: we are officially launching brand-new Coaching Calls with Bjork this month!

What exactly are these Coaching Calls? So glad you asked!

In this post, we’ll dive into what the Coaching Calls are, how they’ll work, and how to get registered for the chance to participate!

What are the Food Blogger Pro Coaching Calls?

Food Blogger Pro members can sign up for the chance to participate in a 1:1 Coaching Call with the one, the only… Bjork Ostrom (our trusty Food Blogger Pro cofounder). Coaching Calls are an opportunity for members to work through their specific blogging or business questions and problems with Bjork. 

How the Coaching Calls Will Work

Coaching Calls will be conducted via Zoom and will provide Food Blogger Pro members with a way to ask at least 3 specific questions about their blog and business to help them reach their current goals. 

Coaching Calls aren’t audits, nor are they a place to advertise a blog, brand, and/or business. Instead, they’re a place for food bloggers to spend an hour talking through their biggest questions about starting or growing a blog, brand, and/or business with Bjork.

We will record each conversation and post it to our Live page during the first week of every month so that the greater FBP community can learn from the advice! 

Best of all, Coaching Calls are included in your membership! If you’re an active member, you can submit an application and watch each month’s recorded Coaching Call.

How to Sign Up for a Coaching Call

Active Food Blogger Pro members can submit an application here. Only one Coaching Call will be published each month, so even if you submit an application, it’s not a guarantee that you’ll be selected for a Coaching Call.

We hope you’re as excited about these Coaching Calls as we are! If you have any thoughts or questions about these calls, be sure to leave them as a comment below!

The post Introducing Food Blogger Pro Coaching Calls appeared first on Food Blogger Pro.

A little over six years ago, we started working on the businesses you’ve come to know as WP Tasty and Nutrifox. 

We were building some custom plugins for our own site, Pinch of Yum, and thought that other bloggers might find these plugins valuable as well, so we started WP Tasty to offer them for sale.

Within a few years, hundreds of publishers a month were signing up to use WP Tasty plugins on their sites and use Nutrifox to analyze their ingredients and generate nutrition labels.

As these businesses and products have grown, we came to realize that the best home for these products would be with a company that focuses entirely on WordPress plugins and software development, so we started to look for potential acquirers who could dedicate the time and resources needed to continue developing and evolving the products.

Enter Strategy11.

Strategy11 was founded by Steve and Steph Wells in 2010. They’re now 20 people strong, and their focus from the start has been WordPress plugins. Steph, the co-founder and CTO of Strategy11, will explain more about who they are in a bit.

One of the greatest joys I’ve had in working on WP Tasty and Nutrifox has been seeing publishers like yourself using the products and creating amazing, captivating content. With that in mind, I’m excited to continue watching the growth of these products and, in turn, the growth of your following and impact.

Looking forward to what’s to come!

–

Bjork

Hi there! I’m Steph Wells, the co-founder and CTO of Strategy11. 

I thought it would be helpful to explain a bit more about who we are, what this transition means for you, and hear about any ideas or insights you have for WP Tasty and Nutrifox products. 

Who is Strategy11?

We’re the team behind Formidable Forms, the most advanced WordPress form builder. A couple of years back, Business Directory Plugin and AWP Classifieds joined our family too. But we’re always ready for more great ways we can help make building websites enjoyable!

What Does this Mean for Existing Users?

Aside from the ownership change, it’s business as usual. You can continue to rely on the WP Tasty team and all the Tasty plugins you’ve come to love.

What’s Coming Next?

Over the coming months, we have plans to further simplify and enhance the products you’re used to. We’ll be working hard to help you make the most successful food blogs on the web!

One of the first steps we’d like to take is to gather your insights and feedback and hear about any product features you might be interested in seeing.

Can you take a quick survey to help us plan? There’s so much we want to do, but it needs to be what you want too.

I want to thank Bjork and the team for all the hard work they put into WP Tasty and Nutrifox to make them the products they are today. I also want to thank all of you who are already using these great plugins, and I hope to earn your support for years to come.

Steph Wells
Co-Founder and CTO of Strategy11

The post WP Tasty is Now Part of the Strategy11 Family appeared first on Food Blogger Pro.

Today’s post is a little bit different, and that’s because it’s an inside look at all the lovely people that help run Food Blogger Pro each and every day!

Chances are you might have interacted with some (or all!) of us somewhere or another on Food Blogger Pro, but we wanted to officially introduce ourselves in this post.

All of us that you see here are part of Team Food Blogger Pro, but we’re also part of TinyBit, the parent company in our family of businesses. Every member of our team helps keep Food Blogger Pro running smoothly, and we’re so grateful for every single one of them.

Let’s jump into the introductions, shall we?

Bjork

What do you do at Food Blogger Pro? My main focus at FBP is the podcast, Live Q&As, and occasionally some courses.

Where do you live? Twin Cities!

What’s your emoji aesthetic (five most recently used emojis, not including faces)? 

What’s one thing that makes you excited? A good book and a good cup of coffee.

If you had to eat one meal every day for the rest of your life, what would it be? Every day? I’d have to say…a cheeseburger? Then again, that might get old after a few days. 

What does your ideal weekend look like? Time with family and friends! And a football game if it’s fall!

What’s your favorite part about working at Food Blogger Pro? Seeing someone apply a new concept or idea they’ve learned and unlocking a new level of success because of it!

Alexa

What do you do at Food Blogger Pro? I’m General Manager, so I oversee the day-to-day here at Food Blogger Pro. I like thinking of new ways we can better serve our members and help them reach their blogging and business goals.

Where do you live? Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania! The City of Champions, the Steel City, and one of the least sunny cities in America.

What’s your emoji aesthetic (five most recently used emojis, not including faces)? 

What’s one thing that makes you excited? My cat, Maya, always always always makes me excited. She’s sassy and hyper and my very favorite thing!

If you had to eat one meal every day for the rest of your life, what would it be? The Creamy Cashew Mac and Cheese recipe from America’s Test Kitchen’s cookbook, Vegan for Everybody, would probably be my vote right now. Now that the weather is getting a little more fall-y, creamy comfort food is all I’m thinking about!

What does your ideal weekend look like? Lots of reading, a brewery or two, and maybe a fun dinner at a fun restaurant! And lots of coffee from my favorite place in Pittsburgh, La Prima.

What’s your favorite part about working at Food Blogger Pro? Two big things stick out to me: 

1. I love my coworkers. I feel lucky every day to have such a kind, smart, and fun group to work with! 
2. I am constantly inspired by our members and their dedication to working hard so they can do what they love to do. Plus, I’ve had the pleasure to meet so many of them in-person (see the photos ), and everyone has been so kind and thoughtful!

Emily

What do you do at Food Blogger Pro? I am the Content Specialist at Food Blogger Pro! I write blog posts, manage our social media accounts, develop new courses and course updates, and help out with the podcast!

Where do you live? I live in Decatur, Georgia, a neighborhood in Atlanta.

