Three Website Design Tips from CooksIllustrated.com Membership Website

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Three Website Design Tips from CooksIllustrated.com Membership Website

Posted in Website Design Tips	June 13, 2006

Permalink: http://daily.mequoda.com/i//website_design_tips/website_design_tips_cooks_illustrated_magazine_181-1.html

By Kim Mateus, Managing Editor Mequoda Daily and Library

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. With 80,000 paid online subscribers, this site's recipe is worth a try.

CooksIllustrated.com shows 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.

Here are three website design tips we pulled from a review of CooksIllustrated.com.

If you're running a membership website, where the majority of your content is behind a firewall, you could still monetize the free content pages by advertising your own products (books or DVDs), much like CooksIllustrated.com does.
On CooksIllustrated.com, you'll find a busy forum. A forum is a great tool, especially for membership websites, but it needs more promotion and integration than Cook's is giving it to reach its full potential.
Keeping up with the user's desire for fresh daily content can be a challenge for membership websites, but even traditional libraries have to compete for an audience's short attention span. Without date stamps on the content, the editorial schedule is unclear on this website.

Mequoda Library Members Only: If you're a Mequoda Library member, reference Terri's entire chapter, CooksIllustrated.com Website Design Review. Or check the full Table of Contents for Website Design for Publishers and Authors.

If you're not a Mequoda Library member, and are interested in accessing the full text of this chapter along with 434 other chapters, start your 14-day FREE trial.

Recent Mequoda Daily Website Design Tips

The Primary Requirement for Site Owner is to Understand the Users' Goals, posted in Website Design Tips | June 12, 2006

MarthaStewart.com Stands Out for Integration, but Does Poorly on Some Key Usability Guidelines, posted in Website Design Tips | June 5, 2006

Keeping Website Navigation Intuitive, Persistent and Consistent , posted in Website Design Tips | June 2, 2006

Three Website Design Tips from Knitter's Review, posted in Website Design Tips | May 30, 2006

Increase the User's Connection to Your Site by Promoting and Building Community, posted in Website Design Tips | May 26, 2006

Read more...

COMMENTS

We've tried our hand at forums and have repeatedly run into a problem with consistent forum administration and keeping threads clean and friendly for our users to enjoy. Our oldest forum running on Mother Earth News has a small set of "regulars" that alert us when a thread is getting off topic or just plain out of hand. What is the easiest way to jump start to this level of a community? Is the best method to simply charge someone in house that has the time and knowledge to constantly roam the forums in search of trolls and threads in need of response? Are people that use the forums in search of other members' responses or our own?

Comment by: Chris E | June 13, 2006

Yes, I think you need to have someone take responsibility for monitoring the forums. When a post goes unacknowledged, the poster feels abandoned. I've had a member quit one of my membership sites because he didn't get a response to his post on a discussion forum, felt embarrassed, and left the group. He roundly criticized me for not answering the post and "making him look foolish."

It's tough to get readers to feel as though they belong to a community and that it is "safe" to make a post. It's easier on a membership website, where the users all are members and have to be on the inside of the site in order to post. That weeds out the spammers and pranksters.

And yes, posters want to hear from other members as well as the site editors. They are generally either looking for answers or want to be acknowledged (validated) for a statement they've made or an observation they've shared.

Respect. Validation. Don't we all want that?

-- Peter

Comment by: Peter S | June 16, 2006

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