Recipe pages for diabetes website - what's important to you?

mike1366 said:

Hi Everyone

I'm a web designer working on some recipe pages for a diabetes charity website. What do you think should be on these pages? What content and features do you look for in recipe pages? What's important to you?

- Counters for calories, carbs and fat?
- Sharing, saving and printing?
- Nice photographs?
- Particular ingredients, meal types or cooking times?
- Comments and voting?
- Particular ways of searching or finding recipes?
- Anything else?

Any thoughts, opinions or frustrations with current pages would be great. Any sites that you think are particularly good (or bad!) would also be very helpful.

Many Thanks

Mike

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I use the BBC quite a bit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/ They tend not to add the nutritional information with the recipes, but uploading the url into myfitnesspal (in the Recipe Section) does the nutritional donkey work for me, usually.

From your list:
Counters for calories, carbs and fat? - Definitely
- Sharing, saving and printing? - Yes, although sharing is less important to me personally. I'd also like to be able to vote the recipe up or down (the BBC allows one to recommend a recipe, the totals for which are then displayed, but not the detail of who recommended it - e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/pork_chop_maman_blanc_71608 <<< a fave on Planet Breathe, but perhaps pass on the saute potatoes!
- Nice photographs? - Yes please
- Particular ingredients, meal types or cooking times? - yes, yes and yes, but also to be able to filter for dairy-free, meat-free for example.
- Comments and voting? - Yes, see above
- Particular ways of searching or finding recipes? - The BBC website has a plethora of search options, which would probably be expensive to replicate
- Anything else? - I'll get back to you when I've had a think.

What a great idea thanks.

Filters, please, for everything.

Carbs, fat and calories - yes! (GL of the whole meal would be awesome, too). Avoid vague things like 'average serving', 'average size', etc, especially when the number of servings can be easily determined. E.g. if it's a recipe for a low-carb bread, please don't give numbers for 'one slice' or 'average slice', because that doesn't tell me anything. Give the numbers for whole loaf, or for 100 grams - so that it's easy to calculate how much I can eat at any time.

Search by ingredients - so if I'm looking for a recipe with e.g. coconut oil and apples, I can filter them. Also the option to filter out an ingredient, e.g. milk. But, it would be awesome to have a filter by number of carbs as well. E.g. lunch with less than 10 grams of carbs, or lunch with 40-50 grams of carbs...

Good range of recipes to cater for those with other issues with their diet, coeliacs, lactose intolerance etc.

Don't always assume cooking is for a family, break it down to a single or double serving. Most recipes are for 4 people. I end up halving the recipe and its not always as accurate.

Recipes suitable for microwaves. I don't mean for reheating but cooking from scratch

Could I add please, some form of indication of "suitable for low carb diet", or gluten free, or the like? There was some very lively discussion around that very thing recently.