A nail studio in the East Bay came to us for a website. What it needed was an operation that could be run from a phone, so that is what we built — and we still run it.
What they were after
Nothing was broken. This was a working business with regulars and a good reputation that simply had very little presence online, and an owner who wanted people searching for a salon nearby to find one. The brief was to be findable and to look like the business actually looks.
The reason the engagement grew past that is the part worth reading. Once a site exists, every other piece of the operation starts asking to be connected to it, and the ones that hurt most are never the ones in the brief.
What we built
- The site, designed with the owner rather than for her. Services, the room, the work. We host it and we maintain it, so nothing about it is the owner’s problem.
- A price list that changes in one place. Every service and every price on the site is generated from a single file. Changing a price is one edit, and it lands everywhere that price appears at once. Before that, a price lived in as many places as it had been typed.
- Payroll, off the spreadsheet. Staff fill in one sheet a day. A small desktop application builds the weekly workbooks, reads the daily totals back out, and produces the earnings, tips and cash figures that go to the accountant. It updates itself, so nobody has to install anything.
- Local search. Pages built around what people in the surrounding towns actually search for, plus a handful of additional sites aimed at neighbouring areas the studio draws from.
- Reviews that ask themselves. The request goes out automatically after a visit through the booking system, rather than depending on someone remembering to ask at the counter.
The part that surprised the owner
The website was the reason for the call. The payroll tool is the thing that gets mentioned. It replaced a job that ran every week, took an evening, and could not be handed to anyone else — and it was never on the brief, because nobody thinks of the tasks they have simply absorbed as problems worth paying to remove.
That is the pattern we look for in a local business. The expensive work is rarely the visible work. It is the recurring hour that has been quietly priced at zero because the owner is the one doing it.
What it looks like now
One retainer covers the hosting, the site, the price list, the payroll tool, the search work and the social accounts. There is no web person, no SEO person and no separate developer to coordinate, which for a business of this size matters more than any single item on the list.
Talk to us about your business
If you run a local business and the website is the thing you keep meaning to sort out, that is usually the smallest part of what we end up doing. Get in touch, or read how the Digital & Operations division works.