Delia Online
Delia Smith is one of the best known TV personalities of a generation and synonymous with great simple cooking. Her site is a treasure house of her recipes and now an active community of cooks and foodies.
What Delia Online wanted?
Delia Smith contacted us to help work out an online strategy for her company and then a year later to build the first site. It had to be simple to use, reflect the tone and feel of her published books and offer revenue generation opportunities.
What we did?
We designed the site, provide the content management, publishing and community tools and support its promotion and marketing.
We are particularly proud of the search facilites used on this site which present "faceted" results. This allows visitors to narrow down their search without presenting an unwieldy search form. We have gone on to use this approach on many of our other sites.
Central to the search is a well modelled recipe, ingredients and menus database that allows every ingredient of every recipe to be explored. This goes well beyond the functionality of most other recipe sites.
The content management challenges
The site online today is our third major reworking of the site and on each occasion the goal has been to make it simpler to run and more useful to the growing number of regular visitors.
Delia runs a small team and our content management approach, using our OTHERobjects CMS, had to be extended to allow scheduling of content and articles so that they could be prepared in advance and published in batches.
Designing and implementing our own content management software makes bespoke work for clients straightforward and useful features for one site then get rolled into the next release.
OTHERobjects CMS not only powers the publication aspects of the site but now also the community message boards and membership components. Delia's team can moderate discussions, design promotions, build links with commercial partners and publish new content all within the same browser based system.
The results
The site is a destination for those who love food and want reliable well tested recipes. It is an award winning site that is regularly picked as one of the top UK food sites.
