As an avid cook, I love to try new recipes, and as a passionate designer I enjoy trying new styles and techniques. My love of cooking has inspired me to correlate the two very different disciplines, cooking and web design. Cooking takes patience and skills, as well as practice time where you may get things wrong, but you can learn from your mistakes and improve your skillset for the future. Web design is much the same way. Many cooking principles can be applied to web design to offer inspiration and guidance when creating a new site. Today we’ll look at several cooking ideas and see how they can apply to the web as well.

Cleanliness is important

Keeping your kitchen clean and organized is essential to creating culinary masterpieces. It’s no different online. Space and hierarchy are very important in a website, so careful thought must go into the organization of items in order to keep your site clean and streamlined. Page organization is also important and must be carefully considered.

Plan ahead and be prepared

When trying a new recipe, you must plan ahead so you have all the appropriate tools and ingredients on hand. Planning ahead for a new website usually involves creating a plan of action. When I start a new design, I don’t just jump into coding it. I research other sites, find out what the client needs, come up with a wireframe, etc. Without a great plan and preparation, the design usually goes poorly, just like a recipe.

Know your audience

As a chef, you must know who you’re serving in order to choose and serve appropriate recipes that will satisfy your guests. With your website, if you don’t know your audience then you aren’t targeting them and satisfying their needs. If you have a call to action and it isn’t working, then it’s probably because you aren’t catching your audience with the right message.

Always keep learning

It seems like there are always new cooking techniques to learn and new styles of recipes to try. The online world keeps evolving and it’s important to make sure you keep up with changing technology and trends. 3 years ago if your site didn’t integrate social media, it wasn’t a big deal. But if you don’t have it today, then you’re behind the curve and missing out on valuable opportunities to reach your audience.

Upgrade your tools and advance your techniques

When just starting out as a cook, you may not be able to afford the best stuff or you may think you don’t need it. Upgrading as you go along and learn more is important and valuable. Upgrading your site as you go along is important as well. Even if you find something isn’t working, reconfigure it and find something new. You don’t have to make a whole new site to keep it up to date and fresh. Just keep good and accurate content, as well as new and relevant stuff on there.

Don’t be afraid to try something new

You can’t become a better cook without trying new things, and you can’t be afraid to fail at them. Advancing your website falls into the same category. Try adding something new on your website and if it doesn’t work, try something else, but don’t give up after a failed attempt. The more you try, the more you can learn from, and the better your site can become.

Break the rules

Learning the rules of cooking properly is important when you first start out, but then you must learn to break the rules, otherwise you get stuck in a rut and can’t move on. Break the rules with your website as well, that’s how we find new and better ways of doing things. Your industry doesn’t ever sell things online, so try it! If it doesn’t work, then you’ve learned something from it, and may even find something better to try next.

As you can see, cooking and website development are similar and you can learn different principles by looking at the other discipline. Can you think of other cooking principles that may apply to the online world?