Choosing a UX-Based Concept for your CMS

Following publishing task 1 when I looked at User Experience (UX) for best practice in creating websites, for this publishing task, I will discuss my chosen genre for my website as well as discuss some of the UX design considerations I will make when creating my site.

The website genre I will create is a food and recipe website titled “Soup & Salad”. This website will give recipes for different kinds of soups and salads and will have a high community aspect to it. It will have posts on ingredients, and how to make the recipe but also heavily rely on user comments and feedback. There will be a rating and review section that will allow the community and users to get involved and engage with the site. The target audience for the site will be a younger demographic of 15-25 year olds but will also have a universal appeal to those wanting to gain knowledge on new recipes in a quick and easy way. A bright and vibrant colour palette will be used throughout the website and will also use earthy tones of greens and yellows to be carried through the website to reinforce the theme of organic, natural and tasty home foods. UX features to be implemented into the site are;

1. A visually appealing and user-friendly comment section.
2. Video content that will include, video guides and tutorials as well as a welcome (introduction) video.

A well-styled and user-friendly comment section can set your website apart from the competition. There are a lot of websites that offer recipes and ‘the best ways to cook’ but taking the time to properly design a unique and interesting comment section and comment form can make a huge impression on new and returning visitors. It can reinforce the message that you care about the opinion of the user and will then lead to further engagement and discussion on your site. Ensuring that it is clear who is posting the comment and proper separation between comments is essential. Also using a threaded comment section or a flat comment section will be considered. As it is a community aspect of a website a threaded comment section could be useful as users could interact with each other as well as the posted recipe. A plugin for spam comments like ‘Akismet' will need to be utilised to ensure that the comment section remains clean and users are not abused by other users.

An instructional video based on the images

Using video content on a website can help to create an immersive and entertaining experience. This helps to connect to the user and creates returning visitors to your site. They can give instructions and product information in a short time period while appealing to a user's audio, visual and motion senses. A website's search engine optimisation (SEO) can be enhanced with the use of video as it draws a greater amount of audience to the web pages and can even increase traffic by up to 157% (Video Marketing Statistics). We live in a world where people want their information fast and in the shortest amount of time so using shorter video clips will help to keep engagement and bring returning users. These videos will play when a user clicks on them rather than playing automatically. This ensures a user will see them from the beginning and be able to read the recipe first before watching if needed.

There are many recipe themes on Wordpress to use like ‘Cookely’, ‘Astra’ and ‘Cupcake’, however, a lot of them use a plain colour palette that I don’t envision for my site. These can be modified and the colour palette can be updated to what I see for my website. Alternatively, I could use a theme and add plugins in order to get my desired site. Some plugin I found interesting when researching was ‘Recipe Card Blocks’ which is visually appealing and user friendly. ‘Delicious Recipes’ is a plugin that utilises 6 widgets to create well-designed recipes. wiDiscuz, a plugin for the comment section is highly ranked as has minimal impact on page loading as well as driving user engagement and the ability to rank other posts from users for the community aspect. ‘Thrive Comments’ is a plugin designed for community engagement and discussion. It allows various comment ranking and filtering options, and visitors can easily engage in conversations with each other.

References

Video Content As a Part of User Experience Design

Videos as Instructional Content: User Behaviors and UX Guidelines

Improve Your Site’s UX with These 7 Video Content Ideas

Comment Design: Considerations, Best Practices and Examples

6 Best WordPress Recipe Plugins 2022

24 Best WordPress Themes for Recipe Blogs

7 Best WordPress Comment Plugins [+ Their Pros and Cons]

18 Best WordPress Comments Plugins for Better Engagement in 2022