February 2008
Common Cucina
Last Friday, Common Media, Inc., the producers of Common Kitchen, launched the first stage of the new website we’re building for the re-launched American edition of La Cucina Italiana, the Italian lifestyle magazine.
What does this mean for Common Kitchen? Plenty. Without the strength of this site and this community, we wouldn’t have this work. What’s more, this work will give us the opportunity to continue developing Common Kitchen, improving our data model, our design and user interface, and potentially other benefits to our CK members as the relationship develops.
La Cucina Italiana is known for their recipes, and the developers of the website for the flagship Italian magazine assured us that recipes were the primary reason people visit their site. You can easily see why, with thousands of tested Italian recipes available at lacucinaitaliana.it. We’ll be developing in that direction for the U.S. edition as well, and the lessons we learn there will come back to Common Kitchen in the same way the lessons we’ve learned here are being applied to La Cucina Italiana.
We haven’t been ignoring Common Kitchen, even as the new site has taken much of our time. We’ve recently moved to a new server to give the site more space (in terms of both disk space and performance), and in a recent update we added “WYSIWYG” (What You See Is What You Get) editing tools to text boxes on the site to assist you in formatting blog posts and recipe descriptions, among other things. We’ll continue posting updates here as we make improvements and add features to the site.