BlogHer Food '11 : Agenda

Before visitors even read your blog, they see your blog. In this session, designers Sabrina Modelle and Irvin Lin will walk you through the dos and don’ts of designing a food blog, taking you through the same type of branding exercises they’ve used with some of the world’s largest brands. Included: design basics like how to choose an appealing color palette, how to make sure your blog’s logo looks great on the web and in print, how to know when it’s time to redesign your blog, and the top ten design mistakes you can make.

One size doesn’t fit all when deciding how to attract and then work with brands and the media. Four very different bloggers, Georgia Pellegrini, Amy Johnson, Hank Shaw, and Lori Lange will discuss how they make the most of their opportunities, and common pitfalls to avoid.

This session will focus on the value of placing food in a narrative context, rich in travel, history, culture, and tradition. Evocative food writers including Donna Pierce, Amelia Schaffner, and Diana Kuan, led by Garrett McCord, will discuss how we look at food, our history or personal experiences around it, how food can be intertwined within travel narratives and historical documentation, and why doing so gives us a credible, engaging voice.

Are you jealous of cooks who don’t seem to need a recipe and can whip up gourmet dishes with a pinch of this and a dash of that? Fine Cooking Magazine’s popular Cooking Without Recipes features, along with their online Recipe Makers feature, is dedicated to letting all of us do that! Join Sarah Breckenridge from Fine Cooking as she shares the guidelines and best practices for making substitutions, riffing on recipes and creating your own masterpieces, no recipe required.

The inevitable move of online content towards mobile needs to change how a lot of us are blogging – including food bloggers. In this session, folks at media companies talk about how they’re adapting their properties for mobile, and not always with a massive budget. The move to mobile means looking at your content and your tools and making the most of both. Lead by blogger Irvin Lin, Kelly Senyei from Gourmet Live, Tanya Steel from Epicurious, and Mark Levine from Food.com will share how they tackled the challenge.

Bloggers have conflicting feelings about SEO: Is it the magic path to tons of traffic? Is it an evil technological impediment for good writing? Answer: neither. In this session Stephanie Stiavetti, Rene Lynch, Pamela Braun, and Geoff Allen are going to explain why and how you can optimize your blog’s search engine friendliness without suppressing your own human voice. Learn how to craft posts that are compelling to readers and readable by search engines.  We will also explore how to make sense of and use of Google’s controversial new Recipe microformat.

One of the most common ethical issues you’ll face as a food blogger is the absolutely appropriate way to use and properly credit another cook’s recipe. Dianne Jacob, David Leite, and Liza Barry-Kessler will discuss the most perplexing issues, including the definition of "adapted" or "inspired by," when you need permission to post a recipe and what defines plagiarism, particularly if you have named the author and linked to their book or website. Is it enough to make minor tweaks to the ingredients list or techniques descirbed?  What, exactly, is copyrightable, and how do you do it? Come find out!

It can be challenging to be a food-lover living with a picky kid, even if it’s just a “phase”. In this session talk about how to turn lemons into lemonade and find inspiration for your food blog not in spite of, but because of your ability to cook for persnickety palates. Food bloggers like Jenny Flake, Debbie Koenig, Caroline Campion, and Cindy Rowland can’t cook as adventurously as they’d like, so, they’re challenging themselves in other ways.

You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to create compelling, quality food photography. Sarah Olson and Alice Currah will explain simple and inexpensive ways to make big improvements in your images. Side-by-side comparison photos will help illustrate that the little things, from props to camera accessories, that can go a long way!

It takes more than being a great cook to develop recipes other people can reproduce. The art comes first, of course: recipe development begins with the appealing combination of ingredients handled in just right way that results in a dish readers will love. Then the science kicks in: measuring, timing, and proceeding in a logical sequence that makes the recipe accessible and reliable. Join Alison Lewis, Marge Perry, and Katie Webster to learn what it takes to turn great food into recipes that will land you happy readers, and maybe even interested editors!