Inspired Imperfection is a multi-topic lifestyle blog by Bourn Creative founding partner Jennifer Bourn that shares recipes, family travel, and insights on work-life balance.
The project included the brand design, email marketing design, social media design, a custom WordPress theme design using a stunning card-style layout, custom WordPress theme development, and custom WordPress plugin development.
The blog uses multiple custom post types to split the three primary content types into separate archives with different taxonomies.
- The Recipes post type organizes recipes by meal type and ingredients.
- The Life post type organizes content by categories and tags.
- The Adventure post type organizes content by adventure type and details.
The archives of posts across the site, on the home page and the three post types, are designed in blocks of seven posts with the first post in each block displayed as a larger, featured post. Each archive can be set to display multiple blocks of seven posts, alternating the position of the featured post on the left or the right in each block.
For the Recipes, Life, and Adventures archives, the posts are displayed in reverse chronological order, with the newest post at the top. The home page, however, displays a manually curated mix of posts from all three content types — Recipes, Life, and Adventures. This allows the home page to be customized for the season, a holiday, a marketing initiative, or timeliness. It also gives the site owner the ability to sell those post positions as sponsored posts with a contracted display timeline.
The home page also includes a static, three-column content section at the top that introduces new visitors to the blog and the three primary content areas.
The Inspired Imperfection blog includes several custom features, including:
Custom Recipe Management: Within the Recipes post type, Bourn Creative built a custom recipe card interface not only makes adding new recipes to the site fast and easy, but also outputs the rich HTML markup needed to display enhanced search listings in Google search results and rich pins in Pinterest.
Beautiful Image Management: Images are an important part of travel blogging, and in the Adventures post type, additional styling options were created to display extra large, beautiful images and tiled image galleries that stretch outside the normal content width and break up the content. When clicked, all images in tiled galleries open in a full browser light box that allows visitors to click through a slideshow of images at full size.
Custom Ad Management: A custom ad management system was integrated across the site for responsive Google Adsense ads, as well as custom, contextual slide-up ads assigned by category. For example, when scrolling through a waffle recipe, and ad for a waffle iron will appear.
Custom Author Box Design: At the end of every post, a custom author box is displayed that includes the author’s name, photo, bio, and a personalized menu of icons linked to social media properties and other websites.
Bourn Creative also integrated a custom publishing workflow for proper FTC disclosure of sponsored posts that adds a purple “sponsored” banner across the corner of the post featured image. This banner is displayed on the archives and the single posts. Additional disclosure information is displayed at the bottom of every post below the author box and on a dedicated legal disclaimers page.