I discovered goeat.ie recently and have been looking around the site. Overall it seems well designed and they have the usual bunch of reviews and competitions and recipes that you would expect on any food site.
They also have the first ever Irish Video Blogs (according to them). A very neat idea but to be honest the videos are brutal. They look like the sort of thing they used to show in the Savoy Cinema on O’Connell Street years ago before the movie. Long sweeping shots of the restaurant and you are just waiting for them to say “After the feature presentation, why not pop next door to the Khyber Pass Tandoori and experience our range of international Vesta cuisine”.
I looked at their video reviews of both Wagamama and The Mongolian BBQ. They didn’t have a negative word to say about either of them (apart from some gentle dig at Wagamama about it not being a place you “dine”). I think this may be a bigger problem than it first appears. On the home page they have a link for restauranteurs. Is it a case that they are trying to play both sides of the field? If so, they will find it very hard to gain credibility with consumers. They need to tread very carefully there.
But all in all, they deserve support for trying to do a decent foodie portal. Check them out.
One other dig: Don’t advertise web-design expertise when your web-site throws a SQL Server error if people with apostrophes in their names (a huge chunk of the Irish population) enter that name to take part in a competition. Tut tut, I’ll accept that beginners mistake from US web-sites but not from Irish ones.
And because I am in a crabby humor - where are the RSS feeds boys? You can’t do Video Blogs and have ads for iTunes and not have RSS. I know you are worried that you will lose advertising revenue but I am actually open to ads in RSS feeds as long as they are small, unobtrusive and relevant.
[tags]goeat.ie, GoEat, Food Portal, Video Blogs[/tags]
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