The MeatEater

Your link to the food chain

The MeatEater is a project that translates fishing and hunting to a broad range of audiences.

YWS > Works > CaseStudy > MeatEater > Intro > Content > Image
Time:

March 2020 - Present

Type:

Web Development

Industry:

Corporate website

Platform:

Web

About

Project Idea

The MeatEater is a company founded by an American conservationist, writer, and television personality Steven Rinella. They partnered with us to update their website and help create a solid community.

The client had

  • The released website
  • A list of desired features and new ideas

Project challenges

  • Moving from WordPress to Contentful
  • Implementing Elasticsearch

Team

Node.js engineer

UX/UI designer

QA engineer

Vue.js engineer

Project manager

Wireframes

The new MeatEater’s website should be intuitive and understandable for users, so we took these notions into account when creating the first wireframes of a new website.

MeatEater first wireframeMeatEater first wireframe
MeatEater second wireframeMeatEater second wireframe

Technology Stack

These technologies were used to complete the task:

MeatEater Technology StackMeatEater Technology Stack mobile

Blog

The MeatEater’s blog contains dozens of articles with useful insights on hunting and fishing. Besides, users can find plenty of recipes to cook and taste themselves.

MeatEater Blog

Video

The website has a collection of shows available in a separate section. Videos include the MeatEater show itself and other shows connected to the project like Duck Camp Dinners and Das Boat.

MeatEater Video

Podcast

In addition to the text blog and video collection, there are several podcasts published on the website. Users can listen to them right there or find these podcasts on other platforms.

MeatEater Podcast

Search

Flexible search is implemented using Elasticsearch. This allows you to search for information by articles, recipes, videos, podcasts and products at the same time that helps users to receive the most relevant results.

MeatEater Search

User profile

With the help of a profile, users can manage their interests to see and receive the most relevant content as well as bookmark articles, videos, and podcasts they like.

MeatEater User profile

Comment threads

The website is using OpenWeb as a third-party open-source solution for building comment threads. It allowed us to pull community from Youtube and Netflix to the MeatEater website.

Challenges and Solutions

Our team faced several challenges while working on the MeatEater.

The structure of data in WordPress

Problem:

WordPress didn’t distinguish different entities of content. For example, all types of content — an article, a recipe, a podcast — were published as the same entity “Post”. Besides, there was no connection between entities “Post” and “Author”. It means that the updates of the author’s information didn’t appear in the published article.

Solution:

We moved the website to Contentful CMS that allowed editors to create separate entities for different types of content. Also, Contentful provided the ability to validate data so editors can post relevant content.

Limited search capabilities

Problem:

The website had an integrated Google Search as an internal search for articles and podcasts. However, it wasn’t able to look for new posts on the website that were not indexed by Google itself.

Solution:

We integrated Elasticsearch and created a system of indexes for each type of entity to facilitate the internal search.

Work in progress

Combine e-commerce and content site experience to enable a seamless transition between different web products.

YWS > Works > CaseStudy > MeatEater > Work in progress