One of my passions in life is cooking. I love trying new recipes and different cooking techniques and the internet is a great resource for finding information for that. There are TONS of cooking sites, some good and some bad, and I thought I would go through and pick out some of the great ones today!

What am I looking for in a good cooking site?

• I want new and interesting recipes and I want them to be easy to find.
• I want to be able to search for a specific recipe.
• I want tips and tricks at my fingertips to give me pointers along the way.
• Usability, design and organization is also very important.

Martha Stewart

Martha’s site gets the most points for design out of these 3 cooking sites. The design has a soft feel and is obviously targeting women. With layers and shadows, the design looks like a scrapbook although it isn’t cluttered, it’s very easy to navigate through. All of the features I’m looking for are here with more than cooking to be found, Martha has sections on crafts, pets, home organization and more.

Kraft

Kraft also has much of what I’m looking for, although the design is a bit more simplistic than Martha Stewart with nothing much other than a gradient in the background. The content seems cluttered, making the homepage a bit hard to look at, although some of the advanced features like the ingredient search are quite cool.

Betty Crocker

Betty Crocker also gets some design points, although their content is also a bit much on the homepage. I do like the simple design, with nice subtle touches adding shine and depth. Their layout is good, allowing the user to find things easily, and I like the javascript sidebar, where sections slide open upon clicking.

All in all, each of these sites has their good and bad features, and I do use each of them mostly for the content they offer, although having a great site with search capabilities and user-friendly functions certainly helps!