Meredith revealed Allrecipes' newly launched digital platform Tuesday. The new site has a social network-oriented focus, boosting the sharing capabilities that the 40 million monthly visitors have increasingly been using.
New features, such as “I Made It,” allow cooks to share their culinary creations with their followers. Stan Pavlovsky, Allrecipes' president, says this transformation is different than what many social networks currently offer. “[They] spark inspiration, but lack actionable information and create fragmented conversations.”
The new site's design and technology were created in-house, leveraging all of the brand's resources over a nearly two-year timeframe. Pavlovsky says that they also looked to the "behaviors, suggestions and feedback from our community of 40 million home cooks," to help inspire this latest iteration.
Over the past 18 months, the brand employed various feedback channels to gather information on the new experience including usability testing, user satisfaction tracking, video diaries, surveys and Web analytics data.
The roll-out strategy included an initial reveal, with beta site access given to a subset of the Allrecipes community over the past year, which "allowed us to gather very rich data reflecting their response to new design elements and features," says Pavlovsky.
Feedback so far has been positive, according to Pavlovsky, with cooks consuming more pages per visit and increased site and community engagement with the shopping features and local offers.
The announcement is "just the beginning of a rich roadmap of features we will be introducing in the months ahead," Pavlovsky adds. Thanks to the new single site and code base that extends across devices, this will allow the Allrecipes teams to "innovate more rapidly so we can release new consumer and advertising experiences at an accelerated pace," he says.
Swanson is one of the first brands to partner with Allrecipes on the new design, largely because "Swanson cooks are turning to digital media sources for culinary inspiration and information more than ever," Mark Materacky, Soup & Broth Marketing Director, Campbell Soup Company, says in the release.
