As a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area on the border of multiple “wine countries”, pairing is an important aspect of local culture. I was online and noticed a site that had some wonderful recipes but no easy way to print them out. I had a flash of someone trying to cook glancing back and forth from their laptop and finally spilling the entire pot all over the keyboard. Clearly, when it comes to recipes, simple quick printouts are required.

Easy Food & Wine

This site is a classic example of recipe sites online. Pleasing overall design, quick simple navigation, but absolutely useless when it comes to using the recipes. Try printing out this page! There are advertisements everywhere, and the recipe is forced into a long narrow column that might take two pages to print out! There was no clear link or button to click for a printer friendly version either. I’m not sure what people are supposed to do with this recipe. You’d be surprised about the number of web users that don’t know how to select, copy text and paste it into a word document. And they shouldn’t need to!

Mirassou

It is always helpful to have pictures of the finished product, and this site does a great job with clearly having photos of the food everywhere. It is much easier to choose a recipe from thumbnails of it, rather than text descriptions trying to explain what it looks like. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same defect– there isn’t any way to just print out the recipe in a simple manner that is useful in the kitchen.

Epicurious.Com

Overall the page is much more printer friendly, although still not ideal. There is a tiny little icon with a print version, but it is difficult to find and even more difficult to click on. People I talked to want recipes fast online– they don’t have time to be searching around trying to find small icons. Why else would someone want to look at a recipe other than to print it out? The only other reason would be to decide whether it was worth printing out or not, and a print button would still be needed. I noticed there was a mobile app for recipes on the site, but an iPhone isn’t any safer in the kitchen than a laptop. I always carefully put my mobile devices on unused counters that I wouldn’t be going near while cooking in case of splashes, not to mention the issues of trying to scroll a web site on it with greasy or flour-coated fingers. Let’s be realistic here!

Gloria Ferrer Winery

At last a clean, uncluttered recipes page. The only problem is that all the recipes are in one long scrolling area with anchored links. That means all the recipes are on one page of the site– what if a visitor only wanted to print out one of them? They’d still have to know how to do the copy paste method. It also did not give enough styling to the subheads like Ingredients or Preparation. When actually creating a recipe, those need to be bold and different from the rest of the text so that it can be deciphered at a glance.

After going through almost fifty Wine & Food pairing web sites, none of them offered printer friendly options. This is an example of how web sites were not thinking ahead to what visitors needed. Sometimes there are items that must be printed out. Often the easiest way of doing that would be to offer a pdf version of the recipe, preferably only printing out on a half page for ease of storing in a recipe book. It is a pity with so many beautiful winery web sites available, that so few are thinking ahead to their visitor’s needs.

This is a lesson that can be applied to any subject on any web site– always consider the point of each section and design accordingly.

Friday, May 14th, 2010, 5:26 pm   |   Content  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback