The day comes first, because the kitchen does.

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

The old site is nineteen display-only code components and one data file: forty-four flavor names, three box sizes and two add-ins, typed straight into the code. An order leaves the browser as two emails sent through EmailJS. Nothing is recorded, nothing is priced by the system, no day is reserved, and no payment is taken. The checkout just lists Cash App, Venmo and Zelle handles as options to pick. That's the site getsweetsquares.com replaced, and every image of it below is a capture.

The design is competent and the words are the family's own. The problem is all underneath.

The order page is the whole business on one screen: a size dropdown, forty-four flavor checkboxes, two add-ins, and a cart that adds itself up in the browser before emailing itself off. Read the small print in the panel beside it and you'll find the contradictions.

What the audit found

We read the code as well as the published pages, because the ordering rules only exist in the code. Every line below quotes a page that's public today, and the answer beside it is on the live site now.

Before and after

The same page, before and after. Drag the slider, or select it and use the arrow keys.

The first question is the day

Fourteen days, each drawn as a pan with its open squares still showing. The number under each one is what the kitchen can bake minus what's already promised. So a day fills up in public, not in a reply three hours later.

The labels are the honest ones, not the flattering ones. Sunday says not baking. The next two days say too soon, because the notice period is three days, and offering a date the kitchen can't hit is worse than not offering it. The line under the strip names the first day that's actually available, which is what most customers came to find out.

It's the same piece of the site on the homepage and the order page, reading the same records. Nobody has to remember to update the second one.

Then the pan: one shape, three sizes

The thirty-count box is the pan: six across, five down. A dozen is four by three, and a half dozen is three by two, cut from the same grid. So the three box sizes aren't three products to compare. They're one shape at three sizes.

A tap fills a share of the box, not a single square. The first flavor takes a third of thirty, the second takes half of what's left, and the third takes the rest. Tapping a flavor that's already in the pan nudges it by one square. Twelve, ten and eight is three taps, two taps and one. Nobody fills thirty squares with thirty taps, and the counter shows where you are the whole way: thirty of thirty squares, three flavors, up to three.

That's the rule the old site could write but not apply. “Up to three flavors, or multiples of the same flavor” was a sentence on a page. Now it's what your hands are doing, and the button at the end says exactly what you asked for.

With JavaScript turned off, the same page is a plain form with a size and a quantity for each flavor. It sends to the same code on the server, which re-prices and re-checks everything from the records either way. The pan is an extra. It's never the thing being trusted.

The rules come from the settings that enforce them

Every sentence in this part of the site is generated from the same settings the order form follows. Change the notice period in the admin and the paragraph changes with it. The paragraph isn't text someone typed. It's the rule itself, put into words.

This is the direct answer to what the audit found. Two pages disagreeing about a deposit isn't a writing mistake. It's what happens when the same fact is typed in two places and only one of them does anything. Here there's one place, and the words come from it.

Ten flavors, not forty-four

The old site lists forty-four. The live one lists ten. That was the family's decision, made with the site open: only flavors with a real photo go on the wall. The rest are waiting to be photographed, instead of showing up as a name next to a checkbox.

The allergen statements follow the same rule, even more strictly. Every flavor page says “Not listed yet”, with the phone number beside it. Nobody outside the family has ever written an allergen statement for these squares, and nobody outside the family ever will. The allergens page says it plainly: never read a blank as nothing to declare. It's the least impressive thing on the site, and the one a food business needs most.

It goes further than the pages you can see. The reviews section doesn't exist until there's a review with an author, a source and a date. The markets section doesn't exist until there's a booking. The code now refuses to show a placeholder event at all, because one sample event, dated the next day, reached the live site before launch and had to be deleted. A shop that invents a market day to look busy will invent anything.

The parts that were already right

A rebuild doesn't mean everything before it was wrong. The origin story is why this business exists, and it's why the old site felt like a real one: a family started baking in 2018, during a hard year, to help with a founder's medical bills. Their four values are theirs. The product photos are theirs. None of it was rewritten.

What changed is where it lives. It moved over as content the family can edit, not text locked inside the code. And it's placed where it does the most good: the story is the one part of the site where the motion nearly stops, because it's the only thing here that isn't asking for an order.

The family's claim about ingredients gets the same care as an allergen statement. “We offer high-quality, homemade desserts that leave out all the seed oils and artificial ingredients” is quoted, credited to the family, and sits above a line saying nothing on this site guesses at an allergen. It's their claim, made in their name, and the site is clear about whose it is.

Catering, markets, and the things people phone to ask

Catering used to be a paragraph and an email address. Now it's a page that does the math in front of you: a thirty-count box feeds a table of sixty a square each. It states the five days' notice it needs, and asks the four questions the family would have had to ask anyway: the date, the headcount, roughly how many boxes, and the occasion.

The markets page is the more interesting one, because most of the time it has nothing to say. It says so, instead of filling the space. There are no dates on it today, so it tells you where they'll appear and points you to what's available instead. The homepage section about markets simply doesn't appear until there's a real booking.

The first screen, and the laptop it didn't fit on

One bug, on the screen that asks for the order. The headline was sized from the window's width alone. On a short, wide window, like a 1366 by 768 laptop or a 1440 by 780 browser, it grew to fill the width. That pushed the two buttons and the line under them off the bottom of the screen. Anyone on the most common screen there is had to scroll to find out they could order anything.

Now it's sized from the height as well. A script checks thirteen real window sizes, and the automated end-to-end tests check seven more, because this is exactly the kind of fault a designer's own monitor never shows.

Behind the sentence is the sheet it's printed on: scored into squares, not cut, with some already spoken for and more claimed as you read. It's the headline's own claim, drawn. None of those squares is a real order, and no number on the page comes from them. The animation is left out for anyone who asks for less motion, has scripts off, or is on a slow machine. They get the same scored sheet, standing still.

The half of it nobody sees

The storefront is the smaller half of this build. Behind the sign-in is the part that decides whether the family can actually run it, and that's where most of the work went.

On a phone

Most of these orders will be placed on a phone, so the pan was designed for one, not squeezed onto one. Six squares across at forty pixels, with an eight-pixel gap, is two hundred and eighty pixels wide. That fits, so the phone gets the whole pan instead of a strip you have to scroll.

The flavors become a list with a count beside each one and a fill-the-rest button. The counter sits right under the pan, where the choosing happens. And the three things a phone customer actually wants are on a bar at the bottom of every page: pick a day, call, flavors.