Developing a website for a start up business in Stamford, CT that is well organized, visually appealing, and user-friendly.
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1.Target Market and Positioning Statement:
The salon location plays a crucial role for
targeting people who live, work or study in Stamford. Beauty Bar Salon’s
audience is affluent young professionals, capitalizing on this community of well-known
company headquarters and businesses. It is a cutting-edge salon providing
multiple services including haircare, makeup and nail care. The salon targets
college-educated women, between the ages of 18 to 40, who commute to
Stamford from different areas, including Fairfield or New Haven, and work part-
or full-time. The reason why we are targeting this specific age group and
population is because they are more likely to be looking for the newest fashion
trends in makeup and hair styles, have income to support personal care, and
seek top quality service. The goal is to maintain these clients as lifetime
customers as they develop trust in our salon. Beauty Bar Salon is the best fit
for those who are looking for professional beauty services and makeup artists
at reasonable prices. Beauty Bar Salon is an affordable salon where simplicity
meets beauty.
2- Marketing Mix:
a.
Products and Services
The
Beauty Bar Salon is well-priced offering a wide-range of services and products,
including three sections: hair, nails and makeup. Hair services include
shampoo, conditioning, trims and cuts, coloring, highlights,
reconstructing, relaxers, and perms. Second section is nails: manicures,
pedicures, sculptured nails, polish, and hand conditioning treatments. The
makeup section includes eyeliners, eyelashes, and every day makeup. The salon
also offers beauty products including shampoo, conditioner, nail polish, nail
polish remover and many others.
b.
Price
The
prices are affordable, targeting the middle-class students and full- and
part-time employees. The Beauty Bar Salon's pricing scheme will be based on a
competitive pricing model with other competitors. (Appendix A) a table of the
salon prices.
c.
Promotion:
We
will promote our services and products in different ways: buy one and receive
half-price on additional products, selling gift cards, working with local
bloggers, offering seasonal discounts on Christmas, Thanksgiving, International
Women’s Day, lower pricing for students and 10% discounts to clients
bringing in other customers. Our products are also available online with a
price reduction for first time visitors. Eventually, we are going to apply
upsell and cross-sell techniques to increase average order values and profit
margins.
d. Place:
Our
social media platform will include a Beauty Bar Salon Facebook ‘local business’
page, Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest profiles targeting women. There will
also be a Beauty Bar Salon blog to share content and drive traffic.
3.
The Main Objectives:
As a startup business, the
salon’s primary goals are increasing salon sales via providing professional
services to our clients and generating leads through online sales. We aim
to build a loyal relationship with our customers; as a result, they will
become salon ambassadors sharing our name and services with their friends and
families. Finally, to build a strong brand awareness and maintaining a good
reputation to stand out in the market.
4. The
Main and Secondary Conversions:
For Beauty Bar Salon, the most critical conversion is to have
clients visit the website to book appointments through different options
including the website, telephone, or email. The secondary conversions are
purchasing products from the Beauty Bar Salon website and engagement with the
content. Writing relevant, interesting and innovative content will make
visitors engage and more likely return to purchase products on the website.
5. Website Competitive Analysis:
a) Beauty Bar Salon competitors in Stamford and Boston:
Stamford, CT
Boston, MA
b) The Website Ranking and The Reasons for Picking Such Websites
as The Best and Worst from The List.
These websites are ranked based on content relevance, website
structure, and aesthetics of the site balance between text, graphics, and
navigation.
Overall, after analyzing the six websites, The Style Bar ranks
number one for user experience and Fascino Salon came in at the bottom of the
list.
The Style Bar Salon Analysis:
The website does not have a complex, cluttered, or overwhelming
navigation bar. The page layouts are easy to understand and use. The site
balance between the text and graphics, and navigation, and also the contact
number -call of action- are all placed on the top of each page. The website is
effective because when users visit they can call the salon phone number, book
an online appointment, or email. Booking online is a very simple task.
The photographs in the above the fold provides users with a hint of the
easy-going atmosphere, personal
attention, and brand persona. The website is compatible with mobile phones,
tablets and desktops. The website is easy to navigate and easily
integrates with other marketing channels such as Facebook, Instagram and
Twitter. The style Bar’s homepage displayed in the appendix (Appendix B).
Fascino Salon and Spa Analysis:
The Fascino Salon and Spa website is out of date, the color and
design are not appealing. The slide show of the pictures on the homepage
are inconsistent, with some in black and white and others in color. The content
in the internal pages is also confusing and not user friendly. For
example, in the products section the website offers holiday boxes with poorly
written descriptions. It is difficult to match the particular description with
a specific product choice. The website does not clearly show how to call to
book appointments. The “Above the fold” provides a first impression and meaning
of the website. This one falls short. The slide show of photographs is only
partially visible and users must scroll down to see them. The navigation bar is
in a very small font in black lettering against a gray background which is hard
to see. Based on PageSpeed insight website, in terms of mobile load page
time, the homepage scores 66 out of 100 points, resulting in a slow user
experience. Fascino Salon and Spa’s homepage displayed in the appendix (Appendix
C).
6. Website Design (Layout):
Beauty
Bar Salon’s sitemap displayed in the appendix (Appendix D).
7.
Website Differentiation:
The
Beauty Bar Salon offers organic products including shampoo, conditioner, nail
polish remover, and customers can order them online, receiving free trial samples
with their orders. Online appointments are available via the booking button
‘call-to- action’ located in the navigation bar. The website provides relevant,
educational content in the blog section, with the ‘How To’ series of tips and
makeup tutorials. Consumers are asked to provide permission for before and
after photographs that are posted on the website. There is also 24/7 e-customer
support services for assistance or advice. To encourage booking
appointments online, there is a referral program where clients receive 20% off
any service or product for bringing in a friend or a family member.