What’s your emoji aesthetic (five most recently used emojis, not including faces)? 

What’s one thing that makes you excited? Maybe it is because I’m writing this in mid-September, but I get *really* excited for fall every year. I love the changing weather, the upcoming holidays, football, seasonal recipes, and the cozy vibes.

If you had to eat one meal every day for the rest of your life, what would it be? A large mug of black coffee, a giant croissant from my favorite bakery, and a handful of ripe berries.

What does your ideal weekend look like? My ideal weekend would include an outing to a brewery with my husband and 2-year-old son, a relaxing afternoon reading a good book and baking a cake, a long walk, dinner with friends, breakfast from a bakery, and a morning with my family at the beach (clearly not realistic in Atlanta, but you said ideal!).

What’s your favorite part about working at Food Blogger Pro? I love my team! Even though we work remotely, I feel so connected to, and supported by, my fellow FBPers – they’re the best!

Natalie

What do you do at Food Blogger Pro? I’m a Content Creator and Editor, so I assist with developing, editing, and updating course and blog content.

Where do you live? I spend most of my time in Southern Florida and a few months in California (as you can see I’m chasing that sun!).

What’s your emoji aesthetic (five most recently used emojis, not including faces)? 

What’s one thing that makes you excited? Seasonal food – I am a huge fan of the changing flavors! Plus, I love anything festive and get way too excited about baking/cooking holiday-related food.

If you had to eat one meal every day for the rest of your life, what would it be? Oof, that’s a hard one! I’m a huge garlic fan so probably Spaghetti Agilo e Olio with a side of sourdough bread.

What does your ideal weekend look like? On a sunny day my ideal weekend includes a morning hike followed by brunch and a whole lot of relaxation. And on a rainy weekend you’ll find me under a blanket with a cup of coffee and a good book (or tv show).

What’s your favorite part about working at Food Blogger Pro? Working with not only a team, but also a whole community, that is as passionate about food and blogging as me is incredible!

Jasmine

What do you do at Food Blogger Pro? Graphic design! I design web pages for the site, UI design for our membership community pages, and various graphics for the blog and special projects.

Where do you live? Vancouver, Canada

What’s your emoji aesthetic (five most recently used emojis, not including faces)? 

What’s one thing that makes you excited? The thing that makes me most excited is “flavor.” I studied wine and artisan chocolate because I am fascinated with the different flavors that can be perceived in both products. It’s always a little magical when you try a new flavor and it sparks a memory or new sensation. When I travel, I always want to try the local fruits and vegetables because food usually tastes best close to where it was grown. One of the best things I’ve ever eaten is fresh cacao fruit, which is the white fruit inside a cacao pod. Chocolate is made from the seeds, but the fruit is nearly impossible to get in Canada.

If you had to eat one meal every day for the rest of your life, what would it be? This is the hardest question. I guess I would choose a Vietnamese Vermicelli Bowl with lemongrass chicken and a side of fried spring rolls. It ticks all the boxes for me a little sweet, a little salty, fresh raw veggies, and something deep fried!

What does your ideal weekend look like? My ideal weekend involves a baking or ice cream-making project. I like to go through all my cookbooks and find something challenging, shop for the special ingredients, and then spend an afternoon in the kitchen. Then, I share the results with friends and family. The best reward is seeing them enjoy something I’ve made.

What’s your favorite part about working at Food Blogger Pro? My favorite thing about working at Food Blogger Pro is the team culture. I’ve worked on many teams in my life, but FBP is by far the best. Not only is everyone amazing at their jobs, but they are also all kind, respectful, fun, and compassionate.

Mary

What do you do at Food Blogger Pro? I hang out in Intercom and assist members with questions and troubleshooting.

Where do you live? The Mitten State – Michigan!

What’s your emoji aesthetic (five most recently used emojis, not including faces)? 

What’s one thing that makes you excited? Sunny days that aren’t too hot or cold – perfect for long walks with a podcast or audiobook!

If you had to eat one meal every day for the rest of your life, what would it be? Ooof, that’s a hard question! I would say a bowl o’ food type meal – a protein, carb, fresh and cooked veggies, something crunchy, and a sauce. It’s my favorite thing to make and I never get tired of them. 

What does your ideal weekend look like? Enough sleep (we have a young daughter and a puppy ), watching Liverpool FC with my husband, reading time with hot cups of tea, visiting a friend or two, eating dinner outside on our deck, and soaking up some sunny weather and family time.

What’s your favorite part about working at Food Blogger Pro? The team and FBP members really live out our value that everyone has unsurpassable worth. There’s so much care and thought that goes into everything we do, and I also see this reflected in member interactions in the forum and Intercom. It’s a wonderful thing to be part of!

And that’s our team! We hope you enjoyed getting to learn a little bit more about the people who help keep Food Blogger Pro running each and every day.

Now let us know in the comments: If you had to eat one meal every day for the rest of your life, what would it be? (This was by far the hardest question for all of us, so we’d love to know your answer.)

The post Meet the Food Blogger Pro Team appeared first on Food Blogger Pro.

Psst… did you know that Food Blogger Pro members get exclusive access to experts in the field of recipe SEO, WordPress, Pinterest, email marketing, and more?

It’s true! We work with an incredible group of experts (who we like to call the Food Blogger Pro Experts) who help answer member questions in the forum, participate in Live Q&As, and contribute to our courses.

And honestly, Food Blogger Pro wouldn’t be what it is today without our wonderful experts, so we wanted to give you a chance to get to know each of them in today’s post.

Without further ado, let’s get into the introductions!

Andrew Wilder — WordPress Support Expert

What’s your job/title? Founder and CEO of NerdPress. We provide support, maintenance, and optimization for WordPress sites, helping take some of the stress of managing a site off your plate. I launched my own food blog way back in 2010, and soon other bloggers started hiring me to help with their sites… and things grew from there. We’re now a team of thirteen, supporting hundreds of websites — most of which are food blogs, of course!

Where do you live? Santa Monica, California

What’s your #1 tip for food bloggers? For those starting out: Don’t be too hard on yourself! Your content probably won’t be great (or perfectly optimized for SEO!) right out of the gate. That’s totally normal and is part of the journey. It’s more important to just keep going — you’ll improve over time. Don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good,” or you’ll never get your site off the ground. If you’ve been doing this for a while: Build a team as soon as you can! There are dozens of different tasks and skills needed to run a blog, and just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Try to do more of what you are really good at and enjoy doing, and start hiring help for the rest as soon as you can.

What’s one thing you wish beginner bloggers knew about site speed or hosting? Oh, there are so many! For site speed, I’d say that while it is important, it’s not nearly as critical as having great content. So many people stress about their speed “score” when in reality, it’s a small ranking factor. Especially for a newer site, it’s much more important to focus on creating lots of great content that resonates with your readers. Faster is better, of course, but it doesn’t solve any other underlying issues. As for hosting — don’t skimp! Your site will not reach its potential on a cheap, shared host that only charges $1.99/month. That doesn’t mean you have to pay a fortune, though. For example, BigScoots has excellent hosting that starts at $35/month and provides fast, reliable hosting with phenomenal customer support and service. They work with hundreds of food blogs, so they understand the unique demands of this niche — something you don’t get at a commodity host that has millions of sites.

