

Stack Overflow for Food. My new site for food questions. - voidfiles
http://answers.qwertykitchen.com

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tomsaffell
I echo all points so far. Nice idea.

Your name doesn't speak to your audience. What % of foodies know what 'querty'
means? My guess: very few (in contrast, stackoverflow is a great name, because
it is a phrase that has significant meaning to the target audience). If you're
targeting gourmet chefs, something like burntgarlic.com would be analogous to
stackoverflow.com, etc.

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voidfiles
Thats actually a really great point. I guess we thought people would know what
qwerty meant. A hybring of food, and computers. Something we will really think
about.

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allang
Perhaps you should focus your target on simply foodies, rather than foodies +
computer geeks. Simplifying will pay off when making decisions in the future.
Rather than thinking "what would a food-lover/computer geek want?", you should
be asking "what would a food-lover want?"

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catch23
I'm guessing the food-lover audience is broader and probably more appealing.
burntgarlic would be a cool domain name. As a computer geek, some of the food
questions I've always had rarely relates to anything computer related. Here's
a few:

how to remove skin from tomatoes, peppers, etc? some chefs use open flame,
others use submersion in boiling water.

when should one use a mortar over a coffee grinder for creating custom mixed
spices?

Yogurt is added into Naan bread for body, why does this work and what other
non-dairy alternatives can we use for similar effect?

In what cases would rice wine work better than grape wine (for saute dishes).

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allang
It is a good idea, but there are issues with the execution. I'll outline them
below.

The most critical problem is that your site has serious SEO issues. Stack
Overflow was built with the goal of having crawlable questions and answers.
That's how you build traffic and usage. Your questions are loaded with some
AJAX, which means that the search engine will never see them. Even worse, your
content will look stale to Google and be indexed very infrequently.

My suggestion: Even if you create a sitemap.xml file (which is one solution),
your files will be indexed slowly. You will need to mess with the crawl
frequency manually with Google Webmaster Tools. This is less than ideal. The
ideal solution is to actually create a crawlable site. You should invest some
time and money into learning about SEO and perhaps hiring someone to audit
your site.

Next, a little harsh criticism: If you are targeting foodies, you should
design your site as such. It's not a very attractive site, let alone designed
correctly.

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ricree
"Your questions are loaded with some AJAX, which means that the search engine
will never see them" I'm looking at the site with noscript on, and everything
seems to be fine. Did he change things since you posted, or am I
misunderstanding the issue.

~~~
voidfiles
Its built to degrade gracefully. So if you view the site without javascript it
should still work. So yes google should be able to pick up all the content.
Ajax was hopefully a better user experience.

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ktharavaad
I don't know if its just me but I think the color scheme and design is very
ugly. If its a website about food, you should use some nice and warm colors
and design elements which makes me hungry!

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voidfiles
What are design elements that make you hunger?

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ktharavaad
A little bit of googling turned up this:

[http://www.logoblog.org/wordpress/hungry-restaurant-logos-
th...](http://www.logoblog.org/wordpress/hungry-restaurant-logos-that-make-an-
impact/)

There's also an article a while back which talked about how the Aqua theme in
Mac OSX was designed so that it will "make your mouth water" to look at it.

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trickjarrett
A noble attempt, but it is extremely sparse. Hire a designer to get in there
and give you a high quality design, make sure he leaves areas for you to run
ads as you'll need to so that you can run that sort of site.

~~~
voidfiles
What kinds of things can a graphic designer, I assume you meant graphic, give
me that I couldn't do for my self?

~~~
trickjarrett
If you're graphically inclined then go ahead and take care of it yourself, but
based on the sparse layout and simplistic design I thought you would need one.

Even StackOverflow and the others are nicer to look at, but remember you're
appealing to food geeks and so they are more visually inclined. Part of
cooking well is the presentation.

~~~
catch23
+1 for presentation. If I go to a restaurant and order a dish that looks like
crap, it generally tastes like crap too.

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tjr
I created an account, and received the password via an email which came, I
presume, from your personal email account. No name, just the address,
voidfiles@...

Even if you use your address, I think it would look better if you made it come
from, e.g.:

    
    
      QwertyKitchen.com <voidfiles@...>

~~~
voidfiles
Point taken, I fixed that.

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truebosko
as a foodie and a programmer my only suggestion is: we like pictures of food.
if you can incorporate that cleanly in your site (fetch pics related to the
question, display as nice thumbnails) then your site will look much more
inviting.

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didip
I don't think your target audiences would understand (or need to) What RPX is.

I think it would be more obvious if you just show the AOL/Google/Yahoo login
interface on that right column.

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voidfiles
I agree, its in the works, I just added the rpx thing today wanted to see how
it worked.

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bdotdub
Favicon is the default drupal one and the "About us" is a 404. whoops

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voidfiles
Fixed, I had a lot more basic problems then I thought posting this up to HN
has been really helpfull in less then an hour.

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mg1313
Did you use an open source software to build your site? Or it is 100% your
code?

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mg1313
I just saw it is built in Drupal...did you use a special module?

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voidfiles
Yes I used a bunch I will make a list.

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mg1313
Thank you.

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peteysd
Uh, horrible glaring typo? What's an anwser?

~~~
voidfiles
I fixed the spelling mistake. You really didn't know what I meant even if it
was misspelled?

