Welcome To The New Italian Food Forever!

Having had an Italian recipe blog online for almost 10 years now, has meant that both I personally, and Italian Food Forever have gone through a number of changes over the years, and after three years with the same old look, I decided it was time for one more. Italian Food Forever has had facelift, and I am very pleased to unveil our new look! As well as a cleaner look, I wanted a more functional blog that would be easier for me to work with, and easier for my blog visitors to navigate, so decided I needed to make the switch from Joomla to WordPress with lots of help from some very talented people.

The amazing Lindsay of Pur Designs did all the initial logo and blog design work, and incorporated gorgeous watercolors I commissioned from Etsy artist Laura Herron into the design for me. Laura did the farmhouse with sunflower image above, as well as the two sunflower images in the header. Lindsay was wonderful to work with and seemed to know exactly what I needed after asking just a few questions. I’d highly recommend her work! After Lindsay handed over the new blog, it took almost six long weeks of work on my part loading recipes, blog posts and other content. As well as what I was doing, I also had lots of help from Mark W. Law who has been overseeing Italian Food Forever along with his wife Lori since it was first launched almost 10 years ago. Mark made all the many tweaks on the new blog to get everything just the way I wanted it (and I tend to be very picky!), and I am really thrilled with how everything turned out. Thanks so much Lindsay, Laura, and Mark for all your help!

You may ask what improvements we’ve made on the new blog, and I assure you there are many!

The recipes are now easier to find by using the Recipe Category Page, search by ingredient, or by using the basic blog search function. For categories that contained many recipes, the category is broken down again into subcatories to make it easier to find the perfect recipe you are looking for. The recipes have now all been formatted according to Google restrictions, (lots of work!) so are now easier to follow, and all will print out without images. Soon, we hope to be partnering with Ziplist and will allow IFF guests to save their favorite recipes in their own personalized recipe box. Presently, no recipes were posted without an image, although I will be going through the older recipes and taking photos of those I feel are too good not to be included.

The recipes are now in a separate category from blog posts, and the blog posts have been separated into two separate formats; those focusing on featured ingredients and cooking techniques you’ll find in the Mangia Bene Blog , while the blog posts relating to our time spent every year in Umbria can be found under Life In Italy.

Under Kitchen Resources, you’ll find handy substitution and conversion charts, a glossary of Italian ingredients, my cookbook reviews, and a list of my favorite Italian and food blogs.

Under Italian Resources, you’ll find all those related links I had on the old blog including Italian online products, ceramics, plus some cultural and wine links.

I have also switched newsletter delivery services and am now using FeedBlitz. I feel this service will be much easier for folks to sign up for the IFF newsletter, and it will be sent out automatically by email once a week and include any new recipes or blog posts from that week. It is a great way to keep up with what’s new on IFF, and much easier on me as well, leaving me more time for recipe development. Although I have done my best to import all the newsletter subscribers over to FeedBlitz, if you are worried you may miss a mailing, simply add your name to subscribe in the box found at the top right side of every page.

I hope you like the new Italian Food Forever as much as I do, and now that the work behind getting the blog in order has been completed, I can once again spend my time in the kitchen developing new recipes to post!

Deborah Mele
November 2011