Written by adam on Nov 12, 2007
An Open Letter to The Food Network
Filed Under: Editorial
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Dear Food Network,
You are a daily part of my life. I know your channel number in my Dish Network directory by heart. You are the first channel I surf to when I want to see what's on in my faves. I have grown up with you. I've been there since the beginning when Emeril Live was once called ground-breaking. You introduced me to my second wife, Giada de Laurentiis. You taught me to become a better cook by showing Good Eats to me. And you enhance my BBQ experience every year during the months of May and June. I love you and I need you.
But your website sucks.
It's bulky and clumsy. It's packed so full of junk and ads that the site barely loads on my computer. You've tried to make it do so much with such a weak server, my tiny little eMac can barely stand to make the request. All I wanted to do was find a recipe from an episode of Everyday Italian, and you made me wait 5 minutes. That's 5 combined minutes from the time I requested your home pages, plus all the searching and page loading.
Look, my love, you need to trim it down. You have an incredibly popular cable channel with a companion web site. They need each other like I need you. But with all the gaudy graphics, databases, and ads, the side just loads too slowly. It seems that with all the ideas of what you COULD do, no one ever asked if you SHOULD do it.
My suggestion: simplify and speed up. Simplify the pages and the graphics and get some better servers. I need you in my life, but not at Nursing Home speeds.
Love,
Adam
Responses to "An Open Letter to The Food Network" ...
jay
So true - I've been thinking this for a while now ...
I'm from Canada but for shows like Barefoot Contessa and others, the recipes are only available on foodnetwork.com ... but in the latest iterations of the site, my browser crashes on searches, ok granted i'm on a 3 year old mac powerbook ... but still ....
adam
Glad to see I'm not the only one. Don't sell yourself short with your 3 year old powerbook. That's plenty of power. Food Network should be building their site to a lower common denominator.
I've been listening to this new podcast called My Life as a Foodie and the host Phil shares your pain. ( http://zeroface.wordpress.com/ )
I couldn't agree with you more. That website is a mess. I see job postings every once in awhile for them so I take that as either they're hard to work for or something was wrong.
It's not as bad as some previous versions but I've run into issues of the site lagging from all of the Flash they use at once and the videos don't always work.
If it wasn't for Bobby Flay and Alton Brown I probably would have never gotten into cooking so I thank FN for that (and when Sandra Lee wears those revealing outfits) but I wish they would do away with The Next Food Network Star. I was embarrassed to watch the train wreck.
Cheers!
Douglas
*see Adam I did post finally :)
el mojay
absolutely agree.
however, you say "nursing home speeds" like that's a bad thing.
e m
Liz
Use firefox and adblocker!
Jewels
AMEN to that. I avoid the FN site whenever possible. I HATE going there for recipes.
J
Gabe
Agreed! I either tend to stay away from the site, or if I need to find a recipe there...
use google to find the recipe.
http://www.google.com/help/features.html#sitesearch
when searching you can limit the search to
www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/
example search for a salad I recall Emeril making... had watercress and papaya in it...
example to enter in the google search field:
watercress papaya emeril site:www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/
2nd entry returned is the recipe I was thinking of.
Hope somebody finds that useful.
Cheers.
Andre
Heya, followed this posting via your RSS feed.
Are you using Safari to get to the FoodNetwork site? I'd recommend Camino, a Mac OS X browser which is built with the Firefox engine, but a bit more Mac OS-y. There's a built-in advertising blocker, which is something you'd have to add-on to Firefox.
http://www.caminobrowser.org/
Give it a shot; and that eMac still got great life on it! My other half still keeps on with his '03 eMac.
Since winter of 2004, I have been exploring the world of cooking and helping out my fellow men in their quests to better themselves in the kitchen. My name is Adam Byrd, you can learn more about me and my mission on my