The Food Section
From Substack to self-hosted: a home that celebrates overlooked food culture.
THE CHALLENGE
The Food Section originally began as a Substack publication, and as the publication and its community grew, founder Hanna Raskin realized the limitations of that platform — the challenge to stand out as a brand, lack of analytics insight, the inability to incorporate advertisements, prioritization of the newest article — and how they were hindering her goals for expansion. Our challenge was to create a new home for The Food Section and its community without limitations
THE SOLUTION
Building a strong, trusting, and collaborative relationship with our client, Hanna, was key to understanding The Food Section’s ultimate needs and crafting a plan to accomplish all her goals for the new site. We worked together to address each issue by building a WordPress x Memberful x Campaign Monitor solution that is customized on the back-end for Hanna’s team while being familiar on the front-end for The Food Section’s online community. The Food Section highlights food culture in cities and communities that are often overlooked by mainstream media, so the new site needed to feel welcoming, accessible, and trustworthy across devices and audiences.
THE RESULTS
The final website embodies a 'choose-your-own-adventure' experience, allowing users to easily navigate through both recent and archived content. This approach ensures that The Food Section's rich history is accessible and engaging for new and existing readers alike. We even added a fun feature called “Potluck” where a member can be taken to a random article from the archives. Transitioning from Substack to a self-hosted platform opened up new possibilities for how users could access the content, how it could create joyous experiences both on the site and in their inboxes, and how Hanna could continue to grow the publication and its reach.
Hanna Raskin, Editor & Publisher of The Food Section
“One of the reasons I wanted to migrate The Food Section off Substack was I felt like the brand had its own identity beyond the newsletter platform. But I didn't have a clue how it might look as a standalone site. The Wonderly team not only crafted the perfect design, but produced it through a process so collaborative and supportive that I emerged with new clarity about my brand's meaning and mission—as well as a gorgeous, easy-to-navigate website that The Food Section's readers love.”