CooksIllustrated.com Website Design Review

ARTICLE SNIPPET - CooksIllustrated.com has Earned High Marks in Relationship Building and Readability. Other Areas Such as Community Building Display a Good Infrastructure that Could Really be Impressive with a Little More Promotion.

Mequoda has previously covered the Boston Common Press's media network in America's Test Kitchen Media Network Case Study by Jane E. Zarem. The membership website (and print magazine) Cook's Illustrated is an important part of the business strategy. Here we'll review the design and usability of the membership website CooksIllustrated.com. With 120,000 paid online subscribers, this site's recipe is worth a try.

Just to re-cap, the media network integrates content across all their outlets. Thus the TV show will use a recipe from the magazine, etc. ... The pyramid includes:

• America's Test Kitchen TV show andwebsite
• Cook's Illustrated magazine and website
• Cook's Country Magazine and website
• Online bookstore with 40 titles of cookbooks and DVDs

The company sees itself as a database business—they seek to gather a database of names with a specific set of interests for further marketing efforts. The target audience is comprised of educated home cooks and smart shoppers who want to know that they're cooking the best recipes with the best tools. This group isn't satisfied with any old brownie mix, they want to know the best brownie recipe—with scientific proof! How do they do it? The content is cooked up—literally—in Boston where "a team of highly qualified test cooks and editors perform thousands of tests every year... to develop the best recipes and cooking techniques, recommend the best cookware and equipment and rate brand-name pantry staples for home cooks."

This Mequoda Website Scorecard review shows some excellent scores in readability and relationship building. On a membership website, this is exactly where we'd expect to see good scores. The audience won't pay for something that's hard to read. And the site won't get a paying audience without paying attention to getting email addresses and subscriptions—building the relationship—from the get-go. The areas that are weak are also not unexpected—for example content that comes from a bi-monthly magazine often fails to figure out how to re-slice itself to fit a website's daily schedule—content freshness is not a strong suit here.

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