Get a beautiful food blog design

We work with some of the best food bloggers: Once Upon a Chef, Natasha's Kitchen, David Lebovitz, Chocolate & Zucchini, Cooking Classy, Once Upon a Chef, and many more. We’d love to work with you too!

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Helping you grow your audience

Rachel Cunliffe and Stephen Merriman - food blog design pros

Hi, we’re Rachel Cunliffe and Stephen Merriman. We’ll create a beautiful custom website for you using smart strategy and data analysis. Work with us and your website will be a fantastic experience for your visitors, search-engine optimized, mobile-friendly and designed to help people find the information they need.

We’ve been designing websites for seventeen years and are one of the world’s leading design companies in the food industry. Working with countless top food bloggers, food writers, cookbook authors, and food-related businesses, we understand this niche like few others do. (See a few testimonials at the bottom of this page.)

We build beautiful, sophisticated customized tools for people to explore, filter, sort, save, share, print and share recipes which suits the individual needs of each client we work with – while focusing on keeping the site very clean, fresh, modern and focused on the food photography. We keep abreast of online trends in the food blogging industry as well as social media and SEO developments, then consult with our clients regularly on how they can best utilize these on their website.

We’ll benchmark how your site is doing against key performance indicators so these can be tracked and assessed over time. We’re proactive and see ourselves in a partnership with you to grow your business, rather than launching and leaving you to it.

Well-organized recipes with multiple ways to explore them

One of the great things about food blogs is that old content is almost always as relevant and useful as new content. Over time, you’ll have built up a lot of recipes and reorganizing them effectively will help keep visitors on your site for longer.

There’s no one right way to organize recipes: it depends on what you blog about and what’s important to your visitors. Options include organizing by course, season, cuisine style, dietary requirements, popularity, ingredient, and difficulty. Renowned authors Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg organize theirs uniquely by flavor pairings.

Your recipes will be easy-to-read, print, pin and share (and Google-friendly)

Time and time again, food bloggers tell us that this is what they want but they often find things like this difficult to implement. We make sure your recipes look beautiful and work effortlessly. Don’t slow down your site using lots of plugins unnecessarily.

Your mouth-watering photos will be showcased

Let’s optimize the design to the type of photos (or videos) you like to use, rather than forcing you to use a pre-determined size or layout. When exploring recipe archives, we’ll use your images as well where applicable.

Your ads, subscriptions and calls-to-action will be optimally placed

We’ll ensure you comply with your ad network requirements (“above the fold” definitions, responsive ad formats etc) and can help you A/B test options. We start off each project by defining your goals and the actions you want people to take on your blog. For example, if you’re wanting to focus on growing your mailing list subscribers, we’ll assess various placement options for you and test what works best.

In the six months after we redesigned and streamlined Once Upon a Chef with a new responsive food blog design, Jennifer Segal’s traffic and advertising revenue increased threefold and new email subscribers went “through the roof”.

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Testimonials from food bloggers

“I live in the United States so initially I was a little wary about hiring a design team all the way in New Zealand, but those concerns turned out to be entirely unfounded. Hiring Rachel and Stephen to redesign my website was one of the best business decisions I have ever made. They are a pleasure to work with – always professional, responsive (despite the time difference), and knowledgeable – and my new site is as beautiful as it is functional.

The numbers speak for themselves: since the launch of the new site about six months ago, my traffic and advertising revenues have increased threefold. Not only that, new email subscriptions have gone through the roof, thanks to a more engaging design and sign-up process that is easy and seamless.

I have continued to work with Rachel and Stephen and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them – they are the top-notch!”

“We thank our lucky stars for the day that we discovered Rachel Cunliffe and Stephen Merriman — a smart, creative sister-and-brother team that designs beautiful websites, including our new one. They are consummate professionals and a joy to work with, and we can’t recommend them to you highly enough. We know you’ll thank us later. (You’re welcome.)”

“Working with Rachel and Stephen has been the smoothest of experiences, and they have continually impressed me with their professionalism, responsiveness, and creative thinking. The complete makeover and migration of a website can be a stressful and daunting project for a blogger to undertake, but I felt in the best of hands and would recommend their services wholeheartedly.”

More testimonials

It’s all about getting your business results.

When your business succeeds, so does ours. Can’t wait to speak with you!

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