Skyward Digital
Skyward Digital Websites for salons
Hair, barbering, nails, brows and beauty Auckland and all of New Zealand

Your photographs already did the selling. Then the link broke.

Almost nobody arrives at a salon site cold. They have seen the work — on a feed, on a friend, in a search result — and by the time they tap through they have mostly decided. What is left is about ten seconds of admin: what it costs, who does it, and when. Those ten seconds are the only part of the whole thing you own outright, and on most salon websites they are a price list from two years ago and a button that opens a message.

Talk about your salon What we would build
Who it is forSalons, barbers & beauty
Where most start$395 Google profile
A salon site, from$2,450, GST in
Who you deal withJosh, on 022 584 0585
01 / THE HANDOVER

Ten seconds between
liking the photo and
being in your diary.

One person, on a phone, on a Sunday evening, moving from having seen your work to having a time booked. Every row below is a place it stops. Around two thirds of searches like these now end without anybody clicking through to a website at all, so a good part of this happens before your site is involved — which is why the first thing we usually sell a salon is not a website.

  1. The photo

    A picture does the whole sale, and it is not on your site

    Somebody sees a colour they want, on a feed or on the head of a person standing in front of them. Nothing has been searched and no decision about you has been made yet — but the thing that normally takes the longest, wanting it done, is already finished. Everything from here is logistics, and logistics is where salons lose people.

  2. The name

    Three words, typed with a thumb

    Your salon name if they have it, otherwise the service and the suburb. What is in neither of those searches: your story, your product range, and the year you opened. They are looking for a place, a price and a time, and whatever answers those three first is what gets read.

  3. The three

    A map, three salons, and the word open

    Before a sentence of yours is read, three names sit under a map with a rating, a suburb and whether they are open right now beside each. That is a Google Business Profile rather than a website, it is the part most salons have never actually filled in, and it is a day of work. What that involves, and what it costs.

  4. The link

    Whatever the link in the bio opens

    For a lot of salons this is a list of five links, or a page somebody built in 2021 and cannot log into any more. It is the single most-tapped thing the business owns and it usually gets less thought than a shelf. Wherever it lands, that is your website as far as this person is concerned, whether you think of it that way or not.

  5. The price

    The question nobody will ring up and ask

    What a cut costs, what the colour on top of it costs, and whether the long-hair surcharge applies to them. People will not phone a salon to ask a price — it feels like haggling over their own appearance — so they either message and wait, or they guess. The guess is nearly always higher than the real number, and it is made in silence.

  6. The person

    They are booking somebody, not a room

    A regular wants their own stylist and will wait three weeks for them. A new client wants whoever is good at this particular thing and currently taking people. A page of head shots with a job title under each answers neither question, and all our team are highly experienced is the least useful sentence on a salon website.

  7. The time

    Where a decided person becomes an unbooked one

    A button that says Book now and opens a message thread. A booking system that will not show a single free time until an account exists. A number answered between cuts, or not at all on a Monday. Any one of those is enough, and it is enough after they had already chosen you and reached for their phone.

  8. The deposit

    Asked for money by a stranger, with no explanation

    Deposits are reasonable and most salons need them. Being asked for one at the last screen, with no warning and no word on what happens if the car will not start, is where a first-time booking quietly closes the tab. Said once, up front, in a sentence, it barely costs anything. Sprung at the end, it costs the booking.

  9. Or nothing

    They stay with the person they already have

    There is no dramatic loss here. They keep the appointment they have got, with somebody perfectly good, and they will admire your work again in a month and do exactly the same thing. Nobody rings to tell you. The salons that quietly do well out of this are not the ones with better colourists. They are the ones where the next step took eleven seconds.

02 / THE PAGES

Eight pages, and the
question each one is
there to answer.

A salon site is a price list and a booking button with good photography around them. It is a small set of pages, each answering one thing somebody typed, with the same obvious next step at the bottom of every one. The tier beside each is the tier it starts at, and it matches our pricing exactly.

01
Essential

Services and what each one costs

What they typeThe service, then how much

The page that answers the question people will not ask out loud. Real numbers against real service names, the surcharges said in the same breath rather than in a footnote, and a date on the list so nobody arrives quoting last winter. If a price genuinely depends on the head, say what it depends on and give the range — a range with a reason attached is trusted, and the words prices from on their own are not.

