Building a website for your bakery business doesn't have to be difficult. Create an online order form or store, accept payments, keep track of customer details, and more with Castiron's food business management tools.
Try it for freeThe key to running a successful small home bakery business these days is a sharp-looking, smooth-running, and well-promoted website. Bakery website templates can offer you the layout you need to make your bakery website design match the overt and the subconscious expectations of the people who visit your site.
Right now the cottage food industry is exploding in popularity. There are many reasons for this. Possibly the biggest contributing factor is the big switch from office to home working after the recent health crisis. People have become accustomed to searching online for all kinds of foods from groceries, to meals, to snacks, and more. The cottage food industry has always been there, ready to serve, but it's much more in demand now.
Many home-based food businesses are meant to remain small, to only make a little extra money on the side, cater to occasional events, and the like. There is plenty of opportunities for these businesses to grow. Many times, the proprietors of these businesses are unaware of how much opportunity there is right now. The demand is certainly sufficient for just about any home bakery business to grow, with the right management and the right tools.
Probably the biggest contributing factor in this rise of opportunity for home based cottage food businesses is the Internet. Since the world wide web went public in the early 90s, home based food businesses have been exploding proportionally. As the art and the science of online business have developed, it has become easier and easier to get started making money cooking from home.
There are a huge number of online businesses out there designed to help give you the tools you need to succeed. Among the most well known are Wix, Weebly, and GoDaddy. These sites make it easy to start your own website for free. They have a massive amount of tools and plugins you can use to set up different features. And they are just one of the many such examples. But these sites give the home bakery business owner little guidance when it comes to setting up a website that will appeal to online shoppers. For that, it is best to work with an organization that specializes in serving the online bakery industry.
Castiron is one of the few sites that is designed explicitly to help the home bakery entrepreneur to set up a winning website. They understand the online food business like few professionals do. Consider, for a start, the importance of presentation in the food industry. The layout of your sales pages alone can make or break your business, so getting it right is absolutely essential. With an online cottage food business, this is even more true since the sense of smell doesn't enter into the shopping experience. That is why it is so important to use the right bakery templates.
Castiron has all the best bakery website templates for your home bakery site. Use our bakery menu template, and start customizing your bakery website without having to take it from scratch. You will be able to create the look and feel you like best easily, and you might even start making sales overnight.
Castiron's cake, cookie, cupcake, and other order form templates make it easy as pie to collect the information you need from customers. Start using our custom order form templates today!
If you want to go into the dessert niche, then the odds are in your favor. Online dessert sales are going through the roof right now. People simply cannot get enough of it, and there are plenty of ways to create desserts with a long shelf life, making them so much more practical and profitable. The key is to provide tantalizing images that motivate buying behavior. For that, you will need to get the hang of product photography. You will also need a bakery website template that promotes responsive use and that is designed to optimize the display effect.
Consider for a moment, what you see when you walk into a brick and mortar dessert shop. You see delectable brownies, chocolates, cakes, and the like under a large, glass case. The purpose of these displays is to pack in as much visual stimulus as possible into every square foot of display space. The proprietor wants you to be unable to move your gaze half an inch without encountering another tempting color and texture. If you were to put your face close to the glass it would be like swimming in a visual treat sensation, if you can imagine that.
You should choose a dessert website template that is designed to simulate this experience on the screen. You might have guessed that this is something of a challenge. In reality, no sweet shop website builder is going to be able to compete with the outright sensory barrage you get when you walk into a real high quality dessert shop. Eliminating the sense of smell, and the resolution reduction of electronic images compared to real life creates a challenge. Castiron understands that the home dessert baker is up against a wall in that regard. That is why their free bakery website tools have been heavily optimized, brainstormed, and carefully revised to generate the optimal effect.
Perhaps the best place to begin is with a high resolution camera and start practicing taking high quality, close up shots of your products. If you are motivated to make quality treats, you will probably be motivated to get this down pat. The hardest part might be getting a quality camera, but a lot of today's smart phones already come with a high resolution camera that will be more than good enough to start with. You should be able to master food photography in an afternoon with a little bit of talent and motivation. However, in time, we recommend obtaining and mastering the use of a professional DSLR camera to take rich. Realistic photos that are irresistible.
Once you have a portfolio of dessert images, you will be ready to choose your cake shop website template. Castiron can help you to customize your online store to fit the sweet dessert theme. Simply try out different photos and products! Take the time to try out several options.
There are a number of things you want to be able to check off your list when choosing HTML code for your bakery website. The first among these is that it needs to look great. We've covered that, but that's number one. The next is that it needs to be responsive. If it freezes, glitches, or is slow, customers will go elsewhere, and they will go elsewhere fast - within about 15 seconds, on average. Castiron offers free responsive website templates for bakery businesses of all kinds.
Next, you want your free bakery website to look good in desktop and mobile versions. Once your site is ready for its dress rehearsal, look it up on a mobile device and see how it looks and how it runs. Castiron will help you to make sure your website is compatible with mobile devices. Castiron's bakery website template is optimized for you, so you don't have to worry about the technical aspects of your website.
If you don't have a mobile device to test your website, you can try resizing your desktop browser window. Simply grab it by the corners and resize it until it is about the size of a tablet or mobile phone face. The site should resize to accommodate it. If not, if the edges of the site simply disappear, then it probably isn't mobile friendly.
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.
Explore our tools for free during a 14-day free trial. Start building your website, create your custom order forms, even start taking orders and payments... then decide if it’s for you.
Easy to start, created specifically for local, handmade food: Castiron’s website builder was created to help you grow. Create a website in minutes with our templates, sell where and how your customers want to buy, and look professional without being technical. Keep customers coming back with email marketing tools, customer records, and more.
Food entrepreneurs, this is your moment. Your community is more and more conscious about what they buy and where it is from. They want food made with love. With ingredients they can pronounce. And they want to support their community while doing it.
Castiron is the best fit for your food business because we're not a one-size-fits-all tool. Selling local food is different from pre-packaged warehouse products. Whether you sell cooking classes, need local pick up, utilize pre-sales to plan inventory, or need a fully custom order form — we got you.
No code required. Add pages, sell your products, build order forms, and show off your beautiful work. We'll handle the tech so you can focus on growing your food business.
Never track down a payment or oversell products again. Real-time inventory tracking and secure payment processing make life easier for you and your customers, and our order form builder makes managing custom requests a breeze.
With our marketing tools, your email marketing can go on autopilot. We make it easy to promote your latest products, announce custom order availability, and stay connected with customers.