Dish.co.nz | Website redesign

Dish magazine | Online editor and staff writer

I led premium food magazine Dish's digital presence between 2014-2015, redesigning dish.co.nz, building a content strategy across web, video and email and creating columns that brought the magazine's voice online.

- Led digital content strategy across web, email and social
- Adapted magazine features into online formats, such as turning cookbook reviews into the monthly Cook the Books column
- Commissioned online-only columns using my own managed digital budget
- Wrote and ran the weekly e-newsletter
- Produced early video content when the format was new to magazines
- Worked with the magazine's art director and lead web designer to wireframe a new site structure
- Designed layouts around the magazine's imagery, such as portrait photo spaces to match its mostly portrait photography, so print content translated easily to web
- Prepared the site for paywalled recipe content and uploaded the magazine's recipe archive
- Result: traffic up 240% in 2014-15, alongside the content strategy
- Photographed website content, with photos used in both print and online
- Negotiated a contra deal with a camera brand to secure a high-end SLR
- Wrote features and conducted interviews for the print magazine
- Styled and shot content to match the magazine's premium feel on a small budget

The challenge: make the website as dog-eared as a well-loved copy of the magazine.

Dish.co.nz functioned as a recipe hub but was hard to navigate and lacked the premium feel of the magazine. With a paywall for the recipe archive on the way, we needed recipes to be easier to find and more appealing to browse. Together with the art director and lead web designer, we redesigned the site to feel more elevated and editorial, and its structure remains the base of what's live today.

**Before:** An old-school nav bar with no dropdowns or recipe categories, and room for only one featured recipe.

**After:** Dropdown navigation for recipe categories and a full-width portrait carousel let our signature imagery lead, making the archive easier to browse.

I identified magazine content that didn’t translate into clicks and reworked it for a digital audience, like book reviews…

David cooked the books

Instead of simply publishing our cookbook reviews online, I commissioned David Parker – a home baker – to practically put them to the test.

With step-by-step photos documenting the recreation of a recipe, each of David’s reviews ended with a scorecard rating the book on difficulty, supermarket trips, how closely the results matched the photos and ease of reading.

“"David's commentary is fantastic, especially the modifications he had to make for lack of equipment. So practical!" - Reader comment on Facebook

In my time at Dish, traffic increased over 240%.

Alongside the redesign, I brought in new contributors for online-exclusive recipes and created new series, including Beer of the Week and Last Night's Dinner, a home for new restaurant reviews. While working as staff writer, I experimented with video and photography to grow our social channels, and I wrote the weekly newsletter, which went to over 50K subscribers.

To make content creation sustainable on a small budget, I negotiated a contra deal for a high-end SLR. I then photographed much of the website's content myself, shown here.