02
Essential

Booking, with one obvious way to do it

What they typeBook, plus your salon name

Whatever system you already run, wired in properly rather than linked to from a corner — and if you have not got one, an honest request form that says when it will be answered and by whom. What we will not build is a button headed Book now that turns out to open a message thread. That is the most expensive small lie on salon websites, and it is told at the exact moment somebody had their card out.

03
Essential

A page each for the people, not a wall of head shots

What they typeA stylist's name, on its own

One page per stylist or barber: a photograph that looks like them, the work they actually like doing, how long they have been at it, and — the part everyone leaves off — whether they are taking new clients right now. People recommend a person by name, and that name gets typed into Google on its own. It is worth being findable rather than buried in a team grid.

04
Essential

A gallery that is short, recent and yours

What they typeThe look, plus your suburb

Twenty photographs of your own work beat two hundred, and both beat anything bought from a stock library. Grouped by the thing somebody would search for rather than by the month it was posted, sized so it loads on mobile data in a car, and pruned when it stops representing what you do now. An old gallery is not neutral — it quietly advertises the salon you were four years ago.

05
Standard

New here, for somebody who has never sat in your chair

What they typeYour name, plus first time

How long to allow, what a consultation involves, whether anything has to happen a few days beforehand and how far ahead to ask, what to bring or not do first, and roughly what the visit will come to. Dull to write and it does more work than anything else on the site. It is also the page that gets forwarded to somebody who has been meaning to change salons for a year.

06
Standard

Deposits, late changes and no-shows, said once

What they typeNothing — they read it after booking

What you take up front, when it is transferable, how much notice you need, and what happens when somebody simply does not turn up. Written plainly and linked from the booking rather than buried, so it is a policy everyone agreed to instead of an argument at the counter. This page is the difference between an awkward conversation and a sentence you can point at.

07
Standard

Hours, parking, the right door and the stairs

What they typeYour salon name, plus parking

Where to leave the car, which entrance, whether there is a lift, how far from the bus stop, and the hours as they are on a public holiday rather than as they were in March. Late nights and Sundays matter more here than in almost any other trade, because that is when the people with jobs can come.

08
Standard

A page for stylists, not for clients

What they typeSalon jobs, plus your city

What it is like to work there, how the chair or the commission is structured, what you are looking for and how to get in touch about it. Most salons recruit through a story on a Tuesday and then wonder why the same three people apply. One honest page costs an afternoon and works while you are cutting.

Eight is the Standard tier. A single-chair studio often does not need all of them on day one — start with the prices, the booking and the gallery, which is Essential, and add the rest when there is something real to add. We would rather build four pages that are finished than eight that are half-written.

03 / THE PRICE LIST

Six things done to
a price list that cost
bookings quietly.

This is the page that gets opened most and thought about least. Every one of these is a decision somebody made once, usually in a hurry, and nobody has looked at since — and none of them needs a new booking system or a new brand to fix.

From

The words "prices from", carrying all the weight

A number with from in front of it is read as the smallest possible truth and immediately doubled. You have not avoided the question, you have answered it worse than the real answer would have. If the price honestly varies, publish the range and say what moves it — length, thickness, how many hours — and the range gets believed.

Stale

Last year's prices, still up, still being quoted at you

Everyone puts prices up. Almost nobody updates the website the same week, so for months the site is quietly undercutting the salon and somebody at the counter has to explain the difference. Put the date the list was reviewed on the page. It takes a line, it is honest, and it turns an argument into a fact.

The photo

A price list that is a picture of a price list

A photographed menu or a PDF cannot be read on a phone without pinching, cannot be searched, and cannot be found by anybody typing the name of a service with your suburb after it. It is the most common way a salon's prices are published and it is the one that does the least. The same numbers as text do all the work the picture was supposed to.

The name

Services named the way the industry names them

The words on your list should be the words people type, with your name for it beside them if you have one. Somebody searching for the effect they want does not know your term for it, and a list written entirely in trade language is a list that answers nobody's search — however precise it is once you are already in the chair.

Consultation

"Consultation required", with nothing after it

Fine as a policy and useless as a sentence on its own. Say how long it takes, whether it costs anything, whether it comes off the price if they book, and how far ahead it needs to be. Without that it reads as a way of avoiding the number, which for a first-time client is the same as a high number.

The add-ons

The extras that appear at the counter

Long-hair surcharges, a toner, a treatment added during the appointment, the card fee. All perfectly normal, all reasonable, and all much better on the site than discovered at the end. Somebody who was told beforehand pays it without a thought. Somebody who was not remembers it for a year and mentions it in a review.

