Testing The Test Kitchen

With baseball season getting under way it seems like a good time to paraphrase "Field Of Dreams." Again. I know. I've done it before. But I've often thought about its most famous line - "If you build it, they will come," - as I've posted to this site: After all, if you blog it, they will read. Right?

I think that's the assumption that most of us made when we first started to blog, or put anything on the web for that matter. The simple notion that we'd pecked and poured our hearts out into a template was enough. But that was, of course, the exact same thought held first by thousands and now by millions of others.

How do you make your content stand out now? How do you compete for someone's attention on the web, for instance, when there are nearly 50 million tweets per day?

It's a question that I'm reviewing now. In the past few weeks I've been helping the folks over at Foodzie.com add some content to their site in the form of a Test Kitchen. For those of you who don't know, Foodzie is an online grocery store that sells artisan foods. Part of the original plan with the Test Kitchen was to engage visitors to the site. Of course getting them to shop was the ultimate goal - that is what retailers are in business for, anyway - but we also wanted to create a dialogue. By offering people recipe suggestions for different products we wanted to establish a conversation where visitors responded with their impressions, and maybe even shared their own recipes.

People loved it! We received excited emails telling us how much they enjoyed the Foodzie Test Kitchen.

There was only one problem: Instead of posting their comments on the site, they sent their messages directly to us.

So, since most of you are more web savvy than I am, I thought I'd turn to you. I'm including some links to the test kitchen below. If you could, please let me know what you think. On the Foodzie site, por favor.

And if you happen to pick up, oh, say, some of La Mar's Mendocino Sea Salt or some of Napa Farmhouse's Persimmon Jam, while you're looking around, well, that would be swell, too.

Here are the links. Thanks in advance! (Photo credit: Courtesy of Foodzie.com)

http://foodzie.com/blog/2010/03/introducing-the-test-kitchen-playing-with-persimmon-jam/

http://foodzie.com/blog/2010/04/test-kitchen-pecan-encrusted-chicken-mojito-roasted-beets/

http://foodzie.com/blog/2010/03/test-kitchen-fig-balsamic-lamb-chops/

http://foodzie.com/blog/2010/03/test-kitchen-tuna-casserole-all-grown-up/