About a year ago I was carping on this blog about how unusable the Chowhound website was. Its wonderful restaurant reviews by devoted foodies were buried in an ugly disorganized mess of a website. Well, no matter, I decided. I would search Chowhound via Google, and bypass most of the clutter. So for a long time, my searches consisted of ones like this:
"dim sum" "New York" site:Chowhound.com
and I passed this tip along to anybody who was looking for a good place to eat.
Then sometime last weekend, I tried it again, clicked on the link, and got a "page not found" error with a new Chowhound logo I'd never seen before. Curious, I went to the home page of Chowhound.
What a shock! Gone were the lengthy explanations, the ugly backgrounds, the proliferation of fonts and colors, and the general clutter. In their place was an attractive, simple grid of a page... and a search engine that appeared to work!
Apparently, CNet has bought the site, and they worked their design mojo on it (and frankly, I think it's much more attractive than CNet's own site.)
Bon appetit!
