At the end of January 2023, the owner of Ivy Rose Hair Studio approached me with a request to redesign the salon’s website. Even though their brand identity was already established, Ivy Rose wanted to revamp the look of their website since the original design was a few years old and didn’t fully give off the feel of the bright, inviting salon to viewers (see image below). Important note: I did not work on the original brand identity for Ivy Rose, but I did incorporate the brand colors, fonts and general style into this project.
The Process
In a little over a month, we worked together to conceptualize and publish the redesigned website:
- My client and I had an intro call to establish the project needs, and agreed on the budget and timeline. We had a check-in zoom call at least once per week to make sure the project was moving along at a steady pace. This is a check-in pace that I would recommend to anyone who is interested in working with me.
- Ivy Rose was great at providing copy for all pages, which I would then help proofread before adding to the website.
- 78% of Ivy Rose Hair Studio’s website viewers in 2023 were on mobile devices. Having the website optimized for mobile usage was extremely important for them to retain and bring in new clients.
- I first created mockups of all core website pages using Adobe XD, which I would share directly with the client to get their feedback. Once we were aligned on the style as well as content, I began designing the actual website to match the design of the mockups.
- The Services page was the biggest learning experience. This page was the most technical, with a Lightbox that was associated with each service. It needed to be user-friendly and responsive for mobile devices as well as desktop.
- Our only main hurdle with this project was getting new images. The salon scheduled a photographer to take new salon shots, but they weren’t available before the site needed to be completed. To work around this, we used stock photos and made it easy for the client to replace images once the new salon photos are ready to upload.
- Before the website went live, I helped my client with SEO on all core pages of the site to make sure they were more discoverable by local, online users.