Where can FBP members find you? Our website is www.nerdpress.net, or you can reach me at support@nerdpress.net. Leslie and Alexa also remind me to check in on the FBP forums from time to time too… so I’ll see you there!

 You can find Andrew on Food Blogger Pro here.

Casey Markee — SEO Expert

1. What’s your job/title? Founder, Media Wyse
2. Where do you live? Ramona, CA (East San Diego County)
3. What’s your #1 tip for food bloggers? Don’t blindly follow the example of a bigger blogger.
4. What’s one thing you wish beginner bloggers knew about SEO? It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Even the best advice takes time to show results.
5. Where can FBP members find you? You can find me on Twitter @MediaWyse or on Facebook.

 You can find Casey on Food Blogger Pro here.

Kate Ahl — Pinterest Expert

What’s your job/title? CEO, owner of Simple Pin Media

Where do you live? Portland, Oregon

What’s your #1 tip for food bloggers? Find what makes you stand out among the crowd, and it doesn’t always have to be your recipes. It can be branding, humor, writing, etc. There’s room for all of us at the table, and you have a unique spin on the food you create. 

What’s one thing you wish beginner bloggers knew about Pinterest? That it’s not very fun to use it as a marketing tool sometimes, but it’s an essential part of the marketing plan for food creators. It’s where people go to search for recipes and new ideas. It’s not magic; it takes investment and planning. But it doesn’t have to take all your time. Take a step back from all the Facebook groups where people share amazing success stories or complain about the platform. Let your data, goals, and marketing plan be your guide. Then, add in some resources and education along the way to keep you moving forward. 

Where can FBP members find you? You can find me at simplepinmedia.com, or you can DM me on Instagram @simplepinmedia!

 You can find Kate on Food Blogger Pro here.

Danielle Liss — Legal Expert

What’s your job/title? I’m the owner of Businessese, where we provide DIY legal templates. I’m also an attorney at LISS Legal, where I focus on simplifying legal for online business owners.

Where do you live? Las Vegas, NV

What’s your #1 tip for food bloggers? Don’t forget to include legal in your business planning and strategy. Way too often legal gets ignored because it’s overwhelming or complicated. By including it in your overall strategy, you can ensure that you are taking a more proactive approach. After that, always make sure you get it in writing in a contract.

What’s one thing you wish beginner bloggers knew about the legal side of blogging? Your legal needs can change based on what stage of business you are in. If you are just starting out, there are definitely aspects of your business that you should consider. As your business grows, so do your legal needs, so don’t assume you can (in the words of Ron Popeil) set it and forget it. If you want to learn more about the different stages of business, I discussed this at length in a podcast episode.

Where can FBP members find you? For DIY legal templates, visit businessese.com. For legal services, visit lisslegal.com. You can also learn more from the Simplifying Legal for Small Business Owners podcast.

 You can find Danielle on Food Blogger Pro here.

Allea Grummert — Email Marketing Expert

What’s your job/title? Email Marketing Strategist & Conversion Copywriter and owner of Duett

Where do you live? Lincoln, Nebraska. Go Big Red! 

What’s your #1 tip for food bloggers? Someone needs what you’re creating — so confidently share it!

What’s one thing you wish beginner bloggers knew about email marketing? You don’t have to do “all of the things” in order to use email marketing successfully. Start today, even if that’s a simple welcome email and an RSS feed to send your new recipes out to subscribers. Make it easy on yourself to share your recipes easily!

Where can FBP members find you? You’ll always find me behind my inbox, sending helpful emails all about how to get the most out of YOUR email marketing. You can hop on the list through any of these resources (I recommend you start with the first one: Your First Welcome Sequence.) If you’re on Instagram, you’ll find me at @alleagrummert.

 You can find Allea on Food Blogger Pro here.

Lauren Gray — Web Development Expert

What’s your job/title? I am the founder and lead web developer at Once Coupled! Mostly that means I’m a nerd  with nerd   friends that I get to work with!

Where do you live? I am in the beautiful Sunshine State, Florida! I currently reside in Clearwater, near Tampa. I love central Florida because we have amazing, warm weather but it’s milder than other parts of Florida (like the panhandle, where I grew up). So the summer is cooler and the winter is warmer and basically it’s paradise if you love humidity (and somehow I do)!

What’s your #1 tip for food bloggers? Whatever you want to do: do it! Like, today. Launch that site today, publish that article today, share something personal — today. You can always improve it tomorrow.   I think this niche attracts so many of us perfectionists and we have to work extra hard to practice 1% infinity with Bjork, because we want to do the “infinity” part all at once, until we have it, well, perfect! But — at the risk of sounding soooooo cheesy — today is perfect.

What’s one thing you wish beginner bloggers knew about web development? Keep it simple. There are so many cool things that fancy development can do for you. But those things can’t build your traffic, only assist a great content strategy. A simple theme, minimal plugins, and stellar content will go further than getting the perfect theme, design, plugins, widgets, etc. Plus (at the risk of totally getting too techy here) some themes or plugins can actually make it harder for you to do a custom theme in the future. The more you’re focusing on content and the less you’re worrying about tech, the better position you’re in long-term. (Disregard that I’m totally anti-selling — is that a word?? — my profession! Custom themes are great for user experience and can assist SEO, speed, etc. But later, ya know?)

Where can FBP members find you? Gosh, right now I’m a straight hermit. I have a limit on my phone that lets me spend exactly 2 minutes on Facebook, so you could ping me there and I’ll probably see it eventually!   Or if you live in Clearwater and have a dog, you can find me 3x a week at the dog park #ClearwaterDoodles!!   OK, in all seriousness the best way to do a Q&A with me is in the FBP forum! I love answering questions about themes, development, CSS, and will do my best with plugins too.

 You can find Lauren on Food Blogger Pro here.

Andrea Balogun — Social Media Strategy Expert

What’s your job/title? Owner + Lead Strategist & Designer, Balogun Strategy & Design

Where do you live? Nashville, TN

What’s your #1 tip for food bloggers?  My #1 tip for food bloggers is to document everything. Many content creators believe they have to create everything from scratch, but the advantage food bloggers have is that they can repurpose content they’re already producing by recording their processes behind the scenes.

What’s one thing you wish beginner bloggers knew about social media? Social media is a great place to find your ideal clients and community, but you shouldn’t build up your audience to keep them there. The goal should always be to move them to your website and/or email list.

Where can FBP members find you? I spend most of my time on Instagram @andreabalogun and Pinterest @balogunstrategydesign.

 You can find Andrea on Food Blogger Pro here.

Brita Britnell — Social Media Video Expert

What’s your job/title? I’m the CEO, owner, and creative director at Food with Feeling, which is a vegetarian-focused food blog!