If the price list is the only thing that is actually wrong, say so when you get in touch and we will look at that on its own. It is often an afternoon rather than a website, and we would rather tell you that than sell you eight pages you did not need.

04 / THE PROOF

The proof is already
on your phone. It is
just not anywhere
useful.

Almost every salon we look at is sitting on the only evidence that matters and keeping it somewhere it disappears in a week. Every row below is something you already have. None of it needs writing, and none of it is ours to invent.

The work

Your own photographs, on a page that keeps them

A story is gone in a day and a grid gets buried in a month. The same twenty photographs on a page of your own stay findable for years, get indexed, and can be sent to somebody as a link. Keep posting where you post — this is not instead of it. It is the one copy that does not expire and that nobody else's algorithm decides who sees.

The people

Who is here, and who is taking new clients

A name, a photograph that looks like the person, the work they most like doing and whether their book is open. It is the thing every new client is trying to work out and the thing almost no salon site says. It also means a stylist's own name has somewhere to land when a client recommends them to a friend by name, which is how most of this business travels.

The room

Photographs of the actual salon

Not a stock photograph of a marble basin in California with nobody in it. The door as it looks from the footpath, the room with the lights on, and where the car goes. Somebody deciding whether they will feel out of place is trying to picture it, and one honest photograph of a real room does more for that than a paragraph about the experience.

The words

What is claimed, and who stands behind it

We build the site around your words. We do not invent claims about what a product does, how long a result lasts, what a treatment will fix or how you compare with the salon down the road, and we will say no if we are asked to. You are the one accountable for that under the Fair Trading Act and under whatever your industry expects, not us. Anything on the site that makes a claim is signed off by you before it goes live.

Reviews

The one thing we cannot build and will not invent

Something about the reviews is the most common reason people give for not contacting a local business, ahead of price. We will make asking take ten seconds, put the link where you will actually find it on a busy Saturday, and show what is really there. We will not write one, buy one, or set up anything that filters the unhappy out on the way. Skyward has no reviews either — we are asking our first clients for one in writing, as part of the deal.

05 / AFTER HOURS

Both your hands are
in somebody's hair.
The message waits.

A salon is the hardest small business in the country to reach during working hours, because the person you want is holding scissors. So the enquiries stack up until close, get answered in a rush at seven, and a proportion of them have already booked somewhere else or gone off the idea. This is not a staffing problem. Nobody should be answering messages mid-appointment.

What we build for that is an intake flow, and it is deliberately not a chatbot. There is no language model in it. That is the whole point rather than a limitation: it cannot invent a price, promise a Saturday you have not got, or say anything at all about what a treatment will do, because there is nothing in it capable of composing a sentence it was not given.

It asks a short set of questions you have written, in the order you would ask them — what they want done, how long their hair is, who they usually see, when they can come — writes the answers down and sends them to you sorted. At the end of the day somebody works through a list of proper enquiries instead of a scroll of half-messages, and rings back already knowing what to quote.

It says on the first screen that it is an assistant rather than a person, every time, to everybody, and it carries your phone number on every step so anyone who would rather speak to a human can stop and do that immediately. Around eighty-five per cent of people say they would rather deal with a person than with AI, and that figure has been going up rather than down. We are not going to argue with them, and we are not putting a robot in front of your clients.

  • Says it is an assistant on the first screen, every time
  • Your phone number on every step, so it is never the only route out
  • No language model, so it cannot invent a price or a free Saturday
  • The questions are yours, in the order you would ask them at the basin
  • Never advises on hair, skin or anything else, because it cannot
  • Everything forwarded sorted, ready to book or ring at the end of the day
06 / WHAT IT COSTS

Flat fees, in public,
with the GST already
in the number.

We ask salons to publish their prices, so it would be a poor look not to publish ours. Most studios here quote plus GST or do not say which, and at fifteen per cent that is not a rounding difference. Every figure below is what you would pay. Nothing is due until you have seen a real working homepage for your salon and said yes to it.

Google Business Profile setup

The map result, claimed, verified, categorised and filled in properly, in a day — with the hours, the services and the photographs that are currently missing from it. No website needed and nothing ongoing. For a lot of salons this is the whole job for now, and it is where we would start.

$395One off

Essential website

Up to four pages. For a single chair or a small studio: services and prices, booking, the gallery, and finding you. Live in seven days from the point we have your content.

$2,450Founding price $1,950

Standard website

Up to eight pages, including a page for each stylist and the new-client page. This is the one most salons want, because a page each for the people is what turns a recommendation into a booking.

