Yes, yes. I know, it’s nearly time for the July update, but this author has good reason for being a wee bit late with the updates this month. There was the whole ‘until death do us apart’ thing that I had to be a part of you see. But that’s old news; the update is here now, and like always, we have loads to tell!!
A Long Awaited Home Page Revamp!
For the longest time, us marketing girls had been giving everyone an earful about how the homepage needed a revamp. And June was the month we got it! We got a whole new features page, a migration form, and a Partner with Us page, amongst other things. And guess what, we have been having such an influx of messages through that migration form, that it’s frankly left all of us wondering why in the world we did not do this sooner!
The RecipeWriter Gets Even More Fancy
That’s right. We have gone ahead and made our much loved RecipeWriter even better with a few choice additions. Like most things we do with the platform, these updates are a results of feedback from bloggers and our own assessment of what will benefit the food blogging community at large. The new updates include the ability to add ‘nofollow’ links, track links and automatic opening of links in new tabs.
These updates have been done specifically keeping in mind sponsored content.
Cucumbertown is on Product Hunt!
It’s always both exciting and intimidating to be on platforms that showcase startups. We are exposing ourselves to a world of both potential criticism and praise. And this appearance on Product Hunt with our new and updated features was exactly that. And we saw a huge surge in interest post the announcement. It’s so good to know that what we are doing is something people love!
Migrations Get Even More Efficient
It’s been exciting times for blogs wanting to migrate to Cucumbertown. We have got shorter wait times, lesser verification and the overall efficiency has improved dramatically. This also means that our numbers are growing exponentially. Yay!
Last month we were excited to welcome Culinary Express, Savory Tales, Recipes and You and Spoon Fork and Food to the Cucumbertown family. And we have more being added to this list every day. Exciting times to say the least…
Customisable Themes and a Theme Development Package Is Now Available
One of the things that we kept hearing, especially during migration conversations was that the themes needed more scope for customisation and that there needed to be a mechanism to develop themes for people who wanted to.
Well we have a reputation of taking feedback, and this time too things were no different.
Here’s how you can customise your theme.
- Login to your Cucumbertown account. Then navigate to your blog .
2. At the right bottom, you will see the button below.
3. When you click on it, this panel will open up.
4. Click on Configure Theme. The page below will open in new tab.
5. To edit an existing theme, click on Edit. To choose a new theme, scroll, choose and then save.
6. When you click on edit, you can customise the appearance, order of widgets and so on.
And here’s a gif in case we missed anything out in that. Always remember to Save for the changes to reflect.
Besides this, a theme development package is also available for designers. So if you have a freelance designer working for you or if you are a designer yourself, reach out to us and this development package will be available to you.
Infinite Scroll Experiment
We had done an experiment to see if infinite scrolls would work to enable readers to spend more time on a specific blog. We had tested this on the Saffron Trail blog, but so far the results haven’t been what we expected. But that’s the thing with experiments, sometimes they work, sometimes, they don’t. This unfortunately belonged to the latter. But lesson learnt. ;)
The infinite scroll basically meant that when you went on to a post in Saffron Trail, you could scroll down, and more and more recipes and posts from the blog would show. This could have encouraged people to spend more time on a particular page or navigate to more pages within the blog.
Check out this post, and you will know what we mean.
Ebook Experiment
Our experiments last month did not end with the above one. We have also started work on No Recipes to include ebooks as a part of the premium benefits for subscribed users.
The books are currently available as downloadable pdfs and come complete with step images.
We are still working on the finer details of this and this feature will only be open to other bloggers after full testing.
Sponsored Content Team Making Major Progress
June has been a very exciting month for us. After long hours of contacting brands, followups and negotiations we had our first campaign in the end of May. In June we had two campaigns with two different brands, one was a confectionery brand and the other was a grocery e-retail brand.
With the confectionery brand, the bloggers had to mention the name of the brand, include keywords and link the brand. With the grocery e-retail brand a similar campaign was conducted where social media promotions were included as a part of the campaign. When the campaign was done, in depth reports were shared with the brands.
More campaigns are planned in the upcoming months and it’s definitely an exciting time to be in the food blogging industry. If you know a brand who is interested in working with us, write to us at partner@cucumbertown.com. If you are a brand, please fill out this partner form, we usually get back within a day.
And The Love Keeps Coming In!
Quite the whirlwind month, don’t you think? But we have to admit, we have been struggling to keep up with the influx of requests and messages. While we would love to respond to every query as soon as possible the last month and this month, we have been tested on this score. Hopefully when our food blogging guide comes out in a few months time, we will have this situation handled in a better way. But until then, we cannot thank our bloggers enough for all their patience and support. Thank you so much! And until next month Ciao!
And don’t forget to subscribe to the magazine for all the updates.
