The box you can actually build, instead of the one you had to describe.

Before — a menu you could read and an order you could only describe

The current site is nineteen presentational components and a single data file: forty-four flavour names, three box sizes, two add-ins, hard-coded. An order leaves the browser as two EmailJS templates. Nothing is recorded, nothing is priced by the system, and no payment is taken — the checkout offers Cash App, Venmo and Zelle handles as radio buttons.

Still live at sweetsquaresllc.com while this is built. The design is competent and the copy is the family's own; the problem is entirely underneath.

The order page is the whole business in one screen: a size dropdown, forty-four checkboxes, two add-ins, and a cart that adds up in the browser before emailing itself somewhere. Read the small print in the panel on the right and you are reading the contradictions — a $15 deposit beside a terms page that requires payment in full.

What the audit found

Read against the source as well as the published pages, because the commerce rules only exist in the code. Every line below is quoted from a page that is public today.

Today, and what replaces it

The same page twice: Sweet Squares’s site as it is serving customers right now, and the rebuild it is being replaced by. Drag the control, or focus it and use the arrow keys.

The rebuild has not launched. Everything on the right is a development capture, and nothing on it is published.

The box builder

Pick a size and the squares appear empty. Choose a flavour and they fill with photographs of the actual squares. The counter says how many are left, which is the sentence the old site could not write.

Choosing a size states the constraint that comes with it, where the choice is being made: the thirty-count needs five days' notice, and the checkout calendar will only offer dates the kitchen can hit.

Two ways in, because an arcade-style tile grid is a pleasure for some people and an obstacle for others: a tile mode and a plain stepper list, both keyboard operable and both producing the same order.

The menu, and the correction the owner made

The menu opened on Featured — six of the forty-four flavours — under a heading reading “Menu” and an eyebrow reading “The whole case.” The owner read that as the entire catalogue, which was the correct reading of what was on the screen.

So All flavors leads and is the default, every tab carries its count, and the row is labelled Filter. “All flavors 44” beside “Featured 6” states the size of the catalogue without needing a sentence. The counts then made the strip wide enough to clip its last two categories behind the search box, so it wraps — a filter whose last two options are hidden is the same failure being fixed twice.

The homepage, as eight chapters

The first build of this page was decorated rather than designed: handwriting eyebrows on every section, a mascot with a homepage slot of its own, rotated pills in four colours the brand does not use, a sprinkle trail following the cursor, and icing drips closing four sections. Each was defensible alone. Together they read “candy arcade”, and they were louder than the food.

All of it came out, and the budget went into motion instead. The page is now an argument in eight numbered chapters — the lineup, the pan, the box, the kitchen, every flavour, the story, pickup and delivery, and the close — with one drizzle line poured down the left gutter to connect them.

The order is the argument. “Fill the box” used to sit above “Cut from the pan”: the reader was asked to fill a box before being shown the product being made. The cut comes first now.

The photo wall, and what “gross” turned out to mean

The owner said chapter four was “not to the standard of the rest of the homepage.” They were right, and none of the three causes was the photography.

Every cell was cropped to 4:3. Every photograph the family has uploaded is square — 676 by 676, 525 by 525 — so the crop discarded the top and bottom eighth of each one, and a parallax drift then moved that crop window around as the section passed. A photograph of an open box was being shown as a band of empty white lid above a stripe of magenta cardboard, with the squares it is a photograph of squeezed into the bottom third. The component had been given each photo's real dimensions since the day it was written and had never read them.

The wall keeps a square module, because a wall is a grid and a grid needs one brick. Below four photographs the section becomes a different composition rather than a stretched one.

The pass that went looking for defects

Twelve public and twenty-three admin pages, crawled at two viewports, collecting metadata, heading order, unnamed controls, overflow sampled down the whole scroll, and console errors, then every internal link followed.

Most of it was already right: one h1 per page across all thirty-five, no skipped levels, no duplicate ids, no missing alt text, and zero horizontal overflow anywhere. Twenty-one things were not.

Two canvases that never stopped drawing

The homepage scroll was reported as clunky. It was, and measurably: on a production build the median frame took 50ms and 64.9% of frames exceeded 32ms.

The cause was not the animation. Both 3D canvases were rendering continuously by default, and this page mounts two of them on a document fourteen thousand pixels tall. A profile taken with the reader in the footer — both canvases thousands of pixels off screen — still showed the hero rendering at sixty frames a second.

Confirmed rather than assumed, because a headless browser software-renders 3D and a slow number there proves nothing on its own: the menu and about pages were measured in the same harness as controls and both scrolled flat at 17ms. The home page was the outlier, and the jank persisted in the bands where no canvas is on screen.

Catering, delivery, and the things people phone to ask

The old site answered these in two places that disagreed. Each now has a page, and the answers come from settings the owner controls rather than from copy nobody remembers editing.

The delivery ZIP check is on the homepage as well as its own page, because “do you come to me” is the question that decides whether the rest of the site is worth reading.

The parts that were already right

A rebuild is not an argument that everything before it was wrong. The origin story, the values and the product photography are the family's, they are good, and they are why the old site read as a real business rather than a template. They move across intact — as content the owner can edit, rather than as copy baked into a component.

The allergen page is new, and is the kind of page a food business needs before it needs anything clever. So is the line under the reviews heading: we only publish ratings we can verify, and there are none yet, so the section says so rather than inventing five stars.

On a phone

Most of these orders are placed on a phone. The box builder is the part that had to survive the move, and it is the part that was designed for it first — the size cards stack, the notice period stays attached to the size that needs it, and the counter follows the choosing rather than sitting above it.