I’m on a hunt for recipes, and instead of going to allrecipes.com or recipezaar.com as I normally do, I’ve decided to check out what’s on the websites of Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver today.
Jamie vs Nigella – who wins online?
Jamie Oliver’s website strikes me as very British in design. Not long ago I visited British organic food company Duchy Originals‘ website and it has the same feel to it with a large photo as a backdrop for the site. Back to Jamie’s site, it’s quite well-designed with a good selection of recipes that carries comments and ratings from website visitors (web 2.0 brownie points for Jamie!), lots of food photos that look delectable against a background of white, podcasts, forums and blogs. The website’s interactivity is very suited for his target audience, a young web-savvy working crowd looking to put together easy, presentable dinners in his breezy manner.
Nigella’s website is so old-world web it does no justice to that pair of perennially manicured hands and her polished presence. I would have expected luscious raspberry maroons to whet up an appetite for her recipes, but instead what I got was a pasty shortbread-colored background, 50% screen real estate left-justified (even when viewed on IE) and a British monarch-type portrait of her on the homepage. How can a food website be devoid of food pictures on its landing page? And frankly, asking her site visitors to “get your skates on” at the bottom of the homepage is incredulous, I not only wanted to skate on, I wanted to scoot off. I think her target audience of domestic goddesses, even if they spend too much time in the kitchen or painting their nails, would be sorely disappointed.
Conclusion? Jamie wins the food fight online, (non-manicured) hands down!
The Digital Vibes 