You don't need a developer to sell online (yet)

Khalidah runs Plant Based Hood Bakery, a vegan bakery in Houston. She sells cookies and other plant-based treats at local markets, and the markets go well. The trouble is the gaps between them. A customer who loved her cookies on Saturday has nowhere to order more on Wednesday, and nowhere to find out where she’ll be next weekend.

She had no website. An old one had lapsed after the business changed its name, and she had no budget to pay someone to build a new one. So she booked a 30-minute call with us to figure out where to start.

We build custom software for a living. We still told her she didn’t need any.

The three things you actually need online

Packaged and labeled for market day. Photo: Plant Based Hood Bakery

The first question we ask is what the site has to do. Not what it could do, or what a competitor’s site does. For Khalidah, the list was short:

1. Show the products.
2. Take orders for pickup or local delivery.
3. Tell people which market she’ll be at next.

That’s it. No customer accounts, no loyalty program, no integration with a point-of-sale system she doesn’t use. If you write your own list and it comes in under five items, that tells you a lot about what kind of tool you need.

Why we pointed her to Squarespace

When the list is that short, an all-in-one platform is the right call. It gives you the store, the hosting, the templates, and basic search visibility in one subscription, and someone else keeps it all running. Squarespace includes a free domain when you sign up, so she could claim a name close to “Plant Based Hood Bakery” on day one.

We looked at the usual alternatives too.

WordPress is flexible, and that’s the problem. You pick your own hosting, and hosting quality varies a lot. Plugins need updates and sometimes break each other. Unless you already know your way around it, you end up spending your time running a website instead of running a bakery.

Wix is a close cousin to Squarespace and would have been fine. We lean toward Squarespace for how good its templates look out of the box, but if you already like Wix, don’t let anyone talk you out of it.

The plan matters a little. The cheapest tier is enough to take orders and run a contact form. The next step up adds real analytics (which pages people visit, what they click), a professional email address through Google, and no extra store transaction fee on top of normal card processing. Check the current pricing before you choose, because those details change. Start small and upgrade when you want the numbers.

One nice detail for Khalidah: she already designs in Canva, and Canva graphics drop straight into a Squarespace site. She didn’t have to learn a new design tool.

Your photos matter more than your template

Online, nobody can smell the cookies. The photo is the product. A beautiful template with dim, cluttered phone shots will sell less than a plain template with clean, bright photos.

You don’t need a photographer to fix this. A DIY lightbox (a box, some white paper or fabric, and two lamps) makes surprisingly professional product shots, and YouTube is full of tutorials that cost nothing but an afternoon. If you can only work on one thing this month, make it the photos.

A white box and two lamps (left) gets you a shot like this (right). Lightbox photo: Tom Marshall, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cookie photo: Plant Based Hood Bakery

Marketing that doesn’t need a budget

A website nobody visits doesn’t take orders, so we talked about getting people there.

A logo sticker on every bag. Add a QR code and each cookie points back to the shop. Photo: Plant Based Hood Bakery

Pick one platform and show up on it. Khalidah was already on Instagram, with a light presence on Facebook and TikTok. Spreading thin across three apps is worse than posting regularly on one. Instagram suits a bakery anyway: it’s visual, and it’s local.

Get help from someone who likes it. A younger family member or friend often has the instinct for social media and will happily do it for cookies instead of an agency fee.

Then there’s the physical world. She already has foot traffic at every market. A QR code on the table, on the bag, and on a business card turns a Saturday customer into a Wednesday order. Coffee shop bulletin boards and door signs still work.

And talk to the other vegan bakers in town. They’re less competition than you’d think, and they’re the ones who hear about the next market first.

When it’s time to call someone

After the call we sent Khalidah a short written report with all of this in one place, so she could work through it at her own pace. If she gets stuck, finishing the site together is about an hour of hands-on work, not a project.

A custom build makes sense later, once the business outgrows what the platform can do: say, wholesale accounts with their own pricing, or inventory shared across several locations. Until then, the all-in-one tool is the honest answer, and the money is better spent on flour.

If you’re staring at a blank website and don’t know where to start, let’s talk. Sometimes the best advice is that you don’t need us yet.