May 2023

We have been working on a ton of different updates this month as it is our first month going live. The main item is our search functionality. After that, we have been updating other things as well. Here are a few highlights.

Search:
– Search via keyword, or use one of the drop-down menus to see what we have available in our system. Right now, you can even just search “blank” and get everything available to you to propagate.
– When you click on an image in search, it currently downloads the recipe directly to your computer or phone. (We will be changing this shortly.)

Recipe Landing Pages:
– This is in the works, but we hope to have it live in a day or two. The main functionality is that we would send you to a landing page from search instead of an instant download. This allows us to do a few other things that we could not otherwise do.
– Formatting, layout, and usability are all things we are working on here. Please have patience.
– A key difference would be that we would send you to an image of the recipe so that you and your staff can use your phone rather than having to download, print, and use a physical print.
– This also gives us WAY more customization options for getting you more content in a cleaner, more usable way.

Updates / Releases:
– We now are posting updates and releases so that you (and others) can know what is going on with the website. This is a quick way to know what is going on.
– Adding tags to these posts should allow you to look up all things in a given month, year, or category so that you can stay up to date.
– We hope to automate much of this so that you could potentially subscribe to the RSS feed and always know what is being added. At the moment a full search shows everything, but this would show you what is most recent.
– We also have a “monthly digest” in the works to help put all the individual releases together and so you can quickly and easily see what was added each month.

Facebook:
– We have a public AND a private facebook group www.facebook.com/groups/theballoonguild/
– On the facebook page, we intend to hold additional content, updates, live updates, polls, recipe requests, support, and more! Highly recommend you request to join. This is live now, but will also be “active” before the end of the month. So, make sure you are on board now!

Logo:
– It may or may not be temporary, but we now have a shield and crest for The Balloon Guild. Bootstrapping, but at least we are doing it with a little bit of style.

Formatting:
– We had a few concerns about the formatting of the images and the font choice. So, we will be slowing down uploads, working to address this, and then changing everything in our system before we add more uploads again.
– We will also be adding another accent color to the recipes. This will allow those wishing to edit the recipes to have the ability to accent them with 2 colors pretty easily.

Editable Recipes:
– We have decided to allow this, but are working on the details on exactly how we put it together so that nothing can “break” in the future. It also requires a bunch of coding on the backend to change our layouts, etc. So, just know we have it on our board of “to do” for you guys! We’re super excited and hope you are too!

As you can expect, there is always more to do. So, if you have ideas / suggestions, please let us know! (The best way is via the facebook group, but an email works too.)