Cake via TwoEnjoy.ca

How can designing a website be like baking a cake? You can take sometime to ponder the differences and similarities or you can just keep reading, your choice.

Designing a site is a complex art that includes time spent in Photoshop or Fireworks and a development application. It is straightforward and simple right? I mean it is always a work in progress … Wrong! Designing a site is a lot like baking a cake and is a lot harder than it looks. Best thing to do is leave it to the experts to do the baking.

First off you need to know what type of site you are making or what cake you are baking. This is the strategy stage. Know what your goals are and where you stand in relationship to that goal.

Step two, know what your planning to put into your site. Metaphorically, know what your are going to be putting into your cake. Will it be raisins? Fruits? Vegetables? Yes there are cakes with vegetables in them, it’s called carrot cake. Although I’m more into the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself…

Step three, prepare your content and images. Just like how you would prepare a cake you need all the physical ingredients to make a great testing cake, else it will become garbage cake.

The fourth step is putting the pieces of your site together in an information architecture document so that you know how and where your information will be available to your readers. In baking terms, know he order in which you will be putting the items together. I’m pretty sure that the egg goes inside the cake before it’s baked, not after. This step is crucial in determining your user experience of your site. If you are not sure what that means. Google “user experience”.

Moving onto step five, start designing your site in Photoshop, Fireworks or preferred image editing application. Likewise, start putting together your ingredients and mixing them together in a bowl.

Step six, toss it in the oven, no not your website, the cake! You send your site to a developer to build your masterpiece. Or if you are technically inclined, build it yourself! Fire up that development application and get coding!

Step seven, launch your site to the public and reap the benefits of an organized and process oriented site design. If you are hungry at this point you can eat your cake too! Bon appetite!