This site wants to put me and my belly into a christmas mood with it's cute pink ridden color scheme and all those sweet cookie images. :) The layout is quite decent as well, reminding me of a theme I've seen before, but without some of the issues it had. Teaser blocks on the homepage are very well differentiated from their background and the spacing between them and other elements (including header and footer) is pretty much perfect giving it all a very orderly and neat look and feel.

Diverse attractive images of sweet cookies are available in each teaser on each page of articles which is great. One little issue that remains with teasers, however, is that they cut the article titles and teasers sometimes in the middle of the word.

The header is I think a little too dark or at least the bar which contains the home link is too dark compared to the background being hard to distinguish, at least on some LCD monitors. The same goes for the input field of the search box. The header image of the site, containing the title, is quite attractive and stylish baiting the visitor with a half bitten cookie that is itself (fittingly to the color scheme) pink. However, it feels a little too far from the main frame of the site. It might be a good idea to try reducing the amount of space between it and the home bar. It might also be a good idea to try putting the search box to the home bar as well freeing space in the header for, perhaps, an unobtrusive banner ad.

At the bottom of the home page and other pages listing article teasers the only element not matching the pink color scheme appears to be the pager. All it would take is changing the link color of pager links to the same pink of article titles or otherwise to something gray like the links in the sidebar.

Sidebar doesn't need the categories block since there seem to be only "uncategorized" articles.

Moving on to the article pages, unfortunately the situation deteriorates somewhat. The teaser image is gone and the square ads tend to be "in your face". They're styled to fit the site's color scheme, but not the text size which could be set to the same size as the ad in the sidebar. The margins between the ads and the content also seems a bit too low causing some overlaps with the content, especially bullet lists.

That said, I like the bullet style of lists within articles (and in the sidebar for that matter) and I like the emphasis that the size gives to section titles although they could nevertheless be just a little smaller because they almost outsize the article title itself.

Overall not bad at all, but there is some room for improvement.

Design Rating: 8/10

Focus:

It's a yet another "no brainer" case considering that the title and domain name spell out the site's purpose quite clearly and the site's content both visually and textually follows it to the tee. BestCookieRecipe.net provides cookie recipes. Whether they're the best is, I suppose, up to each reader to decide, especially those more in the know in cookie making.

Focus Rating: 10/10

Content:

BestCookieRecipe.net offers seven pages of six recipes, that is, whole of 42 cookie recipes. I'd say that's enough for the season. :) The great thing about these articles is that they all consistently use a single outline starting with an engaging introduction and then sections on preparation time, cook time, tools, ingredients, sometimes variations and finally instructions. And they are presented in list form therefore being easier to follow through. This is one suggestion I typically make for sites that provide "how to" type of content so I'm pleased to see this site follow it.

What else can I say? I'm tempted to find a favorite recipe and try one of these recipes myself.

Content Rating: 10/10