Who doesn’t love cake? More importantly, how do you get yours? The Sweet as Cake website makes finding brownies and gift baskets to send as gifts, or to treat yourself, really fun and easy.
When you arrive at the homepage of the Sweet as Cake website, the first thing you’ll see is a pink banner drawing your attention to a decadent looking strawberry and chocolate cake. After a few words about the company, the tempting images continue in strips across your browser window. The first is a row of four kinds of brownie bars, the second is melted white chocolate, and the third is an image of the shop’s storefront. All the images on this page and throughout the website follow an aesthetic color scheme of bold pinks and oranges, contrasted by a white background and black lettering. The colors work very well together and are instrumental in emphasizing each main option: “about us,” “shop,” and “join in.”
The hierarchy on the website is created primarily by location and secondarily by type size and font. The content for most of the website is lots of images with small blocks of text, but it is all oriented in similarly sized horizontal blocks across the page. Therefore, the only spatial hierarchy is created by the placement of the blocks above or below each other. The ones at the top of each page are the most important with importance descending vertically based on how far down you have to scroll to get to each row of images or text. Within each block of text, the type is a clean sans serif font, with bold and slight point size changes to create emphasis on short phrases. The titles and headings, however, are significantly larger and in a dramatic handwriting font.
Unfortunately, I think this choice in font is distracting and less legible than the body text. I struggled to read the largest words on the front page, “Award Winning,” because of an elaborate “A” that looked more like an “S” to me. The titles and headings are also animated. As you scroll down to the location of each one on the page, they are spelled out as you watch. This also seems like a poor choice because my attention is drawn elsewhere while I wait for the largest, most important information to show up. The font choice and animation for the titles and heading on the Sweet as Cake website are ineffective at placing them as high as they should be in the hierarchy of the sight.
Links are well indicated in two ways. The first is that a color block behind the text of a link changes color as the mouse passes over it. This is even true for the navigation menu that pops up from the top left hand of the home page. The second way, which is true even for links that don’t have a color block and don’t change colors (like the twitter link, and the shopping bag icon that links to your online cart), is that the mouse changes from an arrow to a pointing hand when it hovers over a link. Between this, clear labels, and a simple layout, the sight is very easy to navigate.
The ease of navigation is only offset by slight disappointment at when animated brownie bars don’t link to their product descriptions. On the home page, and in a few other places, some images wiggle or change slightly as you drag the mouse over them. Based on the pattern described above, this seems like it should indicate that they are links. And why not link images of products directly to their own description pages? Clicking these images, however, won’t take you anywhere, no matter how many times you try it.
Over all, though, the Sweet as Cake website is as much a treat to experience and shop from as the cakes and brownies that are sold there. A little editing in typeface and animation choices, and the site could be just about perfect!