Food.com

• Recipes for various dietary needs
• Advanced filtering
• Blog and newsletter
• Upload and share recipes
• Expert tips and how-tos

Food offers its users and members an extremely large amount of recipes because it provides members the chance to share their own recipes from home. These user generated recipes come in a variety of tastes and there are plenty of options for those who have special dietary requirements. Locating those recipes is made even easier when one uses the advanced search feature which allows users to filter results by ingredients to include and exclude, meal, course, diet and nutrition, occasion, cuisine, preparation, and type.

The community of sharable recipes also allows users to comment on and rate the recipes by logging in and leaving a review. The recipes also include a feature where you can save the item to your "recipe box" and create a shopping list for ingredients; this will even show you what is on sale in your area.

The expert tips, how-to's, and video are another great feature. They include articles such as "Build a Better Burger" and "How to Cut a Mango" as well as entire sections on breakfast, lunch, and dinner how-to's.

• Difficulty ranking for recipes
• Meal planner

Food.com would benefit from adding a difficulty level to the recipes contained on the website. This feature would allow users, especially beginners, to filter the recipes based on that difficulty level. For example, if a person feels that their cooking skills are moderate they will most like not want to view recipes which are considered difficult if they are simply trying to cook dinner that night. This option would save users /members time as well as allow them to choose the speed at which they grow their cooking skills.

Creating a meal planner to operate with the shopping list would also be beneficial to members and would help the website address another layer of home cooking, namely the creation of a meal plan for each day which increases the amount of cooking at home a user is actually doing. Often people complain that they do not have enough time to cook dinner each night, by offering members a meal planner Food could provide them with a service which allows them to put together a menu of meals which can be made quickly and generate a shopping list for the meals so the members will know that they have every ingredient needed for the entire menu time period.

Overall, we recommend Food.com to people who want to browse recipes from a community of home cooks as well as share their own. With its large amount of recipes, extensive filtering system via the advance search, and expert tips Food.com is a great place for home cooks to learn more about preparing meals and entertaining in addition to providing them inspiration for meals in a variety of diets and requirements.