Remake of
LittleDessert

Design and coding of the new version of Jennifer Lindberg’s website about pastries. The last version can be seen here.

See the new LittleDessert website.

This website has been alive since around 2009 and I have made a few iterations of designs for it. It has until now been in a traditional blog format where all posts are stacked on top of each other in one page. It has a steady growth, but we always try to improve it. Jennifer has been interested in starting a web shop for a long time, so she can sell different things that have to do with pastries and the like. She specializes in making beautiful chocolate shoes.

To make the shop release even better, we didn’t just add the shop to the existing site—we created a whole new website. The earlier versions of LittleDessert have all been looking very similar in the same regular blog style. For this new website I rethinked the whole structure. When a shop is added, the complete focus of the site is not just the blog, but also the shop. To accommodate that, I changed the front page to be an aggregation of the latest things from the site and also some other things you might want to push the visitor to see. I also wanted to make the content of each post a little more special, so the content is only shown when viewing a single blog post, and not in blog indexes where many posts are shown.

In the last version of the site there was an archive page to find older posts. From the statistics I noticed that practically nobody used the archive, so that was an unnecessary page. Instead of an archive, I put the search field in the header so it’s easy to find. Showing posts in a grid was also an idea to replace the archive. The categories are now listed in a box so you can easily see what categories there are and which you are viewing currently.

I wanted to keep the feeling and color theme from the last version, but fresh it up a bit. So the colors are still the same and I tried to keep some of the home made feeling. One special design feature I had in the last version was a box for the ingredients when viewing a recipe post. That makes the post design a bit easier to read for recipes, so that was one thing I really wanted to keep in the new version. There was room for improvements though. I added the ability to specify it more detailed in the back-end, so you can group ingredients with a heading above (maybe you have some ingredients for the dough and some for the filling or something). I also made it possible to make it clearer, by putting the ingredient to the left and the amount of the ingredient to the right.

Jennifer makes delicious and wonderful things, and the best way to show that is by using a lot of photos. That’s why I used very large header images for each post, and also thumbnails for each post in the blog index.