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.
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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.
