The challenge
Daves’ Bakery has been a Willow Point institution for over thirty years — a Campbell River bakery where David and Dave start production at 3:30 every morning. Their website told a different story: a WordPress site they’d built themselves thirteen years earlier, loading over an insecure http connection, stuck on an outdated PHP version their host couldn’t upgrade. They’d found the dead end themselves — patching it wasn’t worth anyone’s time.
One thing absolutely could not change: the Square online store and pre-order forms they’d wired up over a single weekend during COVID still worked perfectly, and the bakery runs on them. The new site had to point at that system, not replace it.
What I built
Instead of wrestling with WordPress, I built a fresh six-page site around what makes the bakery special: the bread. The centrepiece is a day-aware bread board — the site knows what day it is, so on a Tuesday it highlights the Czech rye and on a Thursday the rohlík, matching the weekly baking schedule customers actually plan around.
The counter page lists real prices straight from their Square catalog, the story page covers the two Daves, the 3:30 mornings, and the local supply loop the City of Campbell River wrote up in 2017, and every order button points at the untouched Square store. Their tenth-anniversary “est. 2013” logo sits across the whole site, with Instagram and Facebook one click away — that’s where Dave posts the daily soups and specials.
Like all my builds, the site comes with a simple editing dashboard: log in with an email, click any text to change it, drag in a new photo, and the live site updates itself. After thirteen years of fighting WordPress updates, small changes now take minutes and never wait on a developer.
The result
Six days after David and Dave gave the go-ahead, davesbakery.ca was serving the new site — secure, mobile-friendly, and pointed at the same Square store and pre-order forms their customers already use. The bakery’s email kept working through the switch, and the old site’s press features and order forms all came along to the new home.
“Looks absolutely AMAZING and we are very happy with it. Thank you once again very much for your kind help and assistance with this exciting project.”
— David & Dave, Daves’ Bakery