ALT-1 Website Review Thanksgivingcom
Thanksgiving.comis a website claiming to be “the site for ALL your Thanksgiving needs.” That is what their homepage tagline reads. Whether or not this tagline is accurate depends on the visitor’s needs and expectations.
The homepage of Thanksgiving.com features a family sharing a Thanksgiving style meal. It is warm, friendly and generic. Eight category tabs are located to the left of the picture. The categories include Thanksgiving, Recipes, Smoked Turkey, Smoked Ham, Flowers, Travel, Gifts and Cards.
A visitor to Thanksgiving.com may assume that clicking on the tab labeled Thanksgiving would lead them to pages featuring articles about the history of the holiday, regional customs and other helpful Thanksgiving information. This is not so.
What is found are pages of links to websites that may or may not have something to do with Thanksgiving. On the first page of links in this category, only one leads to a site that relates to the holiday directly. The relevancy of many of the links is questionable. However, if the visitor clicks to the second page, there are links to Thanksgiving.org and kaboose.com, which features fun Thanksgiving activities for kids.
Each of the eight categories follows the same format and provides links to other websites. Some are relevant to the category title and some, not so much.
Under Recipes, useful links to good Thanksgiving eats include Williams-Sonoma, Kelloggs.com, BetterHomesandGardens.com and food giant Kraft. The Smoked Turkey category also links to Williams-Sonoma as well as Lobels.com and GourmetFoods101com to name a few. The Smoked Ham category is similar with links to VirginiaTraditions.com, Lobels.com and HarryandDavid.com.
The Flowers tab has links that are not unexpected and could just as easily be found with a simple Google search. Links lead to popular sites like 1800Flowers, Teleflora and FTD. The Travel category is the same. Links lead to the some of the travel industry’s biggest names including Expedia, Travelocity and Hotwire. There are lesser known websites included in both these categories, but nothing special and most would appear in a basic search.
The most frustrating area was the Gifts category. If a visitor is hoping to find links to unique websites offering creative Thanksgiving gifts, forget it. The first page leads to places like the homepage of Promodirect.com, which did not feature anything Thanksgiving-like. One link listed as “Custom Items” lead to A Promotional Outlet LLC website which specializes in adding corporate logos to stuff like cups, key chains and pencils.
The Cards category offered links to sites ranging from Snapfish to Target to e-card sites. It also included links to credit card information sites, seemingly irrelevant for a search relating to Thanksgiving. One of the best links in this category was the one for “easy to make cards” from BetterHomesandGardens.com. The link to invitationshub.net was also good for anyone searching for printable invitations for their holiday party.
Each of the links offered at Thanksgiving.com opened in a separate window. Several were tried randomly. Each of the tested links opened directly and lead to the correct pages without any problems or annoying pop-ups.
Thanksgiving.com is run by Digimedia.com, L.P. The company Digimedia creates general internet websites and Thanksgiving.com is typical of their product.
Does Thanksgiving.com live up to its tagline of “the site for ALL your Thanksgiving needs?” The answer is both yes and no. The site does provide several links to some good, helpful Thanksgiving related sites however, the visitor does need to weed through the irrelevant sites in order to get to the good ones.
