Case Study

Hair Salon Website Design — Sarah Hodge Case Study

Nearly ten years of design and brand work for the most prominent hairdressing and beauty chain in the South West.

ClientSarah Hodge

SectorHairdressing Chain

LaunchedFebruary 2013

PlatformStatic HTML

Sarah Hodge Hairdressing Group website designed and built by Mediatopia

Project: hair salon website design for Sarah Hodge

The Sarah Hodge Hairdressing Group is the most prominent hairdressing and beauty chain in the South West. They have several branches and a team of leading stylists with many industry awards behind them.

Having been a client for nearly ten years, we have always kept their brand updated and consistently created a cutting-edge salon website with the latest technology. We have also spent a lot of time teaching their staff the importance of social media — which for a salon is not a side activity, it is the shop window.

Why salon websites are a brand exercise first

Hairdressing is bought on style and trust. Nobody chooses a salon on a features list; they choose it because the work looks like the work they want, and because the place looks like somewhere they would be comfortable. The website has to carry both, and that is a design problem before it is a technical one.

For a multi-branch group there is a second problem: each branch needs its own presence for local search, without fragmenting the brand. Individual branch pages with their own addresses, opening hours and teams rank for “hairdresser” plus the town, while the group identity stays consistent across all of them.

Everything is mobile. Someone deciding where to get their hair cut is on a phone, usually in the evening, often on Instagram before they ever reach your website. We build responsive sites so the journey from a social post to a booking is short and does not break along the way.

Social media, longevity and keeping a brand current

Salons live on visual social media, and the website is what turns a follower into a booking. That is why we spent time teaching the Sarah Hodge team how to use it — a beautiful website with no traffic to it is an ornament.

The other lesson from ten years on one client is that a salon brand has to be refreshed. Styles date faster in this industry than almost any other, and a site that looked cutting-edge five years ago now reads as tired. We have rebuilt this brand more than once, which is what keeps it looking current rather than historic.

If you run a salon, barbershop or beauty business and the website does not reflect the standard of the work, that is the job. The Sarah Jane Kitchens case study is a comparable project where photography carries the sale.

What We Built

Project development work carried out

Brand-Led Design

A cutting-edge salon website that puts the work first, refreshed over the years so the brand never looks dated.

Multi-Branch Structure

Individual branch pages for local search, without fragmenting the group identity across several sites.

Social Media Training

Time spent teaching the team to use social properly, because for a salon that is where the audience already is.

Common Questions

Hair Salon Website Design FAQs

It depends on the number of branches and whether you need online booking. A single-salon brochure site is considerably less than a multi-branch build with booking integration. Fixed price before we start.

Yes. We integrate with the main salon booking platforms, or build booking into the site directly depending on how you work.

If you have more than one, yes. Each branch page can rank for its own town, which is how local clients find you. One combined contact page cannot do that.

Critical. Hairdressing is sold on the work, and stock photography of models is transparent to anyone looking. Real photographs of real clients from your own stylists always win.

Both, working together. Instagram is where people discover you; the website is where they book and where Google finds you. A salon relying on social alone is renting an audience rather than owning one.