- When you "zoom" into a photo, ie. go to the photo detail page, the actual picture is not much larger than the thumbnail. If this is about photos of food, the photo should be larger.
- All the emphasis on "beautiful photos": I think you have the wrong angle here. Amateur food photos are not pretty, making good food photos is one of the hardest things to do, even for professional photographers.
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(disclosure: I was the founder, but sold it in 2009 - it is basically unchanged though)
Setting the standard from the start is something any founder of a UGC site needs to be actively involved in.
In the case of OSF I was responsible for much of the early content, armed with my dSLR. I then invited friends who were similarly equipped and they added awesome photos/recipes, which really helped set the tone.
I also actively deleted crappy content. I felt like a douchebag for doing it, but there was a standard I wanted to maintain. People who got their content removed would receive a list of tips to help them take better photos for next time :)
Eventually this scales out of control. You can see the content from the early days is still the most popular: http://www.opensourcefood.com/recipes/all_time_best
And it's all pretty high quality. But you can't keep that going forever as you community grows from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands and beyond.
It's super important for early adoption though. Visitors have to visit your site and go "wow, I want to be part of this!".
What's the long-term vision here?
Also: couldn't hate the name more.
Seems like it is just not for you, too bad. Your comment would be more useful if you could elaborate on what it is that you find useful, though.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1665498
Nice idea otherwise, but I would move "It's all about photos" to the front page. Otherwise it is very easy to assume that it's a Dribbble for the recipes.
If I had to choose three, I would choose type, difficulty and time. Those three would be "must haves" for me, cuisine would be a "should have" and ingredients would be "nice to have".
In all seriousness, I would at least provide a way to broadly tag dishes according to ethnic influence/price of ingredients/or time to prepare.
From here, I would personally prefer a slider to browse through the dishes rather than scrolling down a seemingly bottomless page.
Anyway, I clicked on one of your ads, so at least you will make some money.
