The MeatEater
Your link to the food chain
The MeatEater is a project that translates fishing and hunting to a broad range of audiences.
March 2020 - Present
Web Development
Corporate website
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.
Technology Stack
These technologies were used to complete the task:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
