Women’s Weekly Food
Modernising, refining and updating the Women’s Weekly’s online recipe archive was one of the largest, most complex and fascinating projects of my freelance era. I felt privileged to undertake what amounted to delicate initial surgery on a venerable but ageing beast.
This was a massive undertaking chained to a very tight deadline and based on 20 years of random digitisation. The archive was virtually a historical artefact, yet it was riddled with duplicate, outdated and inconsistent recipes.
I put together and led a team of tech savvy food experts, people with the eye for detail required to comb through the tens of thousands of pages and the subject knowledge necessary to assess and update recipes. We had to correct outdated measurements, replace ingredients that are no longer avalailable and modernise the visual appeal of each page. Finally we needed to redirect every duplicate recipe to the ‘hero’ page, rewrite the metadata and shift each completed section into a holding pen before the implementation of a new CMS. We made it with 2 minutes to spare.
