Official site of British television host and cookbook writer Delia Smith
Delia is a British institution, the face of great cooking for over four decades. Delia Online is home to a massive collection of over 2000 iconic recipes, cookery tutorials and more.
The challenge
Refreshing the Delia Online experience
The previous Delia Online website was outdated. It was non-responsive, used low-quality images, had an unwieldy user forum and was cumbersome for the editing team to update and curate content. The site design needed to be modernised to work responsively and showcase Delia’s stunning food pictures. The back-end needed to be fast and easy for the team to keep the site fresh. We also needed to migrate all of the existing content across from the current site, taking care not to impact the SEO of the site.
The solution
A recipe for success
We started by using analytics of the existing site to research how users were interacting with the site and used this to create several user journeys. It became clear that users wanted an excellent browsing experience and could find specific content when necessary quickly. Users also needed easy access to information that supplements a recipe, details about unusual ingredients, techniques or equipment, for example.
Seamless content management features
Streamlining Delia online’s workflow
The site is built using Drupal, giving the Delia Online team a simple interface to manage the vast content, utilising intuitive content tagging features. We also included clever features that allow them to plan the content strategy and set up recipes of the day and week ahead of time to improve efficiency.
The design is clean and straightforward, allowing the site to be fully responsive, and features high-quality imagery and video throughout. In addition, the recipe pages are peppered with highly relevant related content, pulled through automatically with that great tagging system and a powerful faceted search was implemented to help users quickly drill down to the content they wanted.
The results
New site, new cravings
There has been a great response to the new site from users on social media and the site itself. We have maintained the existing traffic levels and page rankings through careful backlink research and URL mapping.