Where do you live? Portland, OR

What’s your #1 tip for food bloggers? Focus on mastering one thing at a time! Especially when you’re just starting out, there are SO many things to learn from web development, design, photography, SEO, and the nuances of each social platform. It’s SO MUCH! When I decided that I really wanted to turn my blog into a seriously profitable business, I picked a new thing to master and hyper-focused on it until I felt like I had a good handle on it. Video was one of those things and it took longer than most. Then, I spent a month on Pinterest, etc. Some you can learn in a day, most take a month or two to feel proficient, and others even longer. But I tried not to move on to the next thing until I felt proficient in what I was learning at the time. And once you’re able to: HIRE THOSE THINGS OUT to free up time to learn more (or just to enjoy your life more)!

What’s one thing you wish beginner bloggers knew about video? It doesn’t need to be perfect. I’ve ALWAYS said that but the heavy focus on Reels and TikToks has made that even more so. The lighting doesn’t need to be good, the food doesn’t need to be perfectly styled, and you don’t need makeup on to produce a highly engaging video that’s capable of reaching millions. 

Where can FBP members find you? I’m most active on Instagram @foodwithfeeling, but I pop over to TikTok @foodwithfeeling quite often as well.

 You can find Brita on Food Blogger Pro here.

Nisha Vora — YouTube Expert

What’s your job/title? I’m the creator behind Rainbow Plant Life, a vegan recipe website, YouTube Channel, and Instagram page, as well as the author of The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook.

Where do you live? San Diego, California

What’s your #1 tip for food bloggers? My advice is to know why you got into this in the first place. Food blogging is hard. At times, it feels like you need to be a master recipe developer, copywriter, photographer, social media influencer, tech support person, and more. Remembering your purpose and keeping it at the forefront of your mind will sustain you when things feel overwhelming. 

What’s one thing you wish beginner bloggers knew about YouTube? You need to adopt a growth mindset. Your videos are not going to be perfect in the beginning, and that’s okay. The best way to get good at making YouTube videos is to make YouTube videos. Get started, then aim to get a bit better with every video. 

Where can FBP members find you? Say hi over on Instagram @rainbowplantlife or see what’s happening in my kitchen over on YouTube!

 You can find Nisha on Food Blogger Pro here.

Alison Bechdol — Google Analytics Expert

What’s your job/title? Owner of Digital-ade (Digital Marketing and Analytics Consultant)

Where do you live? Milwaukee, WI

What’s your #1 tip for food bloggers? Use UTMs! UTM Parameters are extremely important for accurate attribution. All inbound marketing efforts should be utilizing tracking mechanisms to understand where users came from before landing on your site. Unsure what UTMs are? I got you!

What’s one thing you wish beginner bloggers knew about video? Make sure you are using CC when possible. Not only is this important for users who don’t like to use sound while on their phone/computer but it is also best practice for accessibility. Also, Youtube counts a view after ~30 seconds.

Where can FBP members find you? You can find me at digital-ade.com or email me at alison@digital-ade.com.

You can find Alison on Food Blogger Pro here.

Melissa Rose — Branding and Design Expert

What’s your job/title? Creative Director & Designer

Where do you live? Nashville, TN

What’s your #1 tip for food bloggers? Even more important than the visual appearance of your brand is how your readers feel when they interact with you or your content. Always try to keep in mind that your audience consists of real people, not just numbers or avatars on a screen. They rely on you to provide recipes that are well-tested, reliable, and don’t waste the ingredients they’ve spent their hard-earned money on. Before sharing a recipe, ask yourself if it’s something you genuinely believe in and would confidently recommend to a friend.

Prioritizing quality recipes over just focusing on SEO-driven content isn’t the easy path, but it builds integrity and trust with your readers, naturally improving SEO as they become loyal fans and frequent visitors to your website. With the current state of shifting algorithms, I strongly believe that establishing trust with your audience is the most important thing for long-term success. Even if search engines or social media platforms change the visibility of your content, your readers’ trust will ensure they keep returning to your website year after year.

What’s one thing you wish beginner bloggers knew about branding/design? While many designers will tell you that you need professionally-designed branding, it’s often unnecessary when first starting your website. Instead, opt for a simple typographic logo and accessible color palette, then maintain consistency with those choices throughout the graphics you create. Rather than spending countless hours perfecting your branding, launch your site and refine it as you go.

Many new bloggers spend valuable time fixating on aesthetics at the beginning, when the focus should be on content creation. Building a strong brand takes time, and it’s okay to iterate and make improvements along the way. Once your site is generating income and you feel the need for more professionally designed branding, that’s the time to invest if you believe it’s hindering the vision you have for your brand.

Where can FBP members find you?

• Melissa Rose Design (Design Studio)
• Feast+ (Designer)
• Email: melissa@melissarosedesign.com

You can find Melissa on Food Blogger Pro here.

Jenna Arend — Communications Expert

What’s your job/title? General Manager at Pinch of Yum

Where do you live? Saint Paul, MN

What’s your #1 tip for food bloggers? Don’t get too caught up in the numbers, analytics, and pressure of always doing the “new cool thing” when it comes to running a food blog. Make connecting with your readers and filling whatever their needs are as the first and final goal.

What’s one thing you wish beginner bloggers knew about communications, sponsored content, or anything you do? Focus on small changes and small progress every day. You won’t create a flourishing sponsored content program, SEO strategy, or communications plan overnight, or in a week, month, or year. We’re constantly evolving what we’re doing ourselves, even after 10+ years. Set your goal from a bird’s eye view, but then focus in closer to take things one step and one day at a time.

Where can FBP members find you? You can contact me via email at jenna@pinchofyum.com! 

 You can find Jenna on Food Blogger Pro here.

We hope you enjoyed learning a bit more about the Food Blogger Pro Experts! They are so knowledgeable and helpful, and we’re incredibly lucky to have them as part of the community.

If you’re a Food Blogger Pro member, you can always search for any content our experts have provided to FBP by using the Source drop-down menu on our Search page.

Now we’d love to know: Have you ever interacted with any of the FBP Experts? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Meet the Food Blogger Pro Experts appeared first on Food Blogger Pro.

Introducing: The Food Blogger Pro Member Directory!

Starting this week, members can use this directory to search for and connect with their fellow Food Blogger Pro members and experts. You can search for members by niche, location, name, and blog name!

We’ve said it before, and we’ll continue saying it: One of the best parts of Food Blogger Pro is the community. Why?

• Blogging can be lonely. It can feel like we’re isolated from others when we’re developing recipes, photographing or videoing food, and writing blog posts all by ourselves.
• We can learn and grow by connecting, collaborating, and troubleshooting with one another. Other members have had similar experiences to our own, so we can learn from their knowledge and share our own in the pursuit of making positive progress on our blogs and businesses.

This Member Directory is just one of the ways we’re making blogging feel a little less isolated and helping members connect! We’re so excited for you to use it to meet, follow, and engage with your fellow Food Blogger Pro members.

