I was sent to review your site by John at WebWord.com. Forgive my intrusion onto your peaceful morning.

First, there is much more that I like about this site's usability than what I dislike. Great job.

Now, I wanted to search by category, but only saw one way to "drill down" and that was via the "cookbooks" in the left margin. I would have liked more category structures visible at top, above fold. I DID find categories on a sub-level page under ways to search, but I was expecting to find those categories in the home page somewhere.

This is an information architecture issue. I think when it comes to an everyday topic like food, people will have many different ways of forming a query and the site should anticipate and support this.

Thanks.

-- Eric Grose (ericg@vertaport.com), March 16, 2001