8. Website Usability Analysis:
a) Defining all potential visitors
The potential visitors include fashionistas and beauty-conscious
female high school students, college students, and full- and part-time
professional workers.
b) The 4 task scenarios that a visitor could perform on the
website.
The four tasks include: booking online appointments, checking
the essential salon information, such as salon address, working hours, services
menu and prices, purchasing products online, monitoring salon
reviews on Yelp, Social Media Platform, and Google Places, and reading and
subscribing to the blog content. It is important to consider that all four
tasks work smoothly for desktop and mobile devices as a high percentage of the
conversion rate will come from mobile users.
“I am a freshman student at the University of Connecticut-
Stamford. Next week, I will have family dinner. I was looking for a
salon that is near to my university to do my hair and makeup, and Beauty Bar
salon’s website came first on the result. After checking the essential salon
information, such as salon address, working hours, services menu and prices, I booked
an appointment online, which was very simple process. I tend to read blogs
about the newest trends in makeup. On the other day, I read an article that was
posted on The Beauty Bar Salon blog about "Five best makeup products for
2017", and what I liked the most was that for each product, there was a
link to where you can buy it. I liked the mascara, and when I clicked on the
link, it directed me to The Beauty Bar salon website to buy it.”
c) The best and worst
competitor's user experience and usability analysis for a potential visitor and
recommendations.
The Style Bar website is ranked first on the list. The potential
visitor will check the salon address and working hours, which are placed above
the fold section. Then, the potential guest would review the salon service menu
where the prices are found. Also, the client can check the salon reviews on
Yelp, Social Media and search engines. If the potential visitor is satisfied
with the price of a chosen service, he/she would book online appointments. Overall,
the user experience of The Style Bar website is very smooth, and the call to
action is clear. However, the” request appointment” option should be more clear
to find because it is the primary conversion goal.
In the Fascino Salon and Spa’s website, a visitor will check the
salon address and working hours, click on the gallery to see client’s before
and after pictures, visit the product page, and call the salon to book the
appointment. Due to poor user experience, Fascino Salon and Spa website gives a
bad impression to the potential visitor and impacts his/her decision. For
recommendation, we suggest the following, first change the color of the website
and follow the best practice for user experience when it comes to designing a website.
Secondly, take advantage of the above the fold section and make it visually
appealing to attract the potential visitors. Place the essential
information above the fold, such as the salon location and contact number.
Finally, it is recommended to add booking an online appointment as many salons
are using this option to facilitate their job, and use the collected data for
digital marketing campaigns and special promotions opportunities.
9.
Testing a Website Using Online Audit Tools:
- Analyzing the website by using PageSpeed Insight https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
The page load speed is how much time a website takes to show the
full content on a specific page. Having a faster page speed is most likely to
rank and convert better. In terms of Che Maksou’s Page Speed, the website pages
in general need work. By using Page speed tool the home page speed load for the
mobile receives 57 out of 100, and the range of load speed for the desktop is 58
out of 100. The main issue that slows down the page load time is the size of
the images. The user may have a slow experience with loading the website pages,
so the website needs to optimize some images by reducing their size. To
increase the page speed, one can also minimize HTML, JavaScript, and CSS by
optimizing the website code including removing unnecessary characters such as
spaces, commas, code comments and unused code. There are two
main factors affected on server response time: Web Hosting and Web Server
Software. The server response time might improve dramatically by improving the
scope and the quality of the website web hosting and by changing the software
or configuration of the website's web server. Using
a content distribution network to distribute the load of delivering content
that helps to store the copies of the website at multiple diverse data centers;
thereby users will get fast access to the website.
- Analyzing the website by using Nibbler http://nibbler.silktide.com
Based on nibbler the overall score of the website is 6.5 out of
10. It has not been ranked by Alexa, so the popularity of the site is 0. To get
ranked by Alexa the website should work on strategies that drive traffic.
Internal links is 1.3 because most of the links on the site are “read more,”
“click here” which is considered as weak and fail to describe the content. The
website should consider using descriptive words or phrases instead of taking
the user to other internal links to continue reading the content. Code quality
gets 3.5 because there are more than 30 coding errors on the first five pages
of the website. Thus, some web browsers may not be able to read the website
correctly, and the website might not display correctly. For the website to be
fully compliant, it needs to resolve the validation errors of each code. Meta
tags get 3.6 because only 20% of the pages have a description. Meta tag
description helps users to decide which links to click on search engine result
pages (SERPs). Meta tag description for each page should have a unique
description. If the website developer does not write a well-written description
for a web page, Google will take a snippet of the page content and place it as
a Meta tag description. Regarding the amount of content, the website scores 8.2.
The website has an average of 381 words per page. Increasing the amount of
content might increase ranking in search engine.
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Appendix
Appendix
A:
Beauty Bar Salon’s Prices
services
|
prices
range
|
hair
cut (shampoo, cut and blow-dry style)
|
from
$40 to $50
|
hair
styling (shampoo and blow-dry style)
|
from
$30 to $40
|
single
color
|
from
$55 to $65
|
dimensional
color
|
from
$75 to $85
|
full
highlights
|
from
$95 to $115
|
partial
highlights
|
from
$75 to $95
|
hair
treatment
|
consultation
|
manicures
and pedicures
|
starting
from $ 20+
|
Appendix
B: A
screen shot of The Style Bar Salon’s homepage
Appendix C: A screen Shot of Fascino
Salon and Spa’s homepage
Appendix D: Beauty Bar Salon’s sitemap
