News

It's 3 months since the Beauty UK show in Birmingham now (doesn't time fly); we've had a very busy few months since the show and have been focusing a lot of our time on creating new websites for our clients.

Today we've created a new Website Gallery page, which shows every completed website we've worked on (there are still several more sites in the pipeline that are "work in progress"). So this will be an excellent place to start for anyone who is interested in a website and wants to see the complete spectrum of sites that we have worked on so far.

In August, we plan to launch a new Email Marketing system, which will let clients sign up to the salon's mailing list via a form on the salon's website; salons will then be able to send their clients emails with details of special offers, new products, new treatments, etc. This will be available as an optional extra with our websites at an additional charge.

We're also in the process of commissioning a new server, which will work in tandem with our existing server, providing clustering and failover (each server will contain its own copy of all the databases used by the Salon Alchemy system, and the two servers will synchronise with each other in real time). The servers will be located in two different data centres to provide additional fault tolerance.

We consider this to be essential before we launch our appointment booking and salon management functionality, as we aim for Salon Alchemy to be 100% reliable - a system that you can depend on for the day to day running of your business.

Although Salon Alchemy offers Webalizer web statistics as standard for all our websites, we are also aware that a number of people prefer Google Analytics for analysing visitor behaviour on their website.

Consequently, we've made an enhancement to Salon Alchemy, where it's now incredibly easy to get your website working with Google Analytics - you literally just go to the "website -> edit website details" page, copy and paste the Google Analytics code for your account (from Google's website) into a text box on Salon Alchemy and click "Save Changes" - that's it! Once you do that, your website is up and running with Google Analytics!

We've just finished working on a website for make-up artist Kelly Hollands, http://www.kellyhollands.co.uk/ - it's a re-work of her existing website, with a new logo and background by Verve Design, http://www.verveprint.co.uk/ (who are our preferred partners for logo and graphic design and have done the graphic design for the majority of our websites).

Being a Salon Alchemy powered site, Kelly is now able to easily manage the content on her site; she's already tweaked the text on her home page, uploaded several new images to her gallery (and deleted some old ones) and added loads of testimonials to her new testimonials page (via which clients can also leave their own testimonials - but which won't appear on the website until Kelly logs on to Salon Alchemy to approve them).

The re-worked website has also shown the power of the underlying Salon Alchemy architecture - e.g. being able to add "Custom Fields" to pretty much anything in the system, e.g. extra fields on the contact form ("how did you find the site", etc), the "Wedding Date" field on Testimonials, and splitting the Links page into different categories. So whatever your requirements, Salon Alchemy will rise to the occasion, but in an intutive, no-nonsense, easy-to use way that will make maintaining your website a straightforward and enjoyable experience. Salon Alchemy does the hard work, so you don't have to!

Last night, a new website, SalonTunes.net went "live" - it's a website to promote our relaxation music, which would be great for playing in salons as an accompaniment to treatments like facials, massage and holistics.

Best of all, the music is royalty-free (as we composed and recorded it, so we own the copyright and can do what we like with it) and free to download in MP3 format.

The SalonTunes.net website is also the first website we have created to feature a Flash-based music player - so we are now able to offer music players on other websites, provided that any music played is not in violation of copyright.

For clients who have a POP3 mailbox with us (as opposed to email forwarding to another address, e.g. Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail), we now offer secure webmail access, where you can check your email and reply to messages from any web browser connected to the Internet.

If you have one of our websites but don't currently have a mailbox with us, but would like one, please get in touch for more information.