & Poultry, Vegetables, Tofu, etc.), by Collection (Quick & Easy, Vegetarian, Dim Sum, Gluten-Free, etc.), and by Course (Breakfast & Brunch, Appetizers, Mains, Sides, etc.)
For Woks of Life newbies, and to make it easier for anyone new to Chinese cooking to get started, we also have this handy module on our homepage:
It’s a Quick Start Guide to building your Chinese pantry—10 staple ingredients you need to make hundreds of recipes on our site!
We’ve also included:
- Some of our favorite featured recipes at the top of the page
- Our latest recipes by date (for those of you who just want to see what’s new)
- Top Recipe Collections
- Family favorites
- Travel posts
- How-To articles
- Links to different categories within our Chinese Ingredients Glossary:
We also have this awesome new quote section, where we’ll feature some of our favorite comments from readers, past and present:
And a slider at the bottom featuring some glimpses into life at The Woks of Life in recent Instagram posts (@thewoksoflife).
2. New Recipe Index
This is one of the most exciting improvements we’ve made to The Woks of Life. Our new Recipe Index is so much easier to navigate. Now you can easily explore the nearly 1000 recipes we’ve published over the last 7 years!
Just like on the homepage, you can browse by Category, by Collection, or by Course. We’ve called out some of our most popular recipe collections below that. You can also simply scroll down the page to view all recipes.
If you’re short on time, click the “Quick and Easy” Button to the far right of the recipe menu. You’ll see only Quick & Easy recipes that can be made in under 30 minutes!
3. View All Posts by Date
Don’t worry, if you still want to simply browse posts by date to check up on what we’ve posted recently, simply click “View All By Date” under “Latest” on our homepage. There, you can scroll through recipes just like on our old site!
4. Improved Recipe Cards
Each of our recipes has a printable recipe card at the bottom of the post. It contains the full list of ingredients, condensed instructions, Prep/Cook times, ratings, serving size, and nutrition information.
We’ve improved the design of the recipe card to make it easier to read and digest, and to make it more obvious that you can scale the recipe up or down using the serving size indicator:
5. Family Intros & Author Bios
If you’re new to our blog and our family, it can be confusing to tell who’s who. To make things a bit clearer, we’ve added headshots to each of our bylines, so it’s immediately apparent who wrote the post. We’ve also included author bios below each post!
6. Updated Ingredients Glossary (Coming Soon)
We all know that you guys love our Chinese Ingredients Glossary. We link to it often in our posts and ingredients lists to help de-mystify any unfamiliar ingredients. (And provide photos to take with you when shopping at Asian markets/Chinese groceries.)
Soon after this launch, we will be publishing new versions of the Ingredients Glossary pages. They’ll be easier to browse and navigate, with handy thumbnails, short definitions for quicker and easier reference, and links to longer articles about each ingredient when available.
Stay tuned!
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Our whole family would like to thank all the amazing people who helped make our new site a reality! Our updated logo and all the incredible hand-drawn illustrations were done by graphic designer/illustrator Sasa Khalisa, the website design was done by Melissa Rose Design, and the theme was built/developed by the team at OnceCoupled.
We hope you enjoy browsing around, and as always, Happy Wokking!
