Diann Ackerman has been baking out of her kitchen in Albion, Nebraska for years. Birthday cakes, wedding cakes, graduation cakes, and — her words — “it’s Tuesday and we deserve cupcakes” cakes.
Her customers already knew how to reach her. They texted her. In a town of two thousand people, that is simply how a cake order happens.
Her website did not know that.
The problem was not the design. It was the distance.
Plenty of small business websites look dated. That is the easy thing to spot and the least important thing to fix.
The real issue was the gap between what the site did and what her customers were already doing. Someone would find the site, read about the cakes, and then have to work out for themselves what to say — how much detail Diann needed, what she would ask back, whether they were forgetting something. Most people do not push through that. They close the tab.
And the ones who did push through often went to email, which turned out to be the expensive part.
Diann had lost orders that way. But the lost orders were the symptom. The actual problem was that email was a channel she had to remember to check — and she hated it. Every night, at the end of a day of baking, one more thing to sit down and go through. Miss a night, or come back to it after a busy weekend, and an enquiry had gone cold. The customer had already made other arrangements.
That is worth separating out, because the fix depends on which problem you are solving. If the problem is “email is slow”, you get faster at email. If the problem is “this channel only works when I remember it”, no amount of discipline fixes it. The remembering is the thing that breaks first, and it breaks hardest in your busiest week — exactly when the orders are worth the most.
So when we started, she was clear about it: no email option on the new site at all. Not fewer emails. None.
That is a stronger brief than it might sound, and it is the sort of thing a client knows and an agency argues with. We did not argue with it. We started from a different question instead: what does Diann need to know before she can quote a cake?
Build a Cake: a form that ends in a text message
The centerpiece of the new site is a four-step picker. Occasion. Cake or cupcakes — round, square, heart, sheet, tiered. Flavor and frosting. Then date, headcount and any details.
And then it writes the text message for you.
Tap the button and your own phone’s messaging app opens, with Diann’s number filled in and a complete, tidy order already typed out:
Hi Diann! I'd like to order a cake.
• Occasion: Birthday
• Type: Round cake
• Cake flavor: German Chocolate
• Frosting: Cream Cheese
• Serving about: 24 people
• Needed by: Saturday, August 15, 2026
Could you let me know a price and whether that date works?Nothing is submitted anywhere. There is no form handler, no database, no third-party service and no monthly fee. The customer sends the text themselves, from their own number, so Diann replies exactly the way she always has.
That last part matters more than it sounds, and it is where her brief and the design meet. A contact form creates a new inbox to check — which is exactly the thing that had already cost her orders. This creates nothing new. It just makes the conversation she was already having start with all the information already in it.
It also fails in safer ways. Nothing can break silently, no submission sits unread in a spam folder, and there is no service to keep paying for.
And it solves the actual complaint rather than the symptom. A text does not need remembering. It lands on the phone already in her apron pocket, it makes a noise, and she answers it between trays. There is no nightly ritual to keep up, which means there is no nightly ritual to fall behind on.
The clearest sign it landed the way she wanted: she came back and asked whether the same thing could be done on Facebook and Instagram, where a lot of her customers first find her. That is the question you get from someone who has stopped thinking about the website and started thinking about the pattern.
Worth being precise about the tradeoff, because it is a real one: this rules out the customer who genuinely prefers email, and it means no submission is logged anywhere on her side. For a business where the owner is in a kitchen and every order becomes a text conversation anyway, that is a good trade. For a business with a desk and someone at it, it might not be.
The rest of the rebuild
A gallery that answers “have you made one like mine?” Sixty of Diann’s cakes, filterable across seven themes — weddings, birthdays, cupcakes, showers, graduation, retirement, special events. Her old site split these across separate pages. Now it is one page and the filters are instant.
Sixteen cake flavors and nine frostings, laid out so you can see the whole menu at a glance instead of hunting for it.
Her Facebook page, embedded. New cakes get posted there the day they go out the door. Rather than fight that habit, the site pulls it in.
Reviews from real customers, quoted word for word from the recommendations left on her Facebook page.
A blog on her own domain — not on a rented platform. If she ever changes tools, the posts are still hers: plain files on her own hosting, in her own site’s design. It also accepts posts by webhook, so an automation can publish to Facebook, Instagram and the blog from a single upload.
Fast on a phone. No page builder, no plugins, no framework. It is hand-built and it loads instantly on a weak rural connection, which is what most of her customers are on.
What Diann said
They didn’t just update my website—they completely transformed it into something I’m truly proud of. My site now looks more professional, and has improved how customers can interact with my business.
As a small business owner, every minute counts, and thanks to The Summit Ai Solutions, I will be able to save so much time. That extra time means I can focus more on what I love—creating beautiful cakes for my customers—instead of getting stuck in admin work.
Note the tense in the second one: will be able to. This is recent work, and the honest position is that the time saving is the expected result of removing steps, not something measured over six months. We would rather say that than round it into a percentage.
What we can say confidently is structural. An order now arrives with the occasion, size, flavor, frosting and date already in it, instead of arriving as “hi, do you do graduation cakes?” and taking four messages to become a quote. That difference does not need measuring to be real.
The takeaway for other small businesses
The best thing you can do for a small business website usually is not a redesign. It is removing a step.
Diann’s customers were always going to text her. The website’s job was never to replace that — it was to make it effortless. Once we understood that, most of the design decisions made themselves.
If your customers already have a habit, build for the habit. Do not ask them to learn a new one. The most common expensive mistake in small business web design is building the flow that suits the business and hoping the customer adapts.
The corollary is just as useful: a channel you have to remember to check is worse than not offering it. Diann’s email address was not neutral. It was a door that looked open, staffed by someone who could only get there at the end of a long day, and the cost was orders she never knew she had.
That test applies well beyond email. Any inbox, portal, form or app that only works when you remember to open it is running on your discipline, and discipline is the first thing a busy week takes. If a channel cannot reach you where you already are, either move it somewhere that can — or close it.
Three things here transfer to almost any small business:
- Find the conversation that already happens, and start it further along. Whatever your version of “four messages before a quote” is, that is where the money leaks.
- Fewer moving parts beat more. No form handler means nothing to break, nothing to pay for, and nothing new to check.
- Own the thing you publish on. A blog on your own domain is still yours when a platform changes its rules.
Working out your own version
The equivalent for your business is probably not a cake picker — it depends entirely on how your customers already get in touch and where that conversation stalls.
That is exactly what the free 15-minute call is for, and if there is nothing worth changing we will tell you. If you would rather have the full picture — 3 to 7 specific tools with costs, setup times and hours saved — that is the $999 AI Tools Assessment. If it is the website itself that is the problem, that is a thing we build.
See it live: crazycakelady.org
Published with Diann’s permission, and everything quoted is in her own words.