Website Case Study
Smart Meal Ideas
Weeknight dinners for families with real schedules, with cooking time, calories and protein shown on every recipe card.
At a Glance
Smart Meal Ideas is a West Coast Media Solutions recipe site offering quick, healthy meals for busy families. We built it around a collection of 50 recipes, from one-pan dinners and vegetarian dishes to protein-packed plates, that can be filtered by six categories. Every recipe card shows cooking time, calories and protein, a weekly featured recipe gets its own section, and readers can sign up for weekly recipes or send a message.
- Project
- Website
- Sector
- Food and cooking: family recipes
- Scope
- Single-page recipe site with category filters
- Highlights
- Nutrition on every card, This Week's Star, newsletter
- Live site
- SmartMealIdeas.com
The Brief
On a weeknight, the real question is what can be on the table soon. The site had to answer it at a glance, with time and nutrition visible on every recipe before anyone reaches for a pan.
- Show cooking time, calories and protein on every recipe card, so families can choose quickly.
- Let cooks filter fifty recipes by what they feel like, from one-pan meals to soups and bowls.
- Feature one recipe each week as a ready answer to the dinner question.
- Offer weekly recipes by email and a friendly way to get in touch.
What We Designed
Cook Smarter, Eat Better opens the page, with a promise of fresh, wholesome recipes designed for real life and three counters for the number of recipes, the average cooking time and the categories. A cluster of food emoji adds a little appetite before the collection begins. After the recipes come This Week's Star, a short Why Smart Meals? section, the weekly recipe signup and a friendly contact section.
Playfair Display brings a cookbook warmth to the headings, and DM Sans keeps ingredients and figures easy to read. We chose a warm off-white background, a deep chocolate brown for text instead of black and a terracotta orange accent, colours that feel like a home kitchen rather than a clinic. The tone stays practical throughout: recipes for real families with real schedules, as the footer puts it.
Nutrition on every card
Cooking time, calories and grams of protein appear on each recipe card for quick comparison.
Six recipe categories
Protein-packed, one-pan, vegetarian, pasta and grains, wraps and sandwiches, and soups and bowls, each one tap away.
This Week's Star
A featured recipe gets a section of its own, so there is always a suggestion for tonight.
Weekly recipe signup
A Get Weekly Recipes section invites readers to receive new ideas by email.
How We Achieved It
The recipes sit in one filterable collection, with an All filter and six category filters: Protein-Packed, One-Pan Wonders, Vegetarian, Pasta and Grains, Wraps and Sandwiches, and Soups and Bowls. Each card gives the category, a one-line description, the cooking time, calories and grams of protein, so a family can weigh garlic butter shrimp against a lentil and veggie soup at a glance.
The navigation runs Home, Recipes, Featured, About, Contact and Subscribe, giving the weekly email its own place at the top of the page. The Get Weekly Recipes signup and the contact form are protected against spam with Google reCAPTCHA, and the footer gathers categories, legal notices and company links in one place. A meta description and structured data describe the whole collection to search engines.
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