Help with Web Site Content

[spotit3]

A friend who is a computer consultant has offered to design me a web site free of charge. It is an offer too good to miss as I have seen some of his and they are fantastic. My site would be basically a cookery one but I wondered if anyone had any ideas what I could add to the content to bring some life to it and make it that little bit different from other cookery sites. I am trying to thinkof something to attract visitors to the site but am drawing a blank. Any ideas would be much appreciated.

[fo3nix]

Don't focus on more content.

Minimise your content to what you need -- specialise.

Instead, focus on having a really accessible and simple site.

Sections for fast meals, brave meals to attempt, etc?

(this is far harder to do but i'll suggest it anyway): let the visitor specify what they have in their fridge, and offer recipes based on those ingredients.

most importantly though, keep the site very, very simply. if they're going to come to your site, they're going to come for recipes and nothing else.

[cascarelli]

If the website that your friend designs is that good, you wont need to 'bring some life to it'.

What you need to do is make sure that anyone searching for cookery sites, or other relevant search terms, finds your site. This should be part of the site designers job. There are many, many companies out there who will sell you this 'web optimisation' but really it's not that difficult, mainly common sense, and any web designer should be able to incorporate this when creating the site.

You could try advertising your site with Google Adwords. For some sites Adwords will increase site traffic by 10x or more - this is from personal experience. You will pay per click (i.e. per person who visits your site via the Google ad) but you can turn the ads off whenever you want.

Once people find your site, make it easy to navigate around and incorporate a search function.

Hope this helps.