Low-Carb Dieting With Fairlady Magazine's Meal Plans & Recipes

Fairlady is one of the most popular magazines in South Africa on monthly lifestyle, fashion and health advice.

Services:
Design, Development, Discovery, Hosting, Support

The Challenge

The company required a website that could provide its readers with diet advice in the form of low-carb meal plans and recipes. Site content would need to focus on a daily meal plan featuring low-carb meals and accompanying recipes for each day. To answer the client requirement, our team used our LSX theme and modified our LSX Health & Fitness Plan plugin to exclude workouts and focus entirely on the meal plan and recipe components. An additional aspect was the factoring in of a deviation in PDF downloads that users would access throughout the plan, as these needed to be connected per week. Another key requirement was for a searchable recipe archive with sidebar filters. As our software did not immediately support this, this presented an additional challenge.

The Solution

In order to ensure the focus of the website was on connecting the recipes in the user experience, our team modified our LSX Health & Fitness Plan plugin by applying a customised child theme. This disabled the workouts and any other unnecessary content.

In the WooCommerce-controlled user dashboard, we added functionality to enable weekly downloads to be displayed. Previously, our core software only allowed for these downloads to be displayed within a single day, but for this project the users needed to be able to download a weekly shopping list, as well as an offline copy of the meal plan. Our solution was to add a sidebar for downloads within the user’s weekly overview. The need for this change highlighted some usability issues in the core software, so in the end we added this change into the core of the plugin.

The tabs within the daily meal plan were adjusted to accept three meal slots: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Within each of these tabs the recipes were displayed with an image, ingredient list and cooking instructions, allowing users immediate access to the meal plan recipes for each day.

Our software was also expanded to include faceted search for the recipes archive page. This allowed users to browse recipes and swap out meals, as well as being able to filter by meal type and paleo recipes.

The outcome of our solutions was that this “simple” site was an unqualified success, with designs that looked amazing, setting the tone for a rewarding collaboration with the client. In the process of coming up with a solution, our team uncovered important usability issues with our core software and were able to improve on this, while delivering a user-friendly and accessible meal plan site for our client.