Launching the new Vegan Food and Living website
3rd December 2019
Vegan Food and Living is one of the leading websites for vegan recipes, news, product releases and much more. With the magazine being heavily recipe based, the website is the hub for the news stories and other elements of living a vegan lifestyle. Anthem Publishing came to us to help overhaul all of their brand websites – starting with Vegan Food and Living. After looking into the analytics we could see that a staggering 80% of website traffic came from mobile devices. This led us to research into the user’s journey and experience to find out what the consumers wanted.
“We knew the existing site just wasn’t doing our content justice. Now the mobile experience, in particular, is so much more intuitive.”
– Sally FitzGerald, Vegan Food & Living Publisher
We, therefore, started the design process with a mobile-first approach. Our key aim was to enhance the experience of the user, focusing on how we could not only increase dwell time but encourage them to navigate to other areas of the site. We loved the challenge of being able to let the content visually breathe. Designing a content-heavy site is a tricky balancing act. You have a lot of content and you need to show it in a clean – digestible way. Get it wrong, and you risk overwhelming your visitors. This meant that a restructure of the site was vital. Whilst also building a robust and easy to use, bespoke content management system for the whole team to use.
As always when it comes to creating a new website we always design with the customer in mind. There are some great features in the design of this website, created to improve the customer’s experience. One of our personal favourites is the servings adjuster. This helpful little slider changes the amounts of each ingredient to correlate to the serving amount. Saving customers the time and hassle of figuring this out themselves. Additional favourite features of our include an animated hand icon on the mobile site to show new visitors that you can scroll through recipe categories.
The new website launched Friday, 22nd November and so far we have seen a 40% increase in time spent on the site and 104% increase in average time on page – two of our key metrics! Take a look at the new Vegan Food and Living website here and let us know what you think!
“This is the culmination of six months development with Bopgun Design and our brilliant team, and builds on the momentum of what’s already Anthem’s biggest ever site!”
– Jon Bickley, Anthem CEO