Using the Member Directory

If you’ve been around Food Blogger Pro for a while, you’ll notice that our menu bar now looks a little different. You can now access the directory and the forum under the Community section:

Once you’re there, you can use the filter and search to find members you’ve connected with on the forum, members that live in the same area as you, or members by their blog names:

Only active members will appear in the directory.

How to Fill Out Your Member Card

Here’s what a completed member card looks like:

You’ll notice that we display information like your:

• Photo
• Name
• Blog Name and URL
• Location
• Social links
• Blog niche
• Bio

You can add almost all of that information right on Food Blogger Pro. Simply head to the top-right corner of the menu bar, click on the “Hi, Your Name” drop-down menu, and then click Edit Profile:

When you scroll down, you’ll see the fields you can fill out to complete your member card for the dashboard:

If you’re looking to upload or change your profile picture, check out this support doc!

And of course, as a member, you have the choice of how much or how little information you share on the directory. Or you can opt-out all-together by switching this setting to Disabled:

So be sure to do some searchin’ on the Member Directory to connect with and follow your fellow members on social!

Let us know if you have any thoughts or feedback by leaving a comment below or emailing support@foodbloggerpro.com. See you there!

The post Introducing: The Member Directory! appeared first on Food Blogger Pro.

Today we’re exploring:

• Why we knew we needed something like a Member Dashboard
• Member Dashboard Module Tour

It’s an exciting day here at Food Blogger Pro HQ… because we just launched our new Member Dashboard!

This dashboard has been months in the making, and we’re so thrilled to share it with all of our Food Blogger Pro members today.

If you log into the site, you’ll notice that you’re now taken directly to this dashboard instead of the Community Forum. If you’re elsewhere on the site and want to navigate back to the Dashboard, simply click on the logo in the top-left corner of your menu bar:

Here are all of the details you need to know about this new Member Dashboard:

Why we knew we needed something like a Member Dashboard

Since Food Blogger Pro launched back in February 2013, members have gotten instant access to every piece of content we had at the time that they joined. Not only that, since we’re constantly creating new content and updating old content for our members, the amount of resources they had access to grew every week.

We like to say that your Food Blogger Pro membership will look different at the end of your first week as a member because we always have new resources (courses, Q&As, forum discussions, blog posts, podcast episodes) for members to explore.

As you can imagine, nearly nine years later, we have a lot of content on our site –– including over 80 courses, thousands of forum discussions, years of Q&As, and other timely videos.

I know I’m biased, but it’s incredibly helpful content. It’s about the tools, strategies, and workflows that food bloggers need to know and implement in order to grow their food blogs into money-making businesses.

That said, it’s only helpful if members can find it.

We started getting feedback from our members like this:

“I am overwhelmed and don’t even know where to start.”

“The trouble we have has nothing to do the resources you provide but more just juggling and weeding through the information and trying to prioritize what to do and when.”

“I hate that when I log in I land on the community forum page. It’s hard to know where to start to dig through the forum and find good information.”

“I would also like a landing page that is offers more visual cues for navigation. I have a hard time finding what I am looking for.”

After getting feedback like that, we knew that members wanted to learn and wanted to make progress on their blogs by utilizing our content, but they had a tough time actually prioritizing that content, figuring out where they should start, and finding the right content they wanted to consume.

That’s where the idea of the Member Dashboard was born!

Member Dashboard Module Tour

We divided the Member Dashboard into different sections, or modules, to help members focus on exactly what they were trying to accomplish:

The Course Banner

The Course Banner is the first thing you’ll see on the Member Dashboard… provided that you’ve started watching a course. If you’re brand new to Food Blogger Pro, or maybe you just haven’t had a chance to check out the course content yet, you won’t see this Course Banner.

That said, there are a few different conditions where you will see the banner.

If you started a course but haven’t quite finished yet, you’ll see an orange banner reminding you where you were and showing you how much time is left to complete the course:

If you’ve finished a course, you’ll see a blue banner congratulating you for finishing the course and encouraging you to find a new course in the modules below:

The Crush Your Goals Module

Not gonna lie, I think this is my favorite module of the bunch! And that’s because we’ve created Focus pages to help members dive deep into specific topics:

We’ve identified 22 of the top topics that food bloggers and members want to explore (ranging from SEO to photography to Instagram) and created curated Focus pages for each. Then we assigned our most relevant content to each Focus page:

These Focus pages allow members to find and hone in on the information (via courses, podcast episodes, blog posts, forum threads, and Q&As) that matters most to them.

You can even select which six Focuses show up on your dashboard! To do so:

• Click Explore All Topics to be taken to the Focus overview page
• Hover over the topic you’d like to favorite and clicking the star icon

You can also “star” a topic as a favorite on individual Focus pages:

The Question of the Week Module

This is a relatively simple module, but we’re hoping that it’ll help members learn a bit more about their fellow Food Blogger Pro members and give some visibility into how others are growing, monetizing, and running their sites:

We’ll swap out the question each week with a relevant, timely question, and we’ll show you the results once you vote. If you’re a member and are surprised or curious about a specific question’s responses, we encourage you to ask about it in the Community Forum!

The Let’s Chat Module

Speaking of… we created a module for the Community Forum itself!

In this area of the Member Dashboard, you’ll find a curated list of top forum discussions from the week, quick links to access your favorite discussions and the discussions to which you’re subscribed, and then the photos of the members who have been active in the past week.

You can even click on the member photos to be taken to their member profiles in order to learn a bit more about your fellow FBP members!

The Stay in the Loop Module

Because, as I mentioned, we’re constantly adding new pieces of content (value!) to your membership, we wanted to add an area where you can quickly see what we have planned for you in the next few weeks:

And if you want to dive a bit deeper into our most recent content, we provided a link so you can easily access to our full Membership Calendar as well. You can also subscribe to that calendar so that you’re always… in the loop (see what I did there? ).

The Industry News Module

Last but certainly not least, we have our Industry News module:

This is where you can find links to the top and most recent news from the food blogging industry. Here you’ll find information about Google updates, social media changes, strategy recommendations, and more.

These links are provided to you by the Food Blogger Pro team and our Food Blogger Pro Experts.

And that’s a wrap for this Member Dashboard tour! We hope you enjoyed learning about the why behind the dashboard, as well as some of the specific features of the dashboard.

If you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear them! Email us at support@foodbloggerpro.com to ask us your questions.

The post Introducing: The Food Blogger Pro Member Dashboard appeared first on Food Blogger Pro.

Webster’s Dictionary defines Discovery as…

Just kidding. Hi! And welcome to Part 2 of our blog series on Food Blogger Pro’s migration to WordPress. 

If you want to get caught up, be sure to check out Part 1 here to learn more about our decision to move from ExpressionEngine to WordPress. 

Today we’re talking about Discovery. Aka. The first step in our five-part migration process!

