The Making of New Knickers: The Neurodivergent Edit

Six weeks, several existential crises and an alarming number of conversations with a website builder.

When I decided Bombshell Bakes needed a new website, I had a fairly straightforward plan.

A fresh look. Some lovely photographs. A few updated pages. Perhaps a little polish here and there.

Simple.

Six weeks later, I appear to have redesigned an entire business, invented several things that didn't previously exist, and developed a deeply personal relationship with a website builder that I'm fairly certain neither of us wanted.

All because I thought Bombshell needed a new pair of knickers.

It started with a website. Obviously.

Bombshell Bakes has been around since 2018, and eight years is a long time in cake.

Over those years, the business has grown, changed direction, taken on some wonderfully ridiculous projects and developed a personality that was never going to fit neatly into a handful of generic website templates.

I knew I wanted the new site to feel different.

More grown-up, but not sensible. More artistic, but never pretentious. Romantic, a little whimsical, occasionally mischievous and absolutely still Bombshell.

What I hadn't quite anticipated was how much thinking would be involved.

Because once you start asking what your business should look like, you inevitably start asking what your business actually is.

And that's where things got interesting.

Enter the AuDHD brain

Throw an AuDHD brain into the mix and things get particularly interesting.

One minute I'm choosing a font. The next, I've developed an entirely new concept, redesigned three pages and somehow acquired another six things for the to-do list.

The creativity is wonderful.

The ability to stop? Somewhat less reliable.

There's something quite extraordinary about the way one small idea can connect to another, which connects to something completely unrelated, which suddenly makes perfect sense.

Unfortunately, this often happens at precisely the moment I was supposed to be finishing something else.

I've lost count of the times I've sat down to complete one perfectly reasonable task and emerged several hours later having achieved something entirely different.

Usually something rather lovely.

Just not the thing on the list.

The website that kept growing legs

What began as a redesign gradually became an exploration of everything Bombshell could be.

A page would need a little more personality. That personality would suggest a new idea. The new idea would need somewhere to live. And suddenly there was another page.

And another.

And possibly an entire concept that hadn't existed twenty minutes earlier.

Somewhere between the seventeenth redesign, the forty-third unexpected idea and wondering whether I could legally divorce a website, I realised something rather important.

I wasn't just building a new home for Bombshell.

I was discovering rooms I hadn't even known existed.

And, naturally, immediately started furnishing them.

Some of those rooms are ready for visitors.

Others are firmly locked, with the curtains drawn and absolutely no explanation forthcoming.

Yet.

Six weeks of beautiful chaos

I would love to tell you the process has been beautifully organised.

That every decision was carefully considered, every page completed in a logical order, and every idea documented before moving neatly on to the next.

That would be an enormous lie.

There have been late nights, abandoned layouts, unexpected breakthroughs, technical tantrums and more conversations about image placement than any human being should reasonably have in one lifetime.

There have been moments when everything clicked into place and I could see exactly what I was trying to create.

And others when I stared at the screen wondering whether a career involving absolutely no technology might be worth investigating.

Preferably something with goats.

But the funny thing is, I wouldn't undo the detours.

Not all of them, anyway.

Because some of the best ideas have come from precisely those moments when my brain wandered somewhere it wasn't supposed to go.

The challenge has been learning when to follow the idea and when to tell it, very firmly, to sit down and wait its turn.

We are still working on that particular skill.

More than a new wardrobe

The biggest surprise hasn't been the website itself.

It's been discovering how much more there is to Bombshell than I had properly made space for.

Not necessarily more products. Not simply more pages or more things to sell.

More imagination. More storytelling. More opportunities to make something feel special.

The new Cake Atelier isn't about becoming a completely different business.

It's about giving the business I've spent eight years building enough room to be itself.

All the beautiful cakes, the slightly ridiculous sense of humour, the creative experiments, the unexpected details and the occasional questionable decision.

They're all still here.

They've just found a rather more interesting home.

Are we finished yet?

An excellent question.

Define finished.

The website is becoming the place I imagined, although the journey has been considerably more chaotic than the original plan suggested.

There are still details to polish, things to connect and a few ideas that need to remain safely tucked away until their time comes.

But I can finally see the bigger picture.

And it's rather exciting.

Would I recommend rebuilding a website with an AuDHD brain, a wildly overactive imagination and a tendency to turn every small decision into a creative expedition?

Ask me when I've recovered.

For now, I'm rather proud of what we've made.

Same Bombshell. New knickers.

And apparently an entirely new wardrobe to go with them.

Art you can eat ♡