Professional Salon Web Design and Secure Online Salon Management Software

Salon Alchemy is a new way of getting the website you want for your business.

You no longer have to make do with a free or cheap website with templates that look the same as everyone else's, or pay out megabucks for a professionally designed website that you subsequently can't update yourself and costs the earth to pay someone to update every time you want to change some wording or add a new photo!

Salon Alchemy gives you the unbeatable combination of a bespoke website design tailored to you (using the graphic design skills of Verve Design who have an unparallelled reputation in the beauty industry for quality design at an affordable price), with a powerful, user-friendly web based system that makes it easy to update and maintain your website yourself.

Our pricing is affordable too - we pride ourselves on being able to set up a fully featured, bespoke designed website for £165 (including VAT). There is then a low monthly charge of £12 per month (paid via PayPal) for hosting your site.

For just £165, you can get a website with the following pages:

• Home/welcome page - here, you can give a brief introduction to your business - e.g. where you are based, what treatments you offer, what brands you use, details of your qualifications, any additional info (e.g. cancellation policy, payment methods accepted), opening hours, Facebook and Twitter links, together with a gallery of photos (e.g. of your salon or your work) and product logos.
• Unlimited treatment pages! - using the latest upgrades to the Salon Alchemy system, you can now add as many treatment pages to your website as you need - for no extra charge! Treatment menus are easy to add - you can even split each page up into groups of treatments (e.g. a Waxing page might be split into separate sections for Facial Waxing, Body Waxing, Intimate Waxing, etc) - it's also easy to add descriptions for each treatment - and you can also add text for aftercare info, etc. To make your treatment pages more interesting, it's easy to upload images to each page, e.g. product logos, examples of your work, etc - and better still, any image you upload will automatically be resized to fit on the page and look neat. "Treatment" pages don't just have to be for treatments either - whether you want to add a new treatment menu page, or an "About Us" page or an "FAQ" page, you can still add as many pages as you like!
• Special Offers page - this page will only appear on your website when you want to run one or more special offers - which you can easily add using the Salon Alchemy system. When you add a special offer, you are given the option of entering a start date and end date for the special offer. You can tick a box if you want the special offer to show before the start date - so you can start advertising it on your website before the start date. But as soon as the end date for the special offer has passed, it will automatically disappear from your website - so you'll never risk forgetting to take down an out of date special offer! And if there are no special offers to show, then the special offers page won't even appear on your site - after all - what's the point of having a special offers page with no special offers on it?
• News/Blog page - this page will let you post news stories or run a blog on your website. It will only appear when you have added at least one news story or blog post. This page is ideal if you want to keep your clients up to date with new products and treatments on offer, or if you want to post details of useful beauty tips, for example.
• Gallery page - this is ideal for people like make-up artists and nail technicians who want a page on their website where they can show off their work to potential clients. The gallery page will only appear when you have uploaded at least one image to the gallery. It's also possible to set up a "copyright watermark" message which will be automatically added to each image in the gallery - to deter people from trying to copy images from your website and pass them off as their own work.
• Testimonials/Guestbook page - this page will let clients leave you testimonials/sign your guestbook. Clients can fill in a form with their testimonial or guestbook entry - which will be emailed to you, asking you to log in to Salon Alchemy to approve it before it will appear on your website. So if someone leaves you a derogatory testimonial or a spam message, you can delete it instead of approving it - and it will never appear on your website - not even for a second! If you don't want clients to be able to leave testimonials, you can disable this option and just add the testimonials yourself via the Salon Alchemy system.
• Links page - this page will let you add links to other websites - e.g. if you are a make-up artist offering wedding make-up, you could add links to sites that your clients would find interesting, e.g. wedding photographers, wedding cars, flowers, wedding venues, caterers, dress shops, etc. There's even a "Reciprocal Link Swapping" system - which makes it easy to swap links with other websites powered by the Salon Alchemy system - which can help with getting more hits to your website.
• Contact form - this is where clients can fill in a form with a message which is then emailed to you.

This pricing assumes that you are OK to add all the content for your pages yourself using the Salon Alchemy system - this saves us time and means that we can focus on the techie stuff that we are best at, rather than typing in treatment menus! Of course if you'd prefer us to type everything in for you, then this is possible too - it will just be more expensive as it will take us more time - and it might mean that your website will take longer to complete than if you type everything in yourself. If you want "fancy stuff" like scrolling text, fancy navigation menus (as opposed to a single column of navigation buttons) - or anything a bit out of the ordinary - then this will usually cost more too - as again it will take more time to do than an average site.