$3,450Founding price $2,950

Lead Engine

A page for every service and every suburb you draw from, a local search campaign at launch, the missed-enquiry assistant for twelve months and three months of the care plan. For a salon with more than one site, or one that wants the whole thing done at once.

$5,950Founding price $5,450

Care plan

Hosting, domain, security, backups, unlimited small edits done within two days — which is what a price rise or a new stylist actually is — a monthly tune-up of the Google profile and a report in plain English. No lock-in, cancel whenever, and you still own the site. Pay yearly and two months are free: $1,690.

$169Per month

Missed-enquiry assistant

Added to a site we have built. Set up around your questions and your hours, then tuned each month as you learn what people actually ask on a Sunday night. Not sold on its own.

$890then $129 per month

All prices are New Zealand dollars with GST included and nothing added at the end. Websites are half after you have seen your free homepage and said yes, the balance on launch. We do not discount off-menu — if the budget will not stretch we will move you down a tier or start you on the profile instead. Our first ten clients get $500 off any website in exchange for three things written into the job: an honest Google review when we are done, a testimonial we can use, and permission to publish the build as a case study. It is a trade rather than a sale. The full price list.

07 / STRAIGHT UP

What this
does not buy.

Not a position on Google. Nobody can sell you one. Where you appear depends partly on where the person searching is standing, which is nobody's to hand out, and partly on a system that is not published and changes. Anyone guaranteeing you a place in the three is guessing with your money.

Not a full diary. We have no way of knowing what your column does next and no honest basis for a figure, so there is not one anywhere on this page. What we can tell you is what will be true at the end: the prices will be published, the booking will work on a phone on a Sunday, every stylist will have a page, and all of it will belong to you.

Not claims about products or results. We do not write what a product does, how long anything lasts, or what a treatment will fix, and we will decline if we are asked to invent it. That is yours and you are the one accountable for it. What we do is build the pages around your words and make them findable.

Not reviews. See section 04. We make asking easy and we go no further than that, in either direction.

Not a lock-in. You own the site, the domain and the content, and you have the logins on day one. The care plan is monthly and can be stopped whenever you like without the site going anywhere.

And not experience we have not had. Skyward is new and there are no clients yet, in any industry. The salon site in section 09 is one we invented and built ourselves so that there was something to look at — it is not a job we were hired for and it is labelled as such on every screen of it. What is on this page is how the search result is put together, what the pages have to answer, and where price lists and booking flows fail — all of which you can check against your own week while you read it — not a record we do not have.

08 / QUESTIONS

Six things salons
ask us, answered
properly.

Our Instagram does all the work. Why would we need a website?

Because the part it does is the part you are already good at. A feed sells the work beautifully and then hands the person over to a link, and the link is where it stops — no prices, no way to tell who is taking new clients, and a booking button that opens a message. We are not asking you to post less. We are asking you to own the ten seconds after the post.

There is also the half of your market that never sees the feed at all. They open a map, read three names and a rating, and pick one. That is the $395 job rather than the website one, and it is often where we would start you.

We take bookings through a system already. Do we have to change it?

No, and we would rather you did not. Your regulars know it, your stylists know it, and changing the software your day runs on to improve a website is the wrong way round. We build the site around what you run and wire the booking in so it opens where people expect it to, on a phone, without a detour.

If it genuinely cannot do something the salon needs, we will say so and tell you what your options are. That is a conversation for you and whoever you pay for it, not a sale for us.

We change our prices a couple of times a year. Who does that?

You send it and it is done within two days, unlimited, on the care plan — which for a salon is mostly what the care plan is for. Prices, a new stylist, a change to the Sunday hours. It is usually faster than finding the time to do it yourself between clients.

If you would rather do it yourself you can. You own the site and the logins on day one, with or without a care plan, and at handover we show whoever will actually be doing it how to change a number without breaking anything.

I rent one chair on my own. Is a website overkill?

Possibly, and we will tell you if we think so. Start with the $395 Google profile, which is the map result rather than a website, needs nothing from you but an hour and is done in a day. Plenty of single-chair stylists are full off that plus word of mouth and do not need anything else yet.

The point at which a site starts earning is when you want to be found for the thing you do rather than for your own name, or when messages are taking bookings that should be taking themselves. Come back then, and we will not chase you in between.

Is that $2,450, or $2,450 plus GST?

