This is the website for my wife Jess’s food blog, “Delicious Things Bakery“. It was designed to do what I feel a lot of food blogs out there are lacking…usability and design. Making the site very usable for first time visitors and getting right to what they came for. The food!

This was achieved by using a recipe card style, showing not only the date and number of comments for that particular post, but also the category icon. Breakfast, Dessert, Bread, etc. Each can be used to find other similar recipes, bringing the user deeper into the blog as it grows. A similar device was used in the side bar as well, using image sprites to keep load times fast.

In the end the hardest part of designing this blog wasn’t the navigational challenges. But capturing the unique feeling of Jess as a cook. It needed to be very simple and clean, but also cluttered. It needed to have a distinct color code, but also an overall feminine hue. Very contrasting design elements, and not easy to mix together! But thankfully Jess had a very strong idea of what she wanted, and together we went through 12 different versions of the site before arriving at the final look.

What came out after that design time is a site that I’m very proud of. It expanded my style of design, both aesthetically and navigationally. Using a solid back end design making it easy to evolve as the site grows in the future.

So go check out Jess’s blog! It’s full of, you guessed it, delicious things!

LINK: Delicious Things Bakery