News

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 are always thinking of ways to make our services better, fairer and more efficient.

The latest version of the Salon Alchemy system now makes it possible for our clients to take even more control over managing their websites - including being able to add new pages, and turn off pages such as Special Offers, News, Gallery, Testimonials and Links if not needed. We've also introduced a new "How To Find Us" page, which automatically creates a Google map based on the salon's address (the system does a Google Maps lookup to automatically get the map co-ordinates for the address).

We've also revised our pricing for websites and hosting; our websites now start from £225 (including VAT) - which includes logo and graphic design by Verve - http://www.verveprint.co.uk/

£225 will get you a website of similar complexity to http://www.beautyretreatkent.com/- where you can add as many treatment pages as required, and the treatment pages have a gallery of images down the right hand side of the page; it's also possible to add images to the left of treatment descriptions too - as on http://www.nailsmakeupme.com/

With a £225 website, you also get Special Offers, News, Gallery, Links, Testimonials, How To Find Us and Contact Us pages - although any of these pages can be removed if not required.

If you want something more complex, then this will cost you more; we've had to get a lot stricter about charging more for more complex websites, simply because in the past, we ended up spending a lot longer than anticipated on some websites, for which we didn't charge any extra. That's not fair on us - as we need to be sure that we earn enough money for the time and effort taken. So if you do want something more complex than what we can offer for £225 then we'll be happy to consider it as long as we charge accordingly for the extra time involved.

In terms of making things more efficient, we've decided not to offer domain registration or email any more - we now ask clients to register their own domain names directly with 123-reg.co.uk - and to buy POP3 mailboxes from 123-reg if they need them - that's because we didn't see the point in spending time registering domain names and invoicing for them when it was quicker and easier for people to just buy their domain names direct from 123-reg themselves - likewise we figured that we were best concentrating on websites rather than offering email as well - especially given that 123-reg offer email at a very competitive price anyway. Clients who already have email with us will still be able to continue using it however - we've just stopped offering email to clients who don't have it already.

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.

As you might have guessed, our news article yesterday on our new "Telepathic Websites" was an April Fool spoof. Although a concept that we would absolutely love to offer, unfortunately brain/computer interfacing technology still has an awful long way to go before people will be able to create websites by the power of thought alone!

But we are in the process of improving the design of the Salon Alchemy system to make it easier to maintain your website and give you more power and control, e.g. our latest websites now let you add new treatment menu pages yourself, and we're in the process of working on easy ways of adding image galleries to your treatment pages yourself. Our philosophy is to make the Salon Alchemy system let you control as much of your website as possible, so that we don't have to - thus saving us time that we can instead use for development work to further improve the design of the Salon Alchemy system and make it even more powerful (we'd much rather be spending our time coding Java than entering treatment menus, adding Facebook links or uploading Shellac images).

So although we can't promise the ability to create your website by just thinking about what you want, we do aim to give you the ability to create and maintain your website in the easiest and most straightforward way possible.

The Salon Alchemy system is evolving and improving all the time though - with new features being added, as well as performance tweaks and improvements to make your website load even faster.