A bespoke, custom-coded website and interactive hair consultation tool for an award-winning Aveda salon in Somerset - built to feel as considered as the salon itself, load fast, and turn browsers into bookings.
The client
Verde Hair Lounge is an award-winning Aveda salon on South Street in Wellington, Somerset. It is a team of experienced stylists offering colour, cutting and styling, extensions and beauty, all built on the Aveda philosophy of plant-powered, naturally derived haircare. The salon has a loyal local following and a strong reputation for healthy-hair results and a calm, considered client experience - the kind of place people travel across the county for.
The brief
Verde wanted a website that matched the quality of the salon and the Aveda brand it represents - premium, calm and editorial, rather than the busy, templated look most salon sites settle for. It needed to make booking simple, show off the team's work, and give clients a genuine reason to engage. The standout requirement was a signature in-salon feature: an interactive hair and scalp consultation, running on an iPad in the salon, that would educate clients, recommend the right Aveda products, and encourage bookings and treatments.
What I built
A custom site coded from scratch in HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript - no theme, no page builder, no CMS. It is hosted on Cloudflare Pages with GitHub version control, which keeps it fast and means no ongoing hosting or licence fees. The whole thing is built mobile-first and to a bespoke visual system - self-hosted serif and sans typography, a deep forest-green, gold and cream palette, and a botanical motif that ties back to Aveda - so nothing about it reads as off-the-shelf.
A full salon site
Home, about, a services overview, seven individual service pages, a filterable gallery, contact and legal pages - each built with its own layout, imagery and copy.
Live online booking
The salon's Vagaro booking system is embedded directly into the site, with a dedicated confirmation page after booking and a phone-booking fallback for anyone who prefers to call.
Interactive consultation
The headline feature: a full-screen, one-question-at-a-time hair and scalp consultation designed for the salon iPad, ending in a personalised Aveda ritual and a prompt to book.
Every page carries the SEO groundwork from day one - unique titles and descriptions, HairSalon and FAQ structured data, canonical tags, breadcrumbs, Open Graph and Twitter cards, and a submitted sitemap.
The consultation engine, done properly
The client's original concept was a ten-question quiz. Reviewing it against the salon's own product logic showed that several questions collected answers nothing ever used, and two asked the same thing twice. So it was rebuilt: cut to six questions that each genuinely change the result, and built around a real assembly engine rather than a lookup table.
Instead of matching one answer to one pre-written result, the engine layers everything together - scalp condition, main hair goal, texture, colour treatment, heat styling and styling time - to build a single coherent routine. An oily scalp swaps in the right cleanser while keeping the products chosen for the client's actual goal; colour-treated hair triggers the right protection; heat styling adds heat defence without ever doubling up; and the number of products shown flexes to suit how much time the client wants to spend. It even resolves the light-versus-rich variants of products by hair texture. The whole product list lives in one clearly structured file, so the salon can update recommendations themselves as Aveda ranges change.
The brief was a ten-question quiz. Doing it properly meant a recommendation engine.
The results
The site launched as a complete, premium presence that finally matches the salon and the Aveda brand it carries. The booking journey is frictionless, and the consultation tool gives the team a genuine talking point on the salon floor and a reason for clients to engage beyond a single visit. The whole site is fast, accessible and fully search-ready.
The build scores near-perfect across the board on Google PageSpeed Insights - the same tool anyone can run against the live site:
Google PageSpeed Insights, desktop - 1 July 2026.
Just as importantly, the site is fully owned by the client - no platform fees, no CMS licence, no dependency on a third-party builder. It is fast, it is theirs, and it is built to grow with the salon.
If you run a salon or a business where the experience matters and your current site is not pulling its weight, this is the kind of build I do - see more recent work, or read why a site does not rank.