Today, not a calendar widget
The question is almost never “what does Thursday the 14th look like”. It is “can I come now”. A barber site should answer that above the fold, on a phone, in one glance.
Barber website design in Suffolk
A barbershop website has one job on a Saturday morning: tell somebody whether they can get a cut today, and how. Everything else on it is decoration.
Most barber sites are a photograph of a chair, an Instagram feed and a phone number in the footer. That loses the walk-in who is standing on the pavement deciding, and it loses the regular who wants to know whether Tuesday at four is free without installing anything.
Built, and live
Aldous & Comb
Forty years on the high street, now run by the founder’s granddaughter. There is no appointment system to sign into — the booking sits on the home page as a row of real chairs and real times, and walking in without one is stated as a normal thing to do.
Aldous & Comb is a fictional business in an invented Suffolk town, built to the same standard as paid work and deployed to its own address. It is set to noindex so it can never compete with a real barbershop in search — everything indexable about it lives on this page instead.
The brief
What this website actually has to do
Booking without an account
Sign-up walls lose the customer who was going to walk in anyway. A name and a mobile number is the whole of what a barbershop needs to hold a chair.
Prices in public
A cut, a skin fade, a beard tidy and a hot towel shave are four different prices and four different lengths of time. Publishing them stops the phone call that is only ever about money.
Walking in has to look normal
Half the trade is unbooked. If the site only offers appointments, it quietly tells the walk-in they are doing it wrong.
The build
How this one does it
- The booking is the home page. Aldous & Comb puts real chairs and real times on the first screen rather than behind a “Book now” button. Choosing a slot is the first thing you can do, not the fifth.
- Forty years, used as an argument. The shop’s age is the selling point, so the site says it in type rather than in a paragraph of history nobody reads.
- Photographs treated as one set. Five open-licence photographs, all pushed through the same duotone so four unrelated sources read as one shop. Ninety-two kilobytes of imagery on the whole page.
What one costs
Website, built and handed over, from £300. A website designed, built and handed to you outright. You own the site and the hosting account, and there is nothing to keep paying me. Later changes are £49 an hour, only when you ask for them, and there is a monthly option at £89 if you need software as well as a site.
Quotes are fixed and in writing before anything starts, and I show you the finished site on a development link before asking for a penny.
Want this for your barbershop?
Tell me what your business does and how people currently find you. I build it, show it to you finished, and hand you the accounts at the end — you own what you pay for.