Bakery on Biscotto

My wife started a sourdough bakery out of our home kitchen, and when it came time for a website, I wanted to build something that felt as personal as the bread she bakes. Not a Squarespace template. Not a WordPress theme. Something handcrafted from scratch that matched the warmth and care she puts into every loaf.

The Challenge

Cassie needed more than a pretty homepage. She needed a site that could grow with her business: a way to showcase her full menu, collect customer reviews, and give her an admin panel she could actually use without calling me every time she needed to change something. The design had to feel artisan and homemade, not corporate or cookie-cutter.

Design Approach

The homepage is a single-page experience built to feel like you're stepping into her kitchen. The hero section uses a parallax background with floating flour particle animations. The menu section lives on a parchment scroll aesthetic with a dark wood table background, mouse-tracking candlelight glow, and steam rising from the bread photography. Each menu item features hand-drawn price circles, dotted leaders, and ink-blur scroll reveal animations.

The design pulls from the bakery's brand palette: dark brown, warm golden tans, and cream tones throughout. Typography mixes Dancing Script for headings, Playfair Display for structure, and Cormorant Garamond for descriptions to create that handwritten, personal feel.

Menu System

The menu is organized into three tabbed categories (Sourdough Loaves, Sourdough Breads, Other Breads) with Alpine.js handling the tab switching. Each category has a signature hero item with photography, and the rest flow in a vertical list with descriptions and pricing. A featured 4-pack bundle deal gets its own prominent card. The whole section animates in on scroll with an ink-blur reveal effect.

Customer Reviews

I built a dual review system. Visitors can submit reviews directly through an on-site form with a star rating picker, and after submission they're encouraged to also leave a review on Facebook. All submissions go through an approval workflow before appearing on the site.

The reviews display in a conversation-style layout with alternating chat bubbles, avatar initials, and location tags. A featured hero quote sits at the top with the remaining reviews flowing below in a natural back-and-forth pattern.

Admin Panel

Cassie's admin is powered by Filament, themed to match the bakery branding with a warm dark brown sidebar and golden accents. The dashboard shows review stats at a glance: approved count, pending count, and average rating. She can approve or reject reviews with a single click. The whole panel is designed so she can manage everything herself without any technical knowledge.

The Details

Small touches make the difference. A flour burst particle animation triggers between sections on scroll. The ingredients marquee uses star separators scrolling across the page. The About section features Cassie's portrait in a rounded rectangle frame alongside her real story. The FAQ section uses a smooth CSS grid-row accordion animation. Every section has scroll-triggered reveal animations that make the page feel alive without being overwhelming.

Results

The site launched at bakeryonbiscotto.com and immediately started getting compliments from customers. Cassie can manage her reviews independently, the design stands out from every other bakery website in the area, and the whole thing runs on a single $6/month DigitalOcean droplet with zero-downtime deployments through Laravel Forge.