As the first stage of our migration process, Discovery included:

1. Writing an Initial Planning Document
2. Assigning Team Roles
3. Requirements Gathering
4. Evaluating Software
5. Documenting Decision Rationale
6. Creating Development Tasks and Tickets

We’ll cover all of these steps in this post and talk about why they’re important, how they impacted the project as a whole, and how you might want to implement similar steps as you’re starting a big project. 

If you’re doing Discovery on your own project, it might look a bit different! Ultimately, the goal of Discovery is to make as many decisions as possible before you get into implementation. When you’re cooking a recipe, it’s easiest if you buy all of the ingredients in advance — and a huge delay if you have to go to the grocery store to pick up the items you missed.

Before we dive in, it’s important to note that we used Asana, a project management application, to track our progress through these steps. We had a different project within Asana for each phase of our migration project, so everything we’ll talk about today is taking place in our Discovery project.

Ready? Let’s do this!

Writing an Initial Planning Document

One of the first things that our developer, Daniel, requested when he started this project with us was a seven-page Initial Planning Document. 

Daniel was familiar with Food Blogger Pro, but he wasn’t as in-tune with the ins and outs of the business like the other three people (Bjork, Raquel, and yours truly ) on the migration team were.

That’s why the Initial Planning Document was so helpful and necessary – it was a place where we could braindump information about our existing ExpressionEngine site and start solidifying our vision for our eventual WordPress site. The Initial Planning Document was the foundation for ensuring everyone had access to the same information.

Our Initial Planning Document covered:

What is the Food Blogger Pro website

In this section, we answered questions like how many existing members we had at the time (~2,600), the key functional components of the site (course videos hosted by Vimeo, forums, deals, live videos hosted by CrowdCast, blog, etc.), how affiliate payments work (recurring monthly affiliate payments are tied to membership signups), and any third-party apps or tools we use on FBP (ActiveCampaign, Intercom, etc.). 

Answers to High-Level Questions

These questions helped guide our planning and helped everyone understand the state of the business. These questions included:

• What’s our yearly revenue? 
• Where does the business want to go and why would this move to WordPress help us get there?
• What are the ongoing costs to run the Food Blogger Pro website?
• Is it necessary to redesign at the same time as the migration?
• Is WordPress the best choice for us? What other CMSs have been considered?
• How do we determine success vs. failure for the migration?
• What risks are involved in this project?
• What research and evaluation has already been done?
• What’s the ideal migration time period?
• What’s the most important functional requirement to the site?
• What systems currently integrate into ExpressionEngine?
• What features can we ditch in the migration process (or use the out-of-the-box WordPress functionality instead)?
• How many total users are there? How many are active at a given time?
• How many forum posts are there in total?
• What day and time would have the least impact?

Potential Software Options

We listed some potential plugin solutions that we’d then evaluate at a later time. More on that in a bit!

Project Timeline

We outlined the preferred launch timing (early April to early May), how long each phase of our process should take (anywhere from 1 – 5 weeks), potential approaches (Waterfall vs. Agile), and team roles (again, more on that soon). We also wrote down any important dates that we needed to be aware of as we headed into this project, like upcoming enrollment periods and team member vacations.

The Initial Planning Document was a crucial piece of our Discovery process because it brought everyone up to speed on the state of the current ExpressionEngine site, while slowly starting to solidify the vision for our WordPress site. 

To be honest, I referred back to this Initial Planning Document a lot throughout the project, just to make sure that we were on-schedule and that our decisions were aligning with our overall vision.

Assigning Team Roles

Part of the Initial Planning Document was assigning team roles, and we had four main roles to fill:

1. Developer – write and fixes code; includes both frontend and backend development
2. QA – prepares requirements documents and performs manual testing against the requirements
3. Project Manager – schedules meetings, takes notes, identifies action items, provides progress updates, identifies and communicates project risks
4. Product Owner – provides definition of product requirements and performs final QA

Why was it important to define who was responsible for what? It helped define expectations and workload for each team member. It also helped underscore that the migration was a team effort, and how we’d work together.

We had only four team members working on this migration project, but we wanted to make sure that everyone’s roles matches up with their strengths and interests as much as possible. Not only would this make the project more enjoyable for everyone (i.e. they’re comfortable with and enjoying the work), but it also helped us ensure that we had the best people on the job.

Gathering Requirements

This was probably one of the most tedious parts of the whole migration project. 

Requirements define the current implementation of our features and they would guide the Development and QA processes. 

That said, we might have gone a bit overboard.

In order to understand which requirements documents needed created, we added separate tasks to Asana, assigned them to the appropriate team member. 

We had a requirements document for each key feature on the site where we’d outline the functionalities, buttons, features, and special cases of each page on the site. We used Google Docs so that everyone on the team could contribute and troubleshoot.

Most of these requirements documents were broken up into three parts: an overview of the feature, frontend requirements, and backend requirements:

One easy way to navigate these often lengthy requirements was to add a Table of Contents at the beginning of each document (click Insert, then hover over Table of contents, then click With blue links). These links allow you to easily jump to any headers within the document. Nifty!

Once the requirements document was completed and signed off, we needed to create implementation tasks for each feature:

These tasks were created in our Development project in Asana, and we’ll chat about them in more detail in a jif. 

We also had a Requirements Overview document where we tracked the statuses, owners, and requirements doc for each feature on the site.

While this overall process was helpful, we went into a ton of detail in our requirements documents. While documenting access restrictions for a membership site is helpful, documenting the default setting on a page that five people have visited in the past six months wasn’t. Example:

We spent time documenting small details that weren’t incredibly useful when we could have been documenting these features in a more “big picture” way. 

Localization settings aren’t necessary for the way our membership site should work, so it wasn’t important to “require” location settings on our new site. Not only that, but we’d only have one English version of our site; there’s no need for a language setting if you can’t change it.

This was definitely a mistake on my part, as I was the one documenting most of our requirements. If we ever had a similar project in the future (), I’d try documenting our requirements in a way that prioritized the functionalities that were most important to bring over to the new site.  

Evaluating Software

Another key part of our Discovery process was evaluating the software we’d use, and it was especially important because it would largely impact development needs.

Instead of only looking at the features each plugin solution had, we evaluated each option against the following criteria:

• Frontend Ease of Use
• Admin Ease of Use
• Meets Feature Requirements
• Support Quality
• Roadmap Confidence
• Ability to Customize
• Openness to Contribution
• Available Contractors
• % Unit Test Coverage
• Price

Plugins have a lot of features, and it’s easy to get distracted by all the flashiness when you need to choose the best plugin to support your members. You should steal our evaluation methodology! It helped us understand what we actually needed to make the migration project a success, rather than seeing a feature and saying, “Ooh, that would be cool!”.

We knew we needed plugin solutions for:

• Memberships / protecting content behind a paywall
• Forums
• Courses

With this more holistic approach, we used a Google Sheet to evaluate several different plugins against our quantitative attributes:

Once we found the leaders for each plugin need category, we did a more thorough comparison of the features we actually needed:

We downloaded plugins, searched support articles, and reached out to plugin support teams to find the plugins that were best for us and our members.

