Project 2 – The New Design
The existing Biscuit Recipes site
For Project 2, I have been working on the design and branding of the Biscuit Recipes website in an attempt to improve SEO and the popularity of the site. I discussed the problems with the existing design in one of my previous blog posts.
Look and Feel
My Biscuit Recipes re-design
The existing design is extremely uninspiring so I wanted to counteract this by creating a new design full of colour and interest. The main user demographic for the website is females aged 25-34 and I imagine that a large percentage of these females are young mothers looking for biscuit recipes for their children/children’s parties/biscuit sales etc. With the target demographic in mind, I tried to design a fun, bubbly, colourful site with a slight nod to the kitsch style that is so popular at the moment (see Cath Kidston and Berry Red).
Layout and Usability
I created a simple layout which has been popularised by the proliferation of blogs on the web at the moment. The masthead contains the site branding, the simple 5 tab navigation and a colourful image. The main content is floated left underneath and the sub-content sits to the right. The four main divs are followed by a footer.
I find layouts like this very easy to navigate – you already know where everything is without having to think – and for a site like Biscuit Recipes, usability is incredibly important. Users should be able to find a specific recipe (or a new recipe) very easily. A site that is attractive and easy to navigate is likely to gain popularity by way of return users and recommendations.
The main wrapper is 940px wide and the content has been divided using the golden section to help create balance and visual harmony.
Functionality
The existing site features a forum but it was completely neglected so I felt it would be better to remove this. I have maintained the link to the Biscuit Blog, but this blog should be implemented into the same design rather than being hosted externally. I have added a search box at the top of the sub-content div on the right. A quick search box like this is excellent if a user already has a recipe in mind and would like to find it quickly.
I have added a “Featured Recipes” section on the main page under the introduction. It is just a mock-up at the moment but ideally this would be coded using PHP, pulling newly uploaded recipes from a database so that the content would always be changing, keeping users interested and the site fresh! This would also be excellent for SEO, because new content encourages search engine spiders to keep coming back.
Search Engine Optimisation
In order to help improve SEO for the Biscuit Recipes site, I have created the page titles, html filenames and image filenames using hyphens (to enable search engines to recognise spaces between the words). I have added alt and title attributes to all images used and have also included a meta tag description in the code.