In the age of social media, it's very easy to put all the information you need to share about your home bakery on your Facebook page and Instagram. So you might be wondering why people bother with home bakery websites in the first place. But, there are plenty of things that a bakery shop website can do that social media cannot.
The big one is legitimacy. It takes minutes to set up a Facebook page, but not everyone knows how to make a baking website or will take the time to do so. This ends a certain air of legitimacy to those who go that extra step. Cake bakery websites suggest that this is a legitimate business, not just someone trying to make a quick buck.
Of course, you're going to get farther with both. You want people to see your Facebook posts and follow them to your website. But having that website helps to establish a certain level of authority that your competitors might not have.
Making a modern bakery website takes more time than setting up a Facebook page, but it's easy enough for anyone who wants to establish their little corner of online real estate. You have plenty of templates and drag-and-drop platforms like WordPress that will allow you to build a site from scratch without needing to know how to code.
Perhaps the most important feature of running an online bakery website is having control of your own eCommerce shop. You don't need to pay a percentage by selling through another platform, and there will be one less buffer between you and your customers. Having total control of your online shop allows you to sell what you create on your own terms, and without a bunch of middlemen taking their cut of the profits.
Another feature of running your own eCommerce site: you can more easily track all of the relevant analytics and data points when it comes to your site in general. Most eCommerce websites will offer a few basic points of data, but it's rare that they're going to be telling you things like your bounce rate (how many of your visitors leave the site right away) or average time spent on each page of the website.
The look, content, and style of an online bakery website is only limited by your imagination. But there are some general guidelines you'll probably want to follow, and it's not a bad idea to start with a bakery website template that will help you to stay organized and cover all of the basics.
You don't need your site to be too complicated. In fact, a simple bakery website will make it easier for the user to navigate through and find what they're looking for. Most bakery websites templates will be pretty streamlined, so if you stick to a bakery template design you should have no trouble keeping it from getting cluttered.
You'll want to keep your target customer in mind when choosing bakery website templates and styles. If your focus is on affordable birthday cakes for kids, then you'll want a more colorful, playful look to your site. If you're doing elegant cakes for weddings and dinner functions, then you'll want a more subdued, elegant style to reflect that.
No matter what look you're after, it shouldn't be too hard to find some free bakery website templates for website-builders like Castiron and Wix to help you out.
The point is that you don't need to be an expert to build a decent website. There are more tools available today than ever before, and they're only becoming more and more intuitive and user-friendly. Whether you built a few websites in college years ago or you've never looked at a website from the builder side in your life, it's easier than ever to simply pick up the tools and have a basic website finished by the end of the day. At Castiron, we're making it super easy for you to create an easy website for your online food business.
If you've ever listened to a podcast, you've heard an ad for Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, etc. etc. There are a lot of platforms out there that allow you to build a home-based bakery website.
Or rather, there are a lot of general purpose platforms for building websites, and you can build a creative bakery website on there if you like. But some of these platforms might not be built for eCommerce in the first place, let alone eCommerce with a special focus on home-based food businesses.
Excepting Castiron.
Castiron isn't just a general purpose website-builder, rather, it is specifically oriented around the needs of home-based food businesses. This effectively makes it de facto the best website builder for bakery businesses. The ease of use you'd get from a platform like Squarespace is there, as are the wide range of free templates and widgets and add-ons to help you customize your website to your heart's content. But where those platforms are more general in their purpose, Castiron is focused entirely on home bakers, canners, cooks and food sellers.
One of the cool things about this: not only are the tools designed around the needs of the home-based food business, our staff understand what you need, too. That means that if you reach out for support about your cookie shop, we don't need to be brought up to speed. We already know your industry and are prepared to help you with whatever you need —without you having to explain the whole thing to us from the ground up.
Whether you're generating a bakery description for Facebook or writing an about us for bakery website, our team at Castiron already know the deal. That's going to save you a lot of time, and though it may be a cliche, time really is money for the small business owner. Every minute you spend trying to explain your problem to a disinterested help-desk worker is a minute that you're not spending baking product, chasing leads, building ads or tweaking your website.
Essentially, just working with people who know what they're doing, people who know your trade and what you need to succeed in your industry, that alone is a major advantage that platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, or other large eCommerce platforms can't offer.
The general rule when it comes to content for bakery website is to be comprehensive but concise.
The best bakery website, that is, the one that drives the most sales, will tell the customer everything they need to know, but without overwhelming them with information. So when in doubt, streamline and simplify. You probably don't need an "about us" page and a "some background on us" page. Whatever you can condense down into a single page, a single paragraph or a single sentence, condense it down.
You may want to peruse existing bakery website examples to get an idea of what good bakery description creative writing looks like. And check every part of the page. Read bakery about us examples, eShop pages and so on.
Remember that you have a specific goal in mind when writing your website: make the sale. Ultimately the idea is to sell a batch of cookies or brownies or a custom cake.
In order to do that, you need to be persuasive, and persuasion generally comes down to a mix of authority and personality. Authority in the sense of earning the customer's trust by making sure that you have a straight answer for every question they might have (this is what FAQ pages are for), links to your credentials, including any licensing required in your area, and some information on where your ingredients and recipes come from.
Personality is different from one bakery to the next. As mentioned above, a website that mainly sells high-price cakes for weddings will be very different from a website that sells affordable cakes for children's birthday parties. Putting forth the wrong persona can cost you sales.
So your bakery description needs to tell visitors exactly what you do, what you sell, and why they can trust you. A bakery shop description example for a bakery site that specializes in bulk orders for special events and parties might look something like this:
Whether you're planning a small get-together or a high school reunion, Julia's Baking Company is here to make your job a little easier with locally-sourced ingredients and a wide range of goodies.
Read our user reviews page, take a look at our menu, or let us know if you have something special in mind for the big day, and we'll do our best to meet your needs.
This is just a brief bakery description example, but it showcases some of the basic principles: a bakery description for website should be to-the-point (this one is only a couple sentences long), focused on the user's needs (helping stressed-out event-planners save time and energy), and it should establish authority (pointing to locally-sourced ingredients and user reviews), and hopefully through a sales-persona appropriate to the task at hand (we'll let you be the judge of that).
Of course, none of this needs to be memorized or followed as a list of commandments.
When a bakery website is easy to build, it's easy to tweak, change, customize and redesign as you go. And there will be a lot of data that you don't have access to up front. Running a website is a learning process, and you will want to be constantly adjusting yours to the needs of your users. So don't worry about getting it just right the first time.
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The Cake Whisperer
My business would not be the same without my Castiron website! It is an easy setup with lots of customization and tons of support! I am so glad I set up my shop last year before the holidays — it really helped increase my sales!
The Whimsical Cookie
Castiron provides me a professional site to my customers increasing my credibility and value while giving me the tools to effectively market and manage my business in an easy, user-friendly manner.
Wesley's Treats Hallie's Sweets
Castiron has made my cottage bakery shine, and my business easy to manage. As a platform they care about my business as much as I do.
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