We ultimately ended up going with:

• Memberships: Restrict Content Pro – Not only helps us create and manage our memberships, but it also lets us, as the name suggests, restrict content! 
• Forums: bbPress – A simple, easily customizable forum solution for WordPress sites. It’s free, open-source, and has just enough bells and whistles to help us provide a great discussion experience.
• Courses: A custom-built solution.

Let’s spend some time on that last part, shall we? We (aka. Developer Daniel) ended up building a custom course plugin.

There are a ton of powerful, feature-rich course plugins on the market. We even evaluated LearnDash and WP Courseware from top-to-bottom.

After many team discussions, we eventually decided to build our own course solution because:

1. While courses are important to Food Blogger Pro, they’re a fairly simple part of the site

After writing our requirements document for our courses, we realized that our course functionality needs were fairly simple. Courses on FBP are nested (Lesson > Course > Series), and each Lesson has a Vimeo video embed, a written transcript, and a resource box. That’s it!

2. Integrating two plugins is easier than integrating three

Every time we talked about the possibility of implementing a course plugin, Daniel would compare it to having another kid. Life gets much busier and messier when you have a second kid, and then it gets even more busy and messy when you have a third. 

We knew adding a third critical plugin with more bloat than we needed to our tech stack could introduce unnecessary issues and problems that could be avoided by building our own solution.

3. We could take out a lot of the bulk from the course plugins we tested by building our own

We knew we didn’t need quizzes, certificates, prerequisites, timers, or a lot of the extra fluff that came along with the course plugins we evaluated thanks to our requirements! 

4. We could easily build what we liked from the course plugins we tested

Even though there were some unnecessary features in the course plugins we tested, we did find some functionalities that we liked and wanted to incorporate into our new site.

That said, these features weren’t “launch blockers,” so we decided that we could fairly easily build these elements after we had a stable WordPress site.

Documenting Decision Rationale

One of my biggest takeaways from this migration project: the importance of documenting our decisions and why we were making those decisions. 

As with any big project, there are a lot of decisions to be made, and we’ve already talked about a bunch of them in this article! But there’s going to be a time in the future when you look back at some of these decisions and say, “…and why did we decide to do it this way again?”

That’s why it’s critical to actually document your decisions. Whether it’s taking notes during a call or having a Decision Rationale folder on Google Drive or Dropbox so your team can access them, it’s important to document your reasoning. 

Creating Development Tasks and Tickets

So how do you know when your Development phase is done? For us, it was when:

• The majority of decisions have been made
• The majority of Asana development tasks have been created

An important thing to note here is that not all of your decisions and tasks will be made and created. As the Development and QA processes start, you’ll find there will most likely be some outstanding needs, pages, and choices that need to be made after you’ve “completed” your Development process.

And for a big membership site, that’s to be expected. There were hidden thanks pages, coupon nuances, and membership decisions that needed addressed after we started to build our new site.

But the point of the Discovery process is that you’re performing due diligence and outlining as much of the work that needs to be done as possible. Everything from requirements gathering to evaluating software helped us make these Development tasks, and they guided our schedule and workload for the rest of the project.

And that’s an inside look into our Discovery process for our WordPress migration project!

We’re curious: what was your biggest takeaway from our Discovery process? Was there anything that surprised you or that you’d do differently? Let us know in the comments!

The post Our Membership Site Migration from ExpressionEngine to WordPress: Discovery appeared first on Food Blogger Pro.

Hello hello hello! And welcome to our Part One of our four-part blog series on Food Blogger Pro’s migration to WordPress!

Well…let’s back up.

If you’ve been around Food Blogger Pro for at least a few months, you’ll know that we recently moved our entire site from a CMS (that’s customer management system) called ExpressionEngine to the CMS we all know and love, WordPress.

This was a huge project that we’ve been chipping away at for years. Since we relaunched Food Blogger Pro on WordPress in April, we’re ready to share our story with you, our lovely readers!

Over the next four blog posts, we’ll publish the story of how we went from saying, “Man, it would be great to run Food Blogger Pro on WordPress one day,” to having a stable, thriving WordPress-based membership site. We’ll focus on the processes and systems that we used to take this project from start to finish (and beyond!).

Who is this blog series for?

Great question.

1. Anyone who has a big idea they’d love to tackle with their blog or business, but they don’t know where to start.
2. Small teams who want to refine their project development process.
3. Individuals who want a system to help them work through big projects.
4. Anyone curious about migrating a huge site from one CMS to another.
5. Anyone with a membership site on WordPress.

If that sounds like you and if you want to make sure you stay in the loop with this series, be sure to join our mailing list so all of our blog posts are delivered to your inbox when they’re published!

Today’s introductory post will answer a few important questions that will help you understand the stages of a big project, as well as some of the big decisions you might be faced with in a similar situation.

Why is process important with a big project like this?

That’s the million-dollar question! And it’s the reason we’re starting this series.

It’s helpful to have a plan to keep you pointed in the right direction with any big project. Our process looked like this:

1. Discovery
2. Development
3. QA
4. Launch
5. Post-Launch

We’ll have separate blog posts covering these stages in the next few weeks, but for now, all you need to know is that these five key stages helped drive all of our work, decisions, and deadlines.

Because we really wanted to launch on April 9th, this process helped us avoid nit-picking that would’ve increased the likelihood of missing our launch date. While we knew it was important to have a solid, working site at launch, our process helped us narrow down our “must-haves by launch” and focus on what was the most important first.

Having an established process also helped us prepare and stick to our schedule. We had a rough schedule for each stage, and while some of our stages overlapped with other stages, our schedule kept us on track and ready for what was coming next.

Along those same lines, our documented process helped make sure everyone on our four-person team had the same information, and knew what to expect. Because we all knew where we were in our project process, we knew when decisions had to be made, when we could expect risks, and how our work on the new site would affect the business.

It’s important for you to remember that your project process probably won’t look like ours…and that’s okay.

We’re sharing our process, valuable decisions, and more so that you can get familiar with how we tackled a big ol’ migration project in the hopes of helping you navigate projects you’re tackling with your blog or business.

Why we built Food Blogger Pro on ExpressionEngine

So why build Food Blogger Pro on ExpressionEngine in the first place?

When Bjork and Lindsay had the idea for Food Blogger Pro way back in 2012, Bjork reached out to a few different people about how they started and ran their membership sites.

One of those people was Jon, who was running a membership site called Kicktastic, which was built on ExpressionEngine. Bjork reached out to Jon, asked if they could replicate the functionality Jon had on Kicktastic, and the rest was history.

ExpressionEngine worked for Food Blogger Pro for a really long time. It was an affordable, fast, and relatively simple way to get Food Blogger Pro from the “idea” stage to the live and ready for members stage, and sometimes, that’s what you need.

Because Food Blogger Pro had zero members at the idea stage, it made sense to work with the resources and connections that Bjork and Lindsay had at the time to get a solid site off the ground in just a few months.

