[Photographs: Vicky Wasik]

At Serious Eats, our product team works tirelessly to introduce both incremental and large-scale site improvements. Today, you may notice some changes to the site, and we’re excited to give you a little tour. Start by looking up. A little further. See anything different?

We’ve updated the global navigation menu with brand-new categories and subcategories, which now have their own landing pages. Click through, and you’ll see that both older and newer posts have been labeled more clearly and consistently.

This categorization project started with a simple goal: to create a robust, reliable, one-stop resource for home cooks and food lovers. Serious Eats has had a lot of great content written over the last 13 years—we just had to create an intuitive site structure to organize it and make it easily accessible, while simultaneously updating the look and feel of the site. Our developers are working on more cosmetic updates, still to come.

The new navigation design is the result of months spent conducting user interviews, doing workshops, and testing layouts. We especially appreciate all the volunteers and editors who participated in the process, which taught us so much about how real people use and understand the site. We’ll continue to take this user-centered approach to design as we work to support how people cook, eat, and shop.

Changes include:

• "Recipes" now allows you to browse by categories like cuisine, ingredient, and dish type, directly from the top-level navigation. It also takes you directly to our curated recipe collections (formerly “roundups") and menus.
• "Techniques" has expanded into "How-Tos", allowing us to group together instructional articles that address every task in the kitchen—not just cooking. We’ve sorted this content into sections that deal with topics like equipment care, shopping for ingredients, and entertaining.
• "Equipment" has been retitled "Product Recs" to reflect the breadth of our reviews and recommendations, which cover everything from the best cast iron skillets and the tastiest veggie burgers to our favorite cookbooks and food-related reading.
• "Features" has become "Culture" encompassing a whole range of non-instructional content that demonstrates how food relates to society, history, and our everyday lives. Here's where you'll find personal essays, articles on food science, travel diaries, and staff picks, among other content.
• The visual redesign of the navigation menu includes a simpler, text-based interface and an accordion-style menu on mobile.

You may also have noticed new "Save" buttons on recipe pages; these buttons open a secondary platform called Relish. Relish is a web app designed to streamline the process of shopping and cooking from online recipes. With a free account, you can save recipes across a suite of websites and blogs, generate shopping lists to take to the grocery store, and even shop online directly from the recipe, through a local retailer (US only). You can access your saved recipes and shopping list below ‘Your Account’ in the navigation menu. We’re working closely with the Relish team as they roll out new features, and we’re always eager to hear from readers about what’s working (and what’s not).

So go ahead and poke around! You may rediscover some hidden gems or find new-to-you posts. We encourage you to reach out to our support team if you have any issues or feedback.

If you’d like to participate in future user surveys and workshops to help improve the site, we’d be delighted to have you! You can sign up using this form.

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