As I'm sure you've gathered with my recent review of Justeat.co.uk, I am a massive food lover (those of you who know me will already understand my passion). With my additional love of Dragon's Den and a recent encounter with one of the "investees", I thought I would take a look at mydish.co.uk.

Whilst watching last week's episode of Dragon's Den, I did my usual geeky thing of checking any website projects that come on as they appear on the show. While watching the pitch for My Dish, I went to check the website and unfortunately it was down. So, as a frustrated digital person that says what he sees (in the nicest form of the phrase :) ), I commented about it on Twitter. To my pleasant surprise, I received a quick and reasonably polite tweet back explaining the cause and that the website was up and running again. It was this proactive corporate reputation management that made me want to give their website a second chance (which doesn't happen often).

First impressions
I have to say, aesthetically, the show didn't give the website justice as I personally thought it was quite an attractive site. I could clearly (and visually) see what I was getting myself in for and there were opportunities to find specific receipes or there was also a discovery element to find recipes  as an alternative to entering the product.

The product
Generally speaking the product was an enjoyable experience. The foundations of the engagement model works very well with the focus being firstly about the food, with an additional part of networking behind it. It clearly emphasises on the food which is a really positive part of the productl especially with the saturation of social networking at the moment. This ties in with the shift in online retail to be more focussed on Social Commerce and the commercial opportunities that come with it.

There were a few frustrating usability issues which could be addressed to help maximise retention, but the website is in its infancy so we can only assume that these will get better through the stabilisation phase of the product.

The outcome
As a good, basic recipe search facility, the website works really well. There needs to be improvement to the search, and increasing the discovery options on the homepage would be very useful, but the website is well equipped moving forward. Once the engagement factor has been nailed, I think that this site has a real opportunity to hit the heart of food lovers; especially if it combines forces/cross-links with alternative, complimentary services to cooking such as Justeat.co.uk.

One thing for My Dish to watch out for is ifood.tv which is a video based recipe website which may have an edge with video playing such an important role online at the moment. However, depending on the audience and how it's executed, My Dish could be the difference between using Google or YouTube for the online cooking industry.

Related links:

• My Dish 
• justeat.co.uk
• ifood.tv