Hopefully this serves as a bit of encouragement for you if you’re in a similar situation; you don’t need a giant budget, many months, and a huge team to start something.

Why we decided to migrate Food Blogger Pro to WordPress

So if ExpressionEngine worked when we started Food Blogger Pro, why switch to WordPress?

Both are CMSs, both have easy-to-use backends, and both can help you organize and publish your content, so what makes WordPress better for us now in 2019?

Our version of ExpressionEngine was “Frankensteined” quite a bit – we needed a separate application to handle recurring payments, we pieced together the original functionality from Jon’s Kicktastic site to make it work for us. This became difficult to maintain as time went on. Not only that, certain add-ons we were using on ExpressionEngine stopped being developed, so we had to hire a contracted developer just to maintain them. We got to the point where just a handful of developers and designers truly understood how the site was built, and it was expensive, and also risky, to support this out-of-date functionality.

We knew we needed to move to a platform we understood fully, that stays updated constantly, and that we wouldn’t have trouble maintaining. Our obvious choice? WordPress! The platform we’ve built a successful food blog on and the platform we teach our members to use to build their own blogs!

WordPress powers over 33% of the entire internet ( ) and it’s open-source, so we know that it’s always getting updated and maintained.

We also have a WordPress plugin business, so we’re already putting the time and effort into truly understanding WordPress as a whole. We understand how to optimize a WordPress site for SEO much better than we do an ExpressionEngine site.

Not only that, but being on WordPress sets us up for growing and improving. We weren’t able to use the tools we were using for our other businesses to help us reduce churn or dig into our metrics.

Our decision ultimately came down to the platform we can easily maintain, change, and develop as our business grows, and that platform is WordPress.

If you’re interested in learning a bit more about our experience on ExpressionEngine and our decision to switch to WordPress, you can check out this podcast episode:

What’s next?

If you checked out our process above, you’ll know that we’ll be talking about the Discovery stage next! We’ll cover how we documented decisions, our Initial Planning Document, how we evaluated software, and more.

So that this series is as helpful for you as possible, we’re curious: what’s your #1 question about taking a project from the idea stage to the live stage? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

The post Our Membership Site Migration from ExpressionEngine to WordPress appeared first on Food Blogger Pro.

Hope you’re having a rockin’ Tuesday.

We wanted to send you a quick email because we got some news from WordPress HQ today: WordPress 5.0 (aka. the Gutenberg release) will be live this Thursday, December 6.

Because most of our members are using WordPress and because this is a sizable update, we wanted to answer some FAQs and give you some helpful resource links that will help you out with this transition:

What is Gutenberg?

Gutenberg is a new editor for WordPress. Its aim is to move WordPress toward a modern publishing experience that looks similar to what you’ll see on a live post as you’re building your content.

Why all the hubbub?

The Gutenberg update is the biggest change to WordPress in a long time. It’s also the most tested release ever, which means a lot of people have already been using it and voicing their opinions about it. That also means that it has been tested on a large number of websites already!

What can I expect when my website updates to 5.0?

When your website updates to 5.0, your existing content should look exactly the same. When you go to create a new post, or edit an existing post, you’ll be taken to the new editor.

That said, the update won’t happen automatically (unless you have automatic updates turned on – check with your host if you’re unsure). You can choose when to update to 5.0.

What happens when I edit an existing post? Will Gutenberg break it?

Nope! When you open an existing post in the Gutenberg editor, the content will be added to a “Classic Editor block” and will be exactly the same. You can make some edits to the content there. If you decide to convert the content to blocks, most everything will convert fine. Some unexpected things may happen, though, so it’s good to test this conversion with a post that isn’t super popular.

What is likely to go wrong with Gutenberg?

From the front-end, Gutenberg will likely have no impact. In the admin side, you may notice that when building new posts with Gutenberg, some features you depended on before are no longer available. This is likely due to plugin or theme developers not building integrations for the new editor. You can read more about this in the blog post about preparing your blog for Gutenberg.

Should I use the Classic Editor plugin to disable Gutenberg?

We don’t recommend using it to disable Gutenberg entirely. Instead, use the Classic Editor plugin to make the Classic Editor available, but keep Gutenberg active on your site. The Classic Editor plugin is a good thing to have just in case you need to use the Classic Editor for anything, but you should start using the Gutenberg editor as soon as you are comfortable. New plugin, theme, and core development will mostly be focusing on Gutenberg.

Anything else I can do to be prepared?

Set up VaultPress or some sort of other backup solution. If something goes awry with the update (which is unlikely), VaultPress makes it easy to restore your site. Set aside a couple hours to update to WordPress 5.0 and test out the new editor. If you find that you can’t do some things you need to do in the Gutenberg editor, install the Classic Editor plugin and use the Classic Editor until you find another solution for the missing feature.

Where can I find more information about Gutenberg?

Glad you asked.

• 163: What WordPress’ Gutenberg Update Means for You with Raquel Smith: WP Tasty’s Raquel Smith was on The Food Blogger Pro Podcast a few months ago to chat about what Gutenberg means for you as a food blogger. It’s an informative interview that will help you make sense of the changes you’ll see in this update
• How to Prepare Your Blog for Gutenberg: An awesome, comprehensive guide on the WP Tasty blog to help you get your blog in tip-top Gutenberg-shape.
• WP 5.0 coming on Thursday December 6: A Food Blogger Pro forum thread about the announcement.
• New 5.0 Target Date: WordPress’ announcement about the Gutenberg release.
• All About Gutenberg: WordPress’ landing page for Gutenberg where you can experience how the new editing experience will work.
• Gutenberg FAQ’s: WordPress’ comprehensive Gutenberg FAQ page.
• Classic Editor plugin: A plugin that reinstates the Classic Editor in WordPress.

I have another question about Gutenberg!

Great! If you’re a Food Blogger Pro member, we encourage you to take them to the forum, and our team and other members would be happy to help ya out!

That’s all from us today! We’re excited for this new age of WordPress, and we’re here to help you through it.

The post WordPress 5.0 Gutenberg Release – What It Means for Bloggers appeared first on Food Blogger Pro.

Our new Customer Success Agent will be joining the Food Blogger Pro / Pinch of Yum / WP Tasty family. We’re a tight-knit group that works from all across the US (and Canada!).

We’re now looking to add to our little work family again – this time to help support our WP Tasty customers.

The Customer Success Agent will own our customer service process by:

• Responding to support requests
• Helping our customers utilize our products to their maximum potential
• Reporting on common issues
• Keeping track of feature requests for our products
• Improving our customer service process

If the above sounds like something you’d love to do, you can learn more about the position and submit an application here:

Applications are due Sunday, February 18, 2018!

PS: If you know someone who would thrive in this position will you share this job opportunity with your friends who are of the friendly, patient, customer-loving variety? The ones who would love a job working with our beloved customers on the internet? Thanks from the bottom of our hearts!

The post WP Tasty is Hiring a Customer Success Agent! appeared first on Food Blogger Pro.