From Concept to Checkout: Unveiling the New Balanced Heart Bakery Website
The team at Balanced Heart Bakery is absolutely thrilled to announce that their new online home is officially open for orders! Customers can now visit their website to browse their delicious bakes, place orders, and enjoy a seamless shopping experience.
This launch isn’t just about a new website; it’s the culmination of a journey to create a digital space that truly reflects their passion for baking, their commitment to quality, and their dedication to their cherished customers.
The Foundation: Crafting a Cohesive Brand Identity
Before a single line of code was written for the website, Balanced Heart Bakery poured its heart into defining what it truly stands for. This began with their logo design and the meticulous creation of the Balanced Heart Bakery Branding Guidelines document.
The Balanced Heart Bakery logo features two intertwined hearts, symbolising warmth and care, paired with clean typography that conveys a modern yet inviting aesthetic. This emblem sets the tone for the entire brand.
The branding document then laid out the comprehensive visual identity, ensuring consistency across all platforms. Key elements included:
- Typography: We opted for DM Sans as the primary font, chosen for its versatile and legible sans-serif qualities, making it ideal for headlines and titles with a clean, modern feel. Inter complements this as a highly readable secondary font, perfect for body copy and functional elements due to its optimisation for screens.
- Colour Palette: The chosen palette was designed to evoke warmth, comfort, and sophistication. It features a Main Base (cream – #f5f5dc) for backgrounds, a Vibrant Red (#d50000) for accents and highlights, a Deep Grey (#3c4142) for text and strong contrasts, a Subtle Teal (#36454f) for secondary accents, and a Warm Orange (#cd5500) for additional highlights. This combination successfully blends warm and cool elements, providing an inviting yet elegant feel that is highly functional for diverse branding applications.
Baking Smarter: Custom-Built WooCommerce Plugins
To bring this vision to life and ensure a truly bespoke online ordering system, John Corner developed three custom WooCommerce plugins for Balanced Heart Bakery. These aren’t off-the-shelf solutions; they’re tailored specifically to the unique needs of a busy bakery, ensuring efficiency for the team and convenience for their customers.
1. The Bakery Stock Manager – This is the powerhouse behind the bakery’s inventory control. Its capabilities include:
- Weekly stock resets based on configurable cutoff days and times.
- Custom stock quantities per product variation.
- Display of global cutoff messages on product, cart, and checkout pages when ordering is closed.
- Accurate calculation and display of next delivery dates.
- Compatible with WooCommerce’s High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS), ensuring robust and efficient data handling.
2. BSM Delivery Slots – This new addition, developed by John Corner, provides customers with unparalleled convenience at checkout.
- Customers can now select specific delivery time slots during WooCommerce checkout.
- It implements capacity control per time slot, ensuring that popular slots don’t get overbooked.
- The chosen slot will be clearly visible on their order confirmation, in their customer account, and in order emails.
- This plugin also received an update to ensure full HPOS compatibility, aligning with WooCommerce’s latest performance standards.
3. BSM Single Delivery Day Cart – To streamline operations and ensure orders arrive perfectly, John Corner implemented this focused plugin.
- It enforces a single delivery day per cart, meaning all items in a customer’s order must be for the same delivery day. This prevents conflicts and consolidates baking schedules.
- Like its companions, this plugin is also HPOS compatible.
The launch of Balanced Heart Bakery’s new website represents a significant step forward, combining thoughtful brand design with powerful, tailored e-commerce functionality. I’m confident that these custom solutions will provide Balanced Heart Bakery with the tools they need to grow, and their customers with a truly delightful and efficient ordering experience.