The membership website (and print magazine) Cook's Illustrated is an important part of Boston Common Press’ business strategy. With 120,000 paid online subscribers, this site's recipe is worth a try. This Membership Website Review shows some excellent scores in readability and relationship building, which is exactly where we'd expect to see good scores for a membership website. The audience won't pay for something that's hard to read. And the site won't get a paying audience without paying attention to getting email addresses and subscriptions—building the relationship—from the get-go. The areas that are weak are also not unexpected—for example content that comes from a bi-monthly magazine often fails to figure out how to re-slice itself to fit a website's daily schedule—content freshness is not a strong suit here.

This review is part of a handbook titled Membership Website Publishing.

• Handbook: Membership Website Publishing
• Chapter 21: CooksIllustrated.com Membership Website Review