There are websites that are general in nature, some that are great community centers and promote and encourage sharing of experiences and opinions and some more that provide information about products and services that have changed millions of lives.
The Site
https://chickensoup.com is one such website. Most of us would have read or atleast heard of the “Chicken Soup” series of books. The website is an extension of the books and provides a lot of information about the series of books and their compilers – Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen.
For those who haven’t heard about the book series, the typical “Chicken Soup” book is a compilation of true and moving stories of ordinary people doing extra ordinary things in life. All the stories are short in length (between 300-1200 words) and contain a lesson that is certain to change a particular facet of our daily life.
For long, I was curious about the naming of the books and found the answer on this website. After compiling their first book, the authors were struck without name for the book. Jack Canfield then remembered his Grandmother’s famous chicken soup and her advise that it had the power to cure any ailment. The authors decided that this particular book would have the same healing powers – but for the soul and hence the title - “Chicken Soup for the soul”!
1. Layout of the Homepage
The left hand corner contains links to the different sections of the site. The main menu contains links to short biographies of the two authors, book titles (there are more than 50 books in the Chicken Soup series and I only knew about half a dozen!), E-Cards (free greeting cards in association with “American Greetings”) that are inspirational and act as supplements to the stories themselves, a “Share with us” section that contains links to submitting a story (just the way we submit a review on MS) along with guidelines for submitting them. For those interested, every selected story entitles the person submitting it to USD 300. Cool, eh?
There are other links to the two authors websites, information about the recent releases, the facility of ordering them online. A facility that might be of ready interest is the “Daily E-mails” under the “Free Soup Stories”. Under this, one only needs to key in the mail ID and an auto mail containing a story is delivered daily to the inbox – absolutely free! I’ve used this feature for about an year but had to “unsubscribe” because of some mail accessing problems.
I found it to be a wonderful way to start off the day – by reading a moving story/experience that sets the tone for the rest of the day. I’ve also consciously changed myself after reading some of these stories – they have that kind of effect on you! A major portion of the Homepage is occupied by short articles that lead to the detailed stories within.
2. Visual appeal, Navigational Ease and Loading Speed
The pages are really simple in appearance without any touch of “Holi” about them. The site has been kept plain and simple. It’s only in the links section that different colors are used for the fonts, the background, otherwise is white (or is it colorless?). The homepage and other link pages take only a few seconds to load, thanks mainly to the lack of jazzy snaps and blinking advertisements (at the most, there might be one per page). The loading speed is as fast as the pages on MS, if not faster (that’s a compliment!).
3. Online Shopping
I didn’t venture to place purchase orders for any of the books online but the process seems to be pretty simple and more or less the same as what it is on other known e-commerce sites. I assume that a reputed site such as this would be backed by adequate security measures. Maybe someone among us who would have purchased a book online can feed us some “chicken soup” (sic) regarding that.
Thus Spake Cheeky
The site serves its purpose well – that of giving all information about the book series and authors. There’s nothing in it that would make you go back everyday but it is helpful to all those who want to know about the books and order them online instead of hunting in the local book-stores. Do check out the facility to subscribe to a story every day - it might change your life in many ways, just as it did mine. In case you feel that you don’t have the time or inclination to read the mails on a daily basis, you can simply unsubscribe – no strings attached to it!