Apple Annie’s Bake Shop is a neighborhood pastry shop that has developed a reputation over its 32 years in existence for creative baked goods and quality ingredients.
While the shop is known for its customized cakes and cupcakes, it also offers breakfast pastries, breads, hot beverages, cookies, pastries, cheesecakes, pies, and cobblers.
THE CHALLENGE
Apple Annie’s tasked Sage Island with redesigning its website to better showcase its extensive range of products. Additionally, the website had to communicate the bakery’s story and brand identity to make it stand out as a homey, personalized experience within a competitive market.
THE SOLUTION
Sitemap organization.
The client had plenty of content, from detailing its various services — supplying restaurants, parties, and weddings — to enumerating a wide range of products. We organized Apple Annie’s sitemap to allow users to quickly locate relevant information. We added CTA buttons on the homepage that now point to custom landing pages for weddings, restaurants, and bakery Parties. The site’s main navigation has submenus for each product category.
And, not only did we organize hundreds of product photos, but we uploaded and categorized photographs of commissioned work to be featured. We tagged these photos so they would populate on relevant landing pages, giving prospective customers a taste of what the bakery was capable of.
Delicious imagery.
Images are crucial to selling a visual product like a custom-made cake, so we needed to create website features that prominently displayed imagery, as well as make sure those images were captivating enough to sell the products through the screen.
Our design team took stock of hundreds of photographs provided by the client and proceeded to make them look as delectable as possible. We used retouching techniques to emphasize the colors and textures of creamy frosting and crumbly cookies, without compromising the integrity of the products themselves. We chose a few of these to be hero images that we displayed prominently on the homepage to draw in users and invite them to peruse the many offerings featured on the site.
The rest of the images are now featured in photo galleries categorized by the types of baked goods available in Apple Annie’s Bake Shop. The gallery allows users to click through to see detailed landing pages for individual products. Below each landing page, the gallery automatically pulls in related products so users can browse selections and find exactly what they’re looking for at one time.
Branded design.
To create a branded online presence for our client, our team ensured that every aspect of Apple Annie’s website design reflected brand standards. We chose fonts and colors that mimicked the logo, and incorporated details like background textures and ornaments that alluded to the intricate but playful baking process. The homepage displays a black and white collage of images taken throughout Apple Annie’s history to reinforce the bakery’s enduring place in the community. On the locations page, we customized Google’s interactive map with branded fonts and colors.
Our revamped design also included ample white space to bring more focus to the colorful product photographs and red call-to-action buttons.
Revamped copy.
Our marketing team wrote and revised the existing copy for the website to reflect the brand’s voice, and utilize SEO best practices to boost the website’s ranking on search engines.
THE RESULT
The result is a beautiful new website that not only grabs the attention of your eye- but your stomach as well!
See for yourself here – just prepare to be hungry!