$2,450, full stop. Every figure on this site includes GST and nothing is added later. It is worth asking every other quote you get the same question — at fifteen per cent the difference is not a rounding error, and a quote that does not say which it means cannot be compared with one that does.

Have you built a salon website before?

Not for a client. Skyward is new and has no clients yet, in any industry, and we are not going to pretend otherwise to people who spend all day being judged on work they can point at. What we have built is the salon in section 09 — invented from the name down, so that there is something to open on a phone rather than another paragraph to read.

What we do instead is build your homepage first, properly, for nothing, before any money changes hands. You look at a real working page for your own salon and decide from that rather than from somebody else's portfolio. If it is not good you walk away owing us nothing, which is a more useful test than a testimonial. How that works.

ALSO WRITTEN

Four more places
to start, depending
on what you are.

Whatever kind of local business you are, the method does not change — find out what people type, answer it properly on a page of its own, and make the next step obvious.

$395

The map result, dressed properly, in a day.

The three salons under the map are a Google listing rather than a website. What is in one, what goes wrong in it, what the day involves and what $395 does not buy.

 Clinics

Physio, dental, chiro and counselling, which are not this.

An appointment somebody has been putting off for six weeks is a different sale from one they have been looking forward to. Written for the gap between deciding and booking.

 Cafés

Cafés, restaurants and catering, which are answered in Google.

A venue whose ordinary week is settled inside the search result, and whose website exists for the function and the catering order nobody walks in for.

 Mobile

Mechanics, groomers and cleaners who come to the customer.

The opposite of a chair in a room: no address at all, just a boundary on a map, and a business that can lose money by winning the wrong enquiry.
09 / SEE ONE

There is one. Open it
on a phone, the way
your clients would.

Everything above this is a claim about a website you have not seen. This is the page, finished, built on the argument this one has been making: the people before the salon, every price a total rather than a starting point, and the deposit and the redo policy written down instead of explained at the counter. Nobody is behind it. We invented a salon so that we could build the thing properly rather than wait for permission to build it.

Marram Hair is not a real salon.

The salon, the four people, the prices and every figure on that page were made up so that there was something to build. Open it and a black band sits across the top of the screen saying exactly that, and it stays there the whole way down. The page is marked noindex, so it cannot surface in a search for somebody's actual hairdresser. The phone number is fictional, the email address ends in .example — a domain reserved so that it can never belong to anybody — and nothing typed into its form is sent or stored.

The lines in quotation marks on that page are sample text, and each one says so directly underneath itself. Skyward has no reviews of its own, and yours are yours to earn rather than ours to write. Take the page as a sample of the work and nothing further: if any of it reads to you like a customer, we have written it badly.

01
Hair salon · Kingsland

Marram Hair

Built toBe booked without a single message first

The people are the spine of it rather than the services, because that is what is actually being chosen: four chairs, each one saying whether its book is open, including the one that is on a four-week waitlist and the one that is shut until March. Then a price list in which every line is a total with the GST already inside it — the two things that genuinely move a price printed as numbers underneath, and one job left deliberately unpriced with the reason written into the line. Under that: the deposit and the cancellation terms as three figures on a dark band, and the redo policy in three steps with a number of days on it, which is the thing every salon says and almost none of them writes down.Open the salon concept

Yours would not look like this one, and it should not. A colour salon is not a barbershop and neither of them is a brow studio — what is worth arguing over here is the chair and the price list, and somewhere else it is the queue on a Saturday morning or the photograph of yesterday's work. What carries across is the method: work out the single thing the person came to find out, put it first, and take everything else out of their way. The rest of the concept builds are indexed on the homepage — the trades, a physiotherapy clinic and a mobile mechanic. Worth opening if you want to see how far apart sites built by the same studio can be.

10 / START

We will build your
homepage first.
Then you decide.

Send us the salon name and the suburb. We will look at what is already out there under your name, then build you a real, working homepage — not a mock-up, not a template with your logo dropped on it — and send it to you. If you do not like it, that is the end of it and you owe nothing. No deposit before the demo.

Phone or text022 584 0585 Emailjosh@skywarddigital.co.nz Or start at $395The Google profile, on its own

Josh reads these himself. Nothing is passed to a salesperson, because there is not one. Text is usually easier than a call if you are on the floor all day.

We use these details only to reply to your enquiry and, if you go ahead, to run the job. We don't sell them, we don't add you to a mailing list, and you can ask us to delete them any time by emailing Josh. Please don't send us anything about your clients through this form — it isn't the place for it, and we don't want it. The full privacy statement says who else handles them and for how long.