Hi, my name is Mike. I am Nicole’s husband and the Director of IT, Head Photographer, and VP of Food Tasting at MyLoveForCooking.com . I take care of the technical side of things and do all of the food photography on the site for Nicole.
Recently, My Love for Cooking turned 1. As we reached this milestone, I reflected on the things I’ve learned over the past year and thought about what we could do to improve the site. One thing that I felt was necessary was to give the site a cleaner, more elegant look. The previous template that we used worked great as a recipe directory but Nicole has always wanted her site to be more than that. So, I’ve changed the site to have a brighter, simpler look that will be a more fitting backdrop for Nicole’s beautiful food.
Some of the other improvements that I’ve made to the site include:
- Gravatar integration to display avatars in comments
- New recipe layout with support for printing
- Ratings for recipes
- Improved search
- Improved social integration
- Full posts on the front page
Hopefully these improvements will make visiting MyLoveForCooking.com a better experience.
One thing that Nicole and I have noticed is that much of the food blogging audience is made up of other food bloggers. I have certainly learned a lot about food blogging by reading various blogs and following examples given by other food bloggers. Before we started this site, we never thought about whether we should have a facebook page, twitter, what blogging software to use, should we buy a new camera, etc… With the launch of My Love for Cooking 2.0, we thought it would be great for me to come out from behind the curtain and share my experiences. Expect me to pop in every once in a while to give some tips and tricks, and provide resources to help bloggers that are in the same boat as us progress in their work.
So, to all of Nicole’s friends and readers, nice to meet you. I look forward to sharing our food blogging experience and hearing about yours.
Aha, so nice to meet Nicole’s husband! Hi Mike!
It’s great that you are working on this blog together, and with such a beautiful result!
Greetings to both of you and I wish you a lot of fun together blogging!
Marian
Thanks! Nice to meet you Marian! This is definitely a fun project for us to do together. I’ve always enjoyed developing websites (I’m a software developer by trade), but doing the blog has really sparked my interest in photography.
Haha, then your husband must be a lucky guy :). Nicole puts me to work but I eat well!!
Happy Birthday to the blog! Mike- you have the best title- my husband has the same 🙂 and I’m sure your wife is happy for all your help!