News

We've recently done some work to our "Salon Guinea Pig" website, https://www.salonguineapig.co.uk/ - which is a free website designed to help link people needing models to practise hair and beauty treatments on with people in their local area who are interested in those treatments.

We've completely re-designed the home page, to make it more enticing, and to make it a lot clearer what the website is all about, including adding several new stock photos.

We've also tweaked the names of some of the pages on the website, to make it clearer what each page does, so as to make the website as easy as possible for people to use.

Have a look at http://www.inspirationail.com/ruth-mills/ - it's an interview about the web design work we do, and also Salon Guinea Pig.

If anyone reads BABTAC's Vitality magazine too, have a look at page 51 of the current issue, in the article about how salons can help transgendered people.

We're also offering banner advertising on Salon Guinea Pig now too - please email us at info@salonguineapig.co.uk for more information.

Over the last month or so, we have been working on a significant number of performance upgrades for Salon Alchemy - extensive work right in the "guts" of the system to make things work better, faster and more efficiently. We now have a separate "front end" application specifically for serving up website content, separate from the back end "admin" system where clients log in to maintain their websites. This new "front end" application is load balanced too, for even better performance and robustness.

Most people won't notice that anything has changed - apart from their websites loading up faster.

For 2012, we have revised our website pricing to reduce the up-front costs of setting up a Salon Alchemy website - last year's basic setup cost of £225 has now been reduced to just £165 (this still includes logo and graphic design by Carl at Verve Designs - http://www.verveprint.co.uk/).

We have also changed our web hosting so that it's now payable monthly via an easy to set up PayPal subscription, rather than an annual charge - this should make it much more convenient for people to pay for their web hosting, as well as it being a lot easier to budget if paying a small monthly charge (£12 including VAT) as opposed to a much larger annual charge.

Please note that the £12 monthly web hosting charge is payable as soon as the website is set up.

The £12 monthly web hosting charge also only applies to new customers; web hosting charges for existing customers will be the same as in 2011, although existing customers will be able to switch to paying for their hosting via a monthly PayPal subscription should they wish (please contact us directly if you are an existing customer who wishes to switch to a monthly PayPal subscription for pricing details for existing customers).

At Salon Alchemy, we're always looking to find ways of doing things quicker, better and more efficiently.

Owing to a very high workload over the last few months, we were getting concerned that in some cases, websites were taking longer to complete for our clients than we'd ideally like; much of the delay being due to the time taken for us to convert the graphics from Verve Designs into working websites.

So we've taken the decision to employ the services of freelancers to do this work for us instead of doing it ourselves - while still ensuring that the work is done to our usual high quality standards. Naturally, we've chosen to utilise the services of freelancers based in the UK, thus supporting the UK economy, rather than outsourcing work to companies thousands of miles away.

Of course, this reinforces our philosophy of keeping overheads to a minimum so we can continue to offer our usual competitive pricing on web design. Rather than having to pay out for an office, we (and the freelancers working on our websites) work from home - thus also helping the environment by reducing unnecessary commuting and its associated carbon emissions.

For our clients, this should mean a much faster turnaround on websites, and hopefully a better level of service overall. It should also speed up the completion of functionality that we've been wanting to offer for some time - like email marketing and online appointment booking - so Salon Alchemy will finally reach its potential and achieve the vision that we've had all along of an affordable, powerful and easy to use website management/salon management/marketing system that will deliver a complete solution at a fraction of the cost of many of our competitors.