News

Although we've gained a reputation for developing high quality websites for salons at a surprisingly low cost, we're also happy to design websites for other people, businesses and organisations too.

We've recently added an online shop to the website for Love & Roses Boutique in Aberdeen, which sells a range of designer jewellery, handbags, cards and gifts, and are currently working on an online shop for P and S Jewellery, who design and produce handmade Celtic jewellery from their workshop in Derbyshire (this will hopefully be "live" within the next few days).

We've also developed a website for PREM Management, a public relations, event and media management company based in Staffordshire. This is our first website to feature a Flash gallery (the rotating carousel on the home page of the site), and we're pleased to now be able to offer Flash-based galleries in addition to Javascript. This website makes extensive use of Salon Alchemy's advanced gallery management features, which lets a website owner quickly and easily make changes to images in galleries on their website - i.e adding and deleting images, and changing the order that they appear in the gallery.

We're also delighted to sponsor Bikes and Bands, who are raising money for "Help for Heroes", by providing them free hosting for their website.

The last couple of weeks have seen a wealth of improvements in the Salon Alchemy design, including:

• An upgrade to the latest version of the eXist XML database that is used for storing things like website content and images. This has resulted in a noticeable performance improvement - pages load faster and the Salon Alchemy application is more responsive.
• The Salon Alchemy application has been re-designed to reduce the number of files (e.g. Cascading Style Sheets and Javascript) that are required - which has also improved page load times.
• User security roles are now assignable to each therapist using the application. By default, salon owners get all available security roles, and can do everything. But they may wish to restrict access to certain functionality to other therapists and staff members - now, Salon Alchemy gives you total control as to which functions are available to each therapist.
• Ability to run multiple websites from a single salon account. Now it's possible to run more than one website from your Salon Alchemy account, e.g. you may wish to have a separate website if you offer training.
• Messages sent via the contact form on Salon Alchemy websites can now be viewed by logging on to Salon Alchemy - as well as being sent to you in an email.

The performance improvements and usability enhancements such as assignable user security roles now provide the ideal foundation on which we shall be subsequently building exciting functionality such as appointment booking, training course booking, e-mail and SMS marketing/appointment reminders and reports.

Salon Opening Hours are now editable via the Salon Alchemy system.

We have just added a new tab to the "Edit Salon Details" page which lets you set the salon's opening hours. With a bit more work, it will be possible for these to be automatically published to the salon's website, so you can change your opening hours and have your website updated automatically with the new times.

The Salon Opening Hours work is also the foundation for the forthcoming Appointment Booking functionality, which will enable Salon Alchemy to maintain calendars of appointments and manage appointment booking.

Please join our Facebook page, where you can keep up to date with the latest features and enhancements and discuss the design of the Salon Alchemy system.

We've just completed work on a new component for Salon Alchemy, which will let you easily create special offers to appear on your website.

Each special offer that you add will have a start date and an end date; a particular special offer will only be displayed on your website if today's date is between the start date and the end date - and special offers will automatically disappear from your website once they become out of date.

There will also be a future enhancement (once we get client mailing lists working) where you will be able to send out an email containing details of the special offer to everyone who has signed up to your mailing list and opted to receive special offer emails.