Of course we are happy to work on larger and more complex sites too - we can even offer e-commerce sites with shopping carts - please get in touch for a quote and we hope that you will be pleasantly surprised by how much web site you can get for your money.

Although we specialise in web design for people working in beauty, hair, nails, tanning, make-up and holistics, we are also happy to design websites for other types of clients too, and have completed sites for lots of other businesses too, including a maker of Celtic jewellery, an electrician, a DJ and a dance group - so we are sure to be able to create a website that is just right for you.

Affordable Pricing

Many professional web design companies charge hundreds of pounds for a simple website of a few pages, and then keep you locked in with long contracts that charge you over the odds for continuing to host your website each year too.

With us, there are no long-term contracts - you are free to move your website away at any time, although with our excellent customer service and affordable pricing, we'd hope that you'd want to stay with us!

Our prices start from £165 (including VAT) for a professionally designed content managed website - with a low monthly hosting charge of £12 per month once the website is up and running. The hosting charge covers the cost of running the servers that host your website, and the time taken to maintain and improve the design of the Salon Alchemy system (which we have been working on since early 2009 - so has had a lot of time, effort and love devoted to it so far).

If you want a larger or more complex website, or if you want us to add your content for you rather than you adding it yourself using the Salon Alchemy system, please ask us for a quote.

Easy to Update Yourself

One difference that sets us apart from the majority of web design companies is that we've designed a user-friendly system that makes it easy for you to make changes to your website yourself, e.g.

• Add/update your treatment menus/price lists
• Add links to your links page, and easily swap links with other sites
• Approve testimonials or guestbook entries that people leave for you
• Add new images to galleries on your website
• Add details of special offers
• Run a news or blog page
• Easily change text on other pages on your site

This gives you the power to easily take control of your web site, and also saves you money, as we can offer you a better deal on our websites as we aren't having to spend as much time making changes to your website ourselves once it goes "live".

Quality Graphic Design

Salon Alchemy have teamed up with Verve - who have an excellent reputation and track record within the beauty industry for providing quality yet affordable graphic design (such as logos, websites, flyers and business cards).

You might have already invested in leaflets and marketing for your salon; if so, we can design your site to compliment your existing material and enhance your salon's brand identity (subject to copyright restrictions). Alternatively, you might want to start from scratch and go for something completely new. Either way, the choice is yours.

Technical Perfection

We aim to make our sites 100% compliant with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards, as we believe that this is better for accessibility, and compatibility with different web browsers, including smartphones.

Good Search Engine Optimisation

Although we don't make rash claims to get you to the top of Google, we take a no-nonsense, common sense approach to search engine optimisation, which we are happy to explain in plain English rather than shroud in technical jargon.

Often, the best thing you can do to get more hits to your site and get higher up the search engine results is simply to have more links in to your site from other websites - and there are lots of "free index" sites out there where you can add a link to your website for free - and other things you can do like setting up a Facebook page or group for your business and putting in links to your website from there.

Plus, our "Reciprocal Link Swapping" system makes it easy to request to swap links with other Salon Alchemy-powered websites - so even if you've got a new website, you'll find it easy to find other people to swap links with - which will soon start bringing in extra traffic to your website and get you noticed on Google and other search engines!

Most clients should find that their site performs well on Google, although it may take a few weeks for your site to appear after it is finished and you have started promoting it. However, if you are in an area where there is a lot of competition, you may find that you need more advanced search engine optimisation. In these cases, we recommend that you get in touch with an SEO expert, who will be able to suggest other steps that you can take to improve your site's placement on Google and other search engines - please get in touch with us for more details of people who we can recommend for this.

Fast and Reliable Hosting

All our websites are hosted from our own dedicated server at a secure data centre in the West Midlands with a super-fast connection to the Internet.

Friendly Customer Support

As a family-run business, we are delighted to offer a truly friendly and personal service to all our clients. You'll be dealing with real people, rather than faceless corporate bureaucracy! We're especially proud of the testimonials many of our clients have left for us. Please feel free to get in touch with us at any time if you have any queries about your website or related issues like receiving emails from your domain name.

COMING SOON - Secure Salon Software

As well as web design, we are also working on a secure Web-based salon management software system, which will integrate seamlessly with our websites, and will offer features like an appointment calendar, online appointment booking, email and SMS marketing and appointment reminders, and the ability to run an online shop from your website. Although this has been delayed due to the increasing demand for our web design services, we do hope to get this up and running as soon as possible.