What a salon or bakery website needs on page one
Felix Hellström
Founder, Klarhimmel
A salon or a bakery site has one job. Someone is standing on a pavement with a phone, and in under a minute they want to know whether you are open, what it costs and how to get a time or an order. Everything else on the page is secondary. If you get those four things right on page one, you have a better site than most.
Start with hours, and be exact. Write the real week, "Tuesday to Friday 9 to 18, Saturday 9 to 15, closed Sunday and Monday", and note the odd ones: late night on Thursdays, closed over midsummer. Wrong hours cost you the customer who comes anyway and finds a locked door, and they remember it. When the hours change, change the line the same day. With us that is a sentence, "we close at 16 on Saturdays from October", rather than a call to a developer.
Then where you are. Street, number, the town, and one landmark if the entrance is hard to find. "Second door in the courtyard" has saved more customers than a map ever has. A salon in a back yard or a bakery on a corner that looks like a house will lose people who walk past twice and give up.
Prices come next, and here salons and bakeries differ. A salon should show them. People choose a salon partly on price and they do not like phoning to ask. A plain list is enough: "Cut and blow-dry 650 kr, colour from 900 kr, children's cut 350 kr". Write "from" when it depends on hair length, and say so. A bakery can show the staples and say that cakes are priced by size and order. A birthday cake for twelve will not have one price, so say "from 480 kr, tell us the date and the number of guests".
Now the part owners ask about most, which is booking and ordering. On Klarhimmel, booking and online payment are not there yet. Our page does not have a calendar and cannot take a card. I would rather say that plainly than have you find out after you have put the link on your Instagram.
What owners do in the meantime is simple, and it works. For a salon, put the phone number near the top, and write a line like "Call or message to book, we reply the same day". Only a phone number or an email address becomes a link on the page (tap to call, tap to write); a messaging handle or any other web address shows as plain text. If you already use a booking service, say so on the page and write its address as text; it will not be a button. For a bakery, give an order route that does not rely on a system: a phone number or an email address, plus the lead time, "cakes need three days' notice, order by Wednesday for the weekend". The lead time matters more than the form. It stops the Saturday morning call for a wedding cake.
Photos are worth having if you have good ones, a few of the work and one of the shop front so people recognise the door. Do not pad. Three honest pictures beat a stock gallery.
A last thing, and a small one: write the page in the voice you use at the counter. If you say "welcome in" to people, say that. The pages that work for small shops sound like the person who owns them.
Both of these are starting points to type into the box at the top of our Business Launcher page. The link fills the box with the sample text, and you change the names, hours and prices to yours before you press Enter. Nothing is built until you do. A page you keep goes live at a Klarhimmel address, free, with a small "Made with Klarhimmel" line. Your own domain is not part of that yet.
The type pages show what a first page looks like for each: salon and bakery.
