EMPIRE BEAUTY SALON.
A unisex salon in Corby doing hair, barbering, nails, brows and aesthetics under one roof. The site had to carry the atmosphere of the room, lay out seventy-odd treatments without becoming a spreadsheet, and make enquiring take one tap — because the booking happens by phone, by message, or not at all.
THE SHAPE OF IT.
( 01 — WHAT WAS SHIPPED )Nobody chooses a salon from a price list. They choose it from how the room looks.
Empire has been open in Corby since 2019 and covers an unusually wide range for one salon — ladies' hairdressing, barbering, nails, eyebrow wax and tint, facial waxing, ear piercing and aesthetic treatments. That breadth is a selling point and a structural problem at once: seven categories and fourteen price groups will flatten into an undifferentiated table if you let them.
There is no online booking system behind the business, and adding one would have meant selling the salon software it doesn't want. So the site could not pretend to take appointments. It had to do the persuading and then hand over cleanly to a phone call, a Facebook message or an enquiry form.
THE APPROACH.
( 03 — FOUR DECISIONS )A palette taken from the room
Porcelain, greige, taupe, smoked brown and deep espresso — a warm brown-grey system with no pure white and no gold anywhere, because gold is what every salon template reaches for. A high-contrast serif carries the headings and a grotesque does the work, so the pages read as editorial rather than promotional.
Breadth made navigable
Services are grouped into seven named categories, each with its own panel and its own route through to the relevant part of the price list. The portfolio sits alongside as twenty real pieces of the salon's own work — fades, hand-painted nails, colour — rather than stock photography of someone else's clients.
Three honest ways in, one of them prefilled
Phone, Facebook Messenger and an enquiry form — the three channels the salon actually answers. Tapping through from a service carries that service with it, so the contact page opens with the enquiry already summarised and one button left to press. Less typing on a phone, fewer abandoned enquiries.
No stars we can't stand behind
The structured data describes the salon, its services and its offers, but deliberately publishes no aggregate rating. Self-asserted star ratings with nothing auditable behind them are exactly what Google issues manual actions for. The rich result isn't worth the risk to the domain.
THE SITE.
( 04 — LIVE ON EMPIREBEAUTYSALON.CO.UK )
UNDER THE BONNET.
( 05 — HOW IT'S BUILT )Static pages, one live route
Every page is prerendered to static HTML. The only thing that runs per request is the enquiry endpoint, which keeps the attack surface down to a single, well-understood door.
An enquiry route that expects abuse
Server-side validation against a strict allowlist of services, length and format limits, a request-size cap, honeypot fields and per-IP rate limiting. Enquiries are relayed to the salon and stored nowhere by the app.
Motion that waits its turn
The scroll and animation libraries are imported dynamically after hydration rather than shipped in the critical bundle, and the whole motion layer is wired to the visitor's reduced-motion preference.
Written-down security
A content security policy, HSTS, framing and sniffing protections, a documented disclosure address and a published policy covering secrets, dependencies and data minimisation — so the next person to touch it knows the rules.
The portfolio is the part that compounds. It wants feeding.
Twenty pieces of the salon's own work is a strong start and a weak habit — the gallery earns its place only if it keeps growing, and the aesthetics side of the business isn't represented in it yet. After that, the honest next step on rankings is real reviews on the Google Business Profile, which is also the only legitimate route to the star rating the schema deliberately leaves out.