HBA Hair Design

2013

What I was responsible for

HBA Hair Design didn’t really have a brand. It’s a popular, well respected salon in the area known for quality work, but it was time to kick it up a notch. I helped HBA define a simple brand style, built a responsive website and I also created various bits of salon stationary and marketing material for them.

The website

Hair salon websites are, unfortunately, mostly quite bad. They’re rarely updated and badly maintained because they’re often built with cheap (and overly complex) themes for clients who often don’t understand what they’re buying or how to modify/update them. They’re filled with badly lit camera-phone shots of clients hair because the people updating the website don’t know any better.

I designed this theme from the ground up with easy maintenance & great mobile experience in mind. Great mobile experience was important as I figured that the majority of their clientele would be visiting the site on a smartphone or tablet. It was built completely from scratch by Carwyn Stephen, a frequent collaborator. We chose WordPress as a CMS as we’d worked with it before and because they have a great iPhone app that I could teach Annie to use to update her website – because I knew that if she had to log into the CMS, she wouldn’t be as likely to do it as often.

Instagram integration

Instagram integration is a great way for Annie & her staff to keep the site updated with modern hair inspiration. No uploading to WordPress, no fiddling on a computer. Just like a photo on Instagram & it shows up on the site! This way we avoid the inevitable badly lit/blurry/low resolution images that a staff member might take & upload – instead we get an embedded feed of (often) professionally shot Instagram images. Any images they upload to their Instagram account get pulled onto the home page, meaning there’s always something fresh on the home page because it’s something they can easily update often. Minimal effort, maximum return.

Staff gallery

Annie organised a staff photo-shoot and I designed a custom image slideshow for the site to show off the staff in style.

Price lists

The price lists are easily editable in a backend table plugin.

News

We discussed their ability to market on Facebook & reach people with original content. We thought having a place like News for any announcements, to bounce out from social media, would be a good way to drive people to the site.