When a small, family owned, business in a small town has the desire to stand apart from competitors, they need to reflect their strengths. This desire also needs to be present on their website. The Hair Mill Salon, located in Purcellville, Virginia, is known for offering professional hair styling, perms, coloring and treatments for nearly a decade. While Purcellville is a small town of less than eight thousand residents, there are many other similar businesses in the area. When the hair salon hired Wicked Design, they had a specific set of goals in mind. They wanted to properly portray quality, a higher level of service and the means to present information regarding their location, hours and services.
Based upon the goals of the Hair Mill, our vision was to design the website with an elegant flair in mind. To project this feeling immediately upon seeing the site, we decided to use a large photograph of an attractive woman with fantastic hair styling. We are fond of describing how the use of photography is important than ever. It not only leaves a lasting impression on the web visitor, but helps to strengthen the companies brand.
Because the Hair Mill Salon has been in business for ten years, residents are familiar with their circular logo and chosen color palette. We needed the website design to reflect this established Purcellville branding familiarity. The next stage of the website graphic design process called for an attractive header and page background. We incorporated aspects of their logo and related colors into these web components. The page background we created using the shape of their logo, then lightly applied to a darker brown color. This web treatment is then tiled into the background space without attracting unnecessary attention.
The website header graphic also uses elements from their logo design. However, in this case we scaled the design element to be larger. It features a different shade of color than what is found elsewhere on the site. Doing so carries the entire design forward while allowing each section of the website to have boundaries. This allows the viewer to segment the various aspects while encouraging website exploration, which is just what this Purcellville firm wanted.
WordPress supports these custom changes such that clients can make changes in the future. The main images on the site were designed in Photoshop using good graphic design skills. Using the WordPress interface features, we were able appropriately place these graphics according to the original website design. The platform is no longer considered a simple blogging tool.
As with all of our clients, we provide Purcellville’s Hair Mill Salon with regular web traffic reports. They are able to see which search works are used by visitors, their geographic location and which pages are viewed most. This analytical data can be used to determine the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, regional awareness and weakness in search result rankings.
Would you like to learn more about website design for your business? Visit our Website Design page, or simply contact Wicked Design.
