Maybe a silly idea for a cooking site, but I like the way the Photography site promotes their weekly competition by changing the photo at the top of the page weekly to show last week's winner.
Might we do something similar here, and show a photo representative of the week's topic at the top of the page? The photo should also link to the weekly meta discussion of the weekly topic details (or similar).
I mentioned this when Aaronut brought it up right after we started running these contests, but I'll repeat it here. We at SE are working on a new tool that will allow us to advertise these sorts of events better than we currently can. It's in progress and will hopefully go live in the next 2-3 weeks.
(Also, just a note: the photography contest is advertised with photos because, well, it's a photo contest. And that space for the photo + caption was built into the site design from the very beginning - the rest of the sites in the network were not designed to be able to devote space in the header to custom messages.)
I like the idea. In fact, I have been thinking of something similar. But I would like it to be more cooking-related, including recipes along.
One way for that would be to ask people to submit both a picture of their food and the recipe they used. Then the selected picture will go to the banner, and link to the meta-thread with the recipe in it. But I am open to any other idea which brings a more culinary twist to the thing.
Another thing to think of is if it won't be a nice promotion if the topic is announced in advance, so we can have a pie picture while the pie contest is running. However, this is somewhat problematic, because people seem to prefer to make the contest items during contest, hoping to come up with good questions. Doing this one week beforehand would require them to remember the question for a week, which is suboptimal. So maybe the week-after is the better time; I would like to hear other opinions about that.
