launchly

Do you want me to update your URL to point to cookthing.com instead of recipepuppy?

First thoughts: Cool idea. I thought I understood your site from the first page, but then confusion set in. Your instructions state -- 1) select food, 2) select ingredients, 3) Get a list. This led me to believe you were "anding" all the ingredients to find the one or two that would be perfect matches. Instead, the results contain tens of thousands of recipes that contain any of the selected ingredients. Maybe someway to only show perfect matches would be good. I can always remove an ingredient if I need more results.

SEO: I hate the way all urls return the homepage. (eg /robots.txt, /index.html, /foobar, all return the homepage). For SEO reasons, you should 301 redirect these requests back the the homepage.

You don't have a robots.txt file, nor do you appear to have a sitemap.

You need to get your site name in your title tag, preferably at the end.

You site name changes as you go through the pages.

I like the way you can select the ingredients you want to use. Very easy. But like I said above, it lead me to expect they would be required.

Are you planning on keeping the results page with Recipe Puppy? If not, you should probably add more pages like FAQ, Help, Contact Us, About, etc... If you are going to keep the flow from CookThing to Recipe Puppy, make sure the users expects the jump.

Normally when I want a recipe, I go to foodnetwork, cook's illustrated, or even google at large. I can see myself using a site like yours.

You may wish to add a few basic filters like health, vegetarian, vegan, not-vegetarian, etc. Otherwise, if people are predisposed to only eating health food, getting a lot of non-health results will keep them at their old sources. A site like yours is all about trust. Does the user trust they will quickly find a recipe that will be to their liking. If not, they are gone forever.

Good Luck!

Hmm, I like the new name and the lack of the dog staring at me is good on the new frontend. Unfortunately from a usability standpoint I think it may have taken a step backwards unless you don't intend this site to replace RecipePuppy.

I liked how in RecipePuppy I picked ingredients first and it told me anything I could make using them. Maybe it's more useful to start from the type of dish you want to make but not to me I don't think. I see this service as useful for when I have things in my fridge/pantry that are about to go bad. I may have no idea what I can make with them. What if you sort of reversed it and I could tell you my ingredients I NEED to use first and then you gave me recipes with category filters and only included filters for things I could make? In other words if I can't make cakes or pies don't give those to me. If the only recipes I can make are pastas or dips just give me those two categories.

Anyways, that is how I would see myself using something like this - a way to clean up the fridge/pantry. Otherwise I would probably just go to FoodNetwork.com and search because I can put in "pasta chicken pesto" and filter by my favorite chefs and get back things with those "ingredients". Honestly I could probably accomplish the same/similar on FoodNetwork but if your site was tailored for that specific need I would probably use yours first for when I need to do that.

I was confused when it took me from CookThing to RecipePuppy for the results. Is that how this would stay when finished?

Oh and yes, I would (and have) tell a friend.

Nice

I got a similiar page in Germany, nice idea. Really useful.

I created a site like this, qwertykitchen.com . I am familar with some of the problems that you might encounter. What I wished I could do past the technical feat, was to provide context.

I think it would be great if a site like this could also walk the person through the techniques that are needed for the recipe. If a user doesn't know how to chiffonad, show them a video of a person chiffonanding.

Where does pasta come from and all that stuff. I feel that with out the context, it would be hard to grow your market and to be come truly a breakout. Have you looked at supercook.

I really like the idea of this site. I don't know how often I would use it, but I know that it would be fun every once and a while.

I kind of like the minimalist approach. It is much more appealing than RecipePuppy was. The only issue I see is once I enter in a dish, I have trouble picking the ingredients. They're all in one big list and it was not apparent to me if I could type in my own ingredients.

The pictures of food on the right, I had a little trouble with understanding their context. Are they graphical representations of recipes for the keyword I typed in. Doesn't look like it because I typed in pasta and some meatloaf dishes appeared.

The only other critic I could give is that while I like the minimalistic approach, it seems that there is a lot of white space. Could that be reduced or organized with visual layout elements somehow?

I think that this is making great progress and it is really interesting seeing how it is moving through the iterations. Keep up the good work!

1) Do you know what to do when you first load the main page? Yes, I enter what I want to make and then on the next page I get to chose my ingredients.

2) What do you wish this recipe search engine did that it doesn't do? When your search does not turn up any exact results it should recommend recipes with similar qualities.

3) Would you tell a friend? Once the site has more content and is more refined I would definitely tell a friend.

The share and bookmark button is a great idea but should be improved and placed in a more locatable place.

Looking for my ingredients in a list was tedious. There's room for a lot of improvement there.

After checking about 10 things that I have right now, I get a list of results all containing ingredients that I don't have. If a recipe has ingredients that I don't have then I won't be able to make it. This, it is useless to me.

Show me what I _can_ make with what I have, and consider showing recipes that I only miss some non-crucial ingredients for, or that I have replacements for that will also do.

One more thing: lots of ingredients are somewhat static. I always have garlic, basil and some more things. It would be nice if you remembered my ingredients.