Aus food sites

I've found the site taste.com.au really useful recently. It's well designed and they seem to have thought of it all...


Not only does it aggregate recipes from a whole load of different recipe/food sites, but also:

• Recipe reviews by users
  
• news
• cooking tips
• info about ingredients
• info about specific cuisine types
  
• forums to chat to other foodies
• member login where you can save recipes you like, add your own recipes to your 'folder', save a recipes ingredients to build a shopping list
• Recommends similar / related recipes
  

Certain recipes are grouped to make it easier to browse for specific types like collections of side dishes, turkish food... I particularly enjoyed looking through the barbecue collection and am planning to try the prawn skewers this weekend - yum!
I also looked at cuisine.com.au, I prefer the more subtle look and feel and its groupings and search are simpler and make a bit more sense, but doesn't have the same level of functionality with the member login, user reviews and forums which Taste has.

Love the wine matching tool though!

Australian media ownership

A high percentage of Australian media websites are owned by just a few large media corporations. This seems to be much more so than in the UK or US.

Some of the big players are:

News Ltd, the Australian part of News Corp (Rupert Murdoch).
* 68 per cent of the capital city and national newspaper market;
* 77 per cent of the Sunday newspaper market;
* 62 per cent of the suburban newspaper market;
* 18 per cent of the regional newspaper market.

It's major digital publications through http://www.newsdigitalmedia.com.au/ are:
- http://www.news.com.au/ National news
- http://www.realestate.com.au/ Housing classifieds
- http://carsguide.news.com.au/ Cars classifieds
- http://www.careerone.com.au/ Careers classifieds
- http://www.truelocal.com.au/ Local business search
- http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/ National news
- http://www.taste.com.au/ Recipes (I love this one!)
- http://www.vogue.com.au/ Australian Vogue
and a whole load of other national and regional newspaper and lifestyle sites.


Fairfax
* 21 per cent of the capital city and national newspaper market;
* 22 per cent of the Sunday newspaper market;
* 17 per cent of the suburban newspaper market;
* 16 per cent of the regional newspaper market.

It's major digital publications through http://www.fairfax.com.au/ are:
- http://www.smh.com.au/ Sydney Morning Herald Regional newspaper
- http://www.watoday.com.au/ Western Australian Regional newspaper
- http://www.domain.com.au/ Housing classifieds
- http://www.drive.com.au/ Cars classifieds
- http://mycareer.com.au/ Careers classifieds
- http://www.rsvp.com.au/ Dating
- http://www.afr.com/ Financial news
And many other news, entertainment, classifieds, travel, specialised careers, and lifestyle sites.

Seven Network
owns a number of free and pay TV channels, also has a partnership with yahoo known as Yahoo7 http://au.yahoo.com/ through which you can access all Yahoo products.

PBL
Owns the 9 TV network and also has a stake in Sky News. It has a partnership with Microsoft Nine MSN http://ninemsn.com.au/ through which you can access all of the MSN products.

Figures here and more info including telecommunication and internet service companies can be seen here.

The websites developed or bought by these companies are definitely going to have more financial backing and economies of scale than independent startups. I'm wondering how they manage the balance between advertising opportunities and the user experience, how they're affected by the economic climate right now and what kind of product development processes they use. Would be interesting to hear what it's like to work inside these companies...

Australian eCommerce

I am getting a little frustrated with the lack of decent ecommerce sites in Australia. There's even no Amazon - where do I get my books from now?!

A couple of good (bad) examples of this are the Myer site (Myer is one of the biggest department stores like house of fraser) which looks quite pretty and then you realize all you can do is view the catalogue (page by page of the physical catalogue), you can't purchase and theres no proper search functionality. And the Bunnings Warehouse site (like B&Q) which lets you look through their catalogue again at (sometimes handrawn) pictures of the products and you can't buy, search or even see the prices.

These are on the better side, sometimes these sites just scan in their catalogue pages and put them up as PDFs and call it a website. There are no good places you can go to buy clothes or household goods online, if you search for ages you can sometimes find specialist like for PC parts or fridges, which will transact but then the design and navigation all looks a bit dodgy. Woolworths (one of the main supermarkets) does let you do online food shopping, but will only delivery to certain inner city postcodes.

I think maybe it is because the the country is so massive and the relatively small population is all centred on a few places that the delivery doesn't work out to be cost effective. I've also been reading that maybe the public have privacy / fraud concerns which is more an education and culture thing. Also I've heard that some shops like to set prices by store which wouldn't work very well with the web!

The situation does look to be improving. According to Ecommerce Journal article "eCorner, a leading ecommerce solutions provider, that hosts over 170 Web stores in its Australian SME cluster, reported 90% increase in traffic volume for November year on year." They also reports increase in use at Paypal and Eway (another payment system). There are also a few good comparison site like GetPrice now which make the process easier.

Weddings pt 1!

After organising my blogs I'm now thinking about our big event of the (British) summer. Had a bit of a shock a few days ago when I realised that there is only 8 months to go. Still have a few things to sort out.

I set up a wedding site to give all our info to guests using Momentville There are a few companies out there who will do this kind of thing, but momentville is free, simple to set up, and doesn't look too bad. You can add forum areas for guest to chat and add comments (e.g. favourite song recommendations for the reception!). You can upgrade and design your own template if you like too, but I found one of theirs which was ok. I particularly like that these guys are really enthusiastic about their system, are often updating it (and blog about the updates), and they respond really quickly to support questions.
On the other hand, trying to find a photograher was not so great. I would have thought having a decent website was an essential piece of their business these days. But a lot of the sites I've seen take so long to load, have links which don't work, and look awful . I don't expect them to be hard core developers, but surely a photographer wants to have a online experience which supports and enhances his work? True, the great sites I have seen tend to be the ones charging a fortune, but it doesn't cost much to just ensure there are no errors, the images display and you're not using clashing colours? Anyway, I have now booked Michael Marker, who has great references, seemed lovely when we spoke on the phone and has a simple, but effective website :-)

The wedding forums I've looked at have been helpful too, there are so many - will write more of a review of them later...

Organising blogs

I have forgotten about this blog for a while, having been so busy with moving over to Sydney, and using this blog to tell our friends and family about adventures. But that is not really the place for all the posts I want to write so am picking this one up again.

By now I definitely do have a lot to say about Australian ecommerce, internet and mobile and looking forward to getting it all down.