Competition
There are many competetor websites that serve similar functions and serve as great tools for those looking to find quick, simple recipes. The purpose of this page is to point out the features that make these sites successful, but to also take note of their shortcomings.
The Good
- Social media websites like Pinterest and Instagram have amazing features that allow you to add, save, and share media that has been posted on their websites. While these websites are not entirely based around recipe sharing, they serve as great references for the type of posting and sharing that I hope to replicate on my website.
- RecipeLand and RecipeRadar are recipe sharing websites that have promising designs - allowing users to find recipes based on ingredients, the kitchen equipment you have, dietary restrictions, and other features. In this way, they cater well towards my audience. Narrowing down the scope of your search makes finding recipes that are relevant to the user is generally helpful when accounting for time.
- Websites like SuperCook allow users to add ingredients to a shopping list, to make prepping meals much easier. While the aim of my website will not necessarily be for food preperation, it does serve as a good model for how users could be able to save ingredients and recipes to lists.
The Bad
- Most of these websites link you to external sources to actually view and print recipes. This can make the process of finding recipes difficult to keep track of, and users can easily get lost in the process. I would generally like to keep my users on a single website in order to lower the risk of users getting lost.
- While finding recipes on these websites is generally easy, many of the recipes are lengthy and are difficult to narrow down. A user might need to look through dozens of recipes before finding one with a realistic chance of being made. Some require equipment that a college student would probably lack, while others use a dozen different spices. The audience reach for these websites are targeted primarily towards people with more than what a college student has.
- None of the websites that I have found this far have good methods for tracking saved recipes. Before locating just one recipe, the user would have to sort through many different hyperlinks, read lengthy introductions, and navigate all over the web to find the simple recipe that they are looking for. I want my site to be straightforward - nothing but the ingredients, instructions, and possibly a few helpful tips.