A new chapter for Great British Chefs

You are reading this on our new, fully responsive website that we have built completely in-house over the last year. We are pretty excited about what we will now be able to do and it is worth saying that what you see today is only the beginning.

Before I introduce the new site, I want to mark the passing of the old one. Hidden beneath all websites are the fingerprints of developers who laid the foundations that others were able to build upon. So I want to recall the work of Jim Tollan, Iain Galloway, John Bull, Re:Media and a CMS by the name of Kentico that allowed us to get to this point. Later, under the unflappable leadership of our CTO, James Ellis-Jones, and our ever-optimistic senior developer, Martin Malloy, these foundations stood up to our evolving business model and rapidly growing traffic with multiple iterations. Over the last three-and-a-half years, it has served more than 50 million page impressions to 12 million users. Today, however, we find ourselves faced with new challenges and opportunities which require different solutions and technologies.

We began work on our new platform in July 2014 and have spent the last 12 months creating not only a new site with a completely different look and feel but also a completely bespoke back-end to support it. We tested our vision at the end of 2014 with Great Global Chefs and rapidly built a great team of in-house developers and designers around James, Martin and our designer Arjuna Woodrow to help deliver the new Great British Chefs site which you are visiting today. This site has been built with the user in mind – its consumer-focussed experience is best in class and makes the most of the incredible images and content that we have published over the last four years and the wealth of material we will be commissioning moving forward.

The site has been built using the content management system – named Lynicon – our chief technical officer James has created. You can find more information about it here.

As with many sites, we now receive a huge number of visits from mobile devices. We have worked hard to ensure we can now deliver our content in the most user friendly way possible, irrespective of the device you are using to access it.

Our editorial team has expanded to ten people and, led by Gemma Marti, they have undertaken a Herculean task in the last six months. They have migrated all our recipes to a new template, rebuilt all our how-to-cook articles and videos, polished up all our features and created almost 1,000 recipe collections. They’ve also rewritten almost all our chef profiles and created galleries to ensure people can enjoy our stories in their full glory.

The team is now on a mission to produce even more content that people are going to love, with an objective to publish at least three new chefs, over 100 recipes and 15 how-to-cook articles each month as well as restaurant reviews, behind-the-scenes exclusives and all the latest food trends.

We plan to create an ever-growing stream of editorial that goes far beyond the UK and tells the stories of everything from truffle hunting in the Italian hills to street food in Hong Kong. We are also going to be producing a significant amount of video content, a good example of which is the fabulous video you can watch today of Stanley Tucci, the Italian Consul General in London and Francesco Mazzei or Vivek Singh’s ode to the tandoor oven.

Everyone seems to be obsessed by taking pictures of food, scrolling through feeds of ‘food porn’ and, even in this digital age, leafing through beautiful cookbooks. We have 21,805 images that we have taken over the last four years and we decided it was time to shout about them. Our team have undertaken the huge task of uploading all these images to our new, bespoke media library so that our community can enjoy them to the full. To celebrate this, we have pulled together a gallery of some of our team’s favourite images.