Edible New York is a multi-channel business with print magazines, live events, and multiple website properties on a WordPress multi-site network. Edible New York approached Bourn Creative not only seeking a new ongoing partner for website support, maintenance, and new feature development, but with an immediate need to address challenges with the existing sites.
Our partnership, spanning several years, began with a thorough technical site audit and code review, as well as an initial contract to make immediate changes and improvements to solve the most critical challenges at hand. The technical review resulted in a development road map of recommended changes, upgrades, and issues that needed to be fixed, prioritized based on impact on the site, cost, time, and importance. The development road map then became the ongoing plan of action that would improve user experience, security, and page load speed across the network of sites. Our first six months together was completely focused on completing the road map items.
In terms of design and development, we can do anything when starting from scratch, but with the Edible New York sites, we were working with nearly 10,000 existing blog posts across four sites, with one singular code base, and everything we create must be backward-compatible.
Our Work with Edible New York has included:
- An overhaul and rebuild of the client’s entire Google DoubleClick ad management system from scratch. The new Google DoubleClick ad integration is easier to use and includes custom ad units and responsive ads that resize automatically for various screen sizes.
- The previous version of the home page curated content section only allowed for the curation of blog posts. Bourn Creative rebuilt the feature to allow the internal team to easily select any mix of blog posts, events, and guide listings as desired.
- The integration of a custom search engine in the header of each site.
- Multiple changes over time to refine the design, improve performance, page load time, and image optimization, as well as the creation of custom publishing workflows for editors to manage multiple authors, contributing authors, and guest authors.
- A backward-compatible redesign and rebuild the existing Edible Guides to showcase manually curated collections of locations for restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and other food-related businesses. The manually curated section can be used to promote specific locations or neighborhoods, articles from the print magazine, or upcoming events — or the highly-coveted spots can be sold to advertisers.
- The new guide included a custom Google Maps API integration, done via a custom WordPress plugin, that uses fields in the post editor to automatically fetch the formatted address from Google, and create a Google Map marker pin that links to the post and links back to Google Maps directions. On a phone, Google Maps is automatically opened to the location if the visitors uses the app.
- The Guide archive pages also use a custom Google Map showing all the locations in that specific taxonomy, as well as an advanced faceted search that allows visitors to search by neighborhood, location type, or direct keyword that onyl searches the guide listings.
- The creation of event management tools, including custom event widget and template component development, tools for selling and managing tickets for the events, and customizations of the Events Calendar WordPress plugin for displaying a calendar of events
- A redesign and rebuild of an existing gallery feature for better user experience on mobile, faster performance, and cleaner design, as well as integration of the same code into the native WordPress gallery to allow the client to add galleries in multiple locations.
- The addition of extra large, featured images, and to improve performance, these images use responsive image markup so only a small image is loaded on mobile screens.
- Conversion of the WordPress multi-site network to PHP 7 and SSL.
Bourn Creative also works with Edible to create separate, branded microsites for their individual live events, using unique designs and features that are not available in their main publishing network.
We continue to work with the Edible New York team for strategic consulting, ongoing website support and maintenance, new feature additions, and design refinements.