Recipe Archive and Organization:  

Though Cooking Light has an extensive archive of healthy food and beverage recipes, its search features are somewhat lacking. Without an advanced search menu with helpful search criteria, finding the right recipe can often require blind luck or patience. However, sidebar categorical options can help shorten any keyword search.

Culinary Appeal:  

Despite Cooking Light’s healthy focus, the broad range of recipes it offers helps to balance out what would otherwise be an asymmetrical site. With special attention given to home and entertaining matters, Cooking Light offers a place for cooks, aficionados and food lovers of all levels and calibers.

Community:  

Boasting a robust community, Cooking Light provides its members with discussion forums, profile features such as recipe boxes and even gives provides its members to take their community offline with Supper Clubs. Though Cooking Light is well ahead of many Online Recipe and Entertaining sites with its community features, it is still greatly outpaced by other sites, such as Epicurious and Chow.

Resources:  

Though Cooking Light might skimp on some ingredients with its recipes, it lays it on thick with its resources. Providing a vast array of topical articles, how-to guides, technique videos, entertaining and décor ideas, among others, Cooking Light helps members see their recipes through from start to finish, from the pan to the plate.

Help/Support:  

Though lacking a FAQ section to troubleshoot technical problems, Cooking Light does offer assistance by email and telephone. For improved site navigation, Cooking Light provides a well-organized site map.

Though its scope is limited to healthy eating and living, Cooking Light still offers a broad range of recipes, resources and community features that are likely to appeal to even those who tend to shy away from “healthy” and “light” qualifiers. However, despite remaining well ahead of the curve, the recipe listing and organization features, culinary appeal and community features leave a lot to be desired. Other online Recipe Sites, such as Epicurious, Chow and Food & Wine, fill most of those holes and more.