I Ate Oklahoma

Case Study

One of my favorite projects I have ever worked on is a blog named “I Ate Oklahoma.” It’s a blog penned and maintained by Greg Elwell.

The Problem + History

Greg is an incredible restaurant and food reviewer and, after working for various outlets, decided to strike out on his own with the I Ate Oklahoma blog.

Greg started with a super vital piece, branding. Erin Demoss created Greg’s logo, and it’s an incredible piece of art, and it really helped set apart Greg and his new blog.

The original blog launched on Wordpress, and it was great. Between that logo and Greg’s incredible writing and a platform used by so many things were headed in the right direction.

But, as Greg began adding more content, he ran into the limits of Wordpress. It wasn’t very easy to get the layout just the way he wanted and to create new pages with the control and precision he was looking for.

The Solution

I reached out to Greg to let him know I was a fan of the site and offered to help with some of the pieces mentioned above.

On top of this, I felt very strongly that someone with incredible branding and amazing content should have a site that would genuinely match his voice and help tell his story.

I turned to Webflow to help make this a reality. When searching, I could see a few people were using Webflow to blog (including Webflow) that were a great success!

I started digging into what would be needed to really make this project successful. The content and the structure wasn’t something that bothered me since I had worked in Webflow before and knew it could handle anything I threw at it from a content perspective.

There were, however, some things we’d need:

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Comments - Webflow doesn’t have a native commenting system, so we elected to use Disqus since it was free and is widely used even on some Wordpress sites. Using Disqus with Webflow is pretty straightforward, and this ended up being a quick and easy win.
In the sidebar, Greg wanted to make sure some things were always visible. The things people were quickly scanning for when they’re reading a review. A details panel with where to find the restaurant, links to social and website, and the hours of operation. The other panel he wanted was a “Must Haves.” This would list Greg’s favorite dishes and the items he thought someone would need to check out if they visited. In Wordpress, you would need to use custom fields and write some code to make this happen. In Webflow, this was a snap and was made even more potent with the sticky positioning available natively in the Designer.
I used some custom code to add in:
- Time to read the article
- Custom ads controlled by the CMS
- JSON LD
Other features include
- Site search
- Reading progress bar
- Custom categories design that looks like menus
- Add This integration

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The Result

When this project began, Greg was really starting to make this project go. Switching to Webflow gave Greg a lot of power, and his readership has increased dramatically. His readers have a smooth experience that visually matches his brand and his writing style.

And Greg has a blog on a platform that empowers him, makes it easy to update, and is ready to pivot with him in any direction his ventures may go.