The brief
It had to be modern, striking and memorable. A salon client is choosing a person to trust with how they look, and the website is often the first thing they judge. So Marram is black, white and greys only, with black and white photography, a fine display serif (Bellefair) over plain sans-serif body text, square buttons and a lot of white space.
The home page opens on a full-screen photo with the salon's name and suburb across it, and closes on the name set huge across the footer. The menu is a full-screen black overlay. Nothing on the page is coloured except the hair in the photos.
What's on the site
- Five service pages: balayage, hair colour, women's haircuts, hair extensions and keratin treatment, each with its own price list.
- A price list that changes with the stylist you book. Pick graduate, senior or director and every price on the menu changes to that level, because that is how a real salon charges and the first thing clients ask.
- A Newcastle page over nine suburb pages, from Merewether to Charlestown. Each one gives the drive time from the salon, where to park and the bus stop, and its own six questions.
- A stylists page, and three journal posts, including balayage against foils.
- A booking form that takes the service and a preferred day and time. On a real build it links the salon's own booking system instead.
- The skin test explained where colour is booked: a five-minute visit at least 48 hours before a first colour, as the colour makers instruct. NSW has no hairdressing licence to print, so the trust line is the qualification every stylist holds.
The suburb pages stop where a salon's clients stop driving. A salon is a place people come to, so a page for a suburb 35 minutes away would compete with every salon there for a client who will not make the trip. That is a different rule from a trade business, which drives to the job.
How it moves
The colour bloom is the signature. Every photo sits in black and white; on a computer the hair comes into colour when you point at it, and on a phone it blooms once as it scrolls in, holds for a moment, then settles back to black and white. Photos open like a blind as they arrive, headings rise out of a mask, and the price switch rolls each number to its new figure rather than swapping it.
Down the home page runs a single fine line, a blade of the marram grass the salon is named for. It grows down the margin as the page is read and ends in a tuft of grass near the bottom. A visitor who has asked their phone for less motion gets every page finished and still, with nothing hidden.
What it scores
Google PageSpeed Insights, mobile, on the live demo home page, 27 Oct 2026: performance read 98 on three runs. That is with full-screen photography and the motion above, on a phone.
Why SEO says 100 here and less on the live demo. Marram Hair isn't a real business, so the demo carries a noindex tag: it tells Google not to list the site, and it never competes in search with a real salon. PageSpeed marks that one tag down, because on a real site it would be a mistake. Switch the tag off and SEO scores 100: we tested the home page, a service page and a suburb page that way on 27 Oct 2026, and all three came back 100.
Built to be found
Every page was given its own search term before a word was written. We researched the searches people actually make for hair salons and hairdressers around Newcastle, then gave the highest-volume terms to the pages that sell: each service, the Newcastle page and the suburbs nearby. No two pages compete for the same search.
What we'd ask a client to shoot
On a real build these come from the salon, in colour, so the site can show them in black and white and bring the hair back. For this demo they are stock photos and one generated stand-in, labelled as samples.
- Six finished looks, a mix of colours and lengths, against plain backgrounds.
- Each stylist, half-length, on a light backdrop.
- A stylist and a client talking at the mirror.
- Hands painting colour onto a section of hair.
- The salon itself: the chairs, the mirrors, the light.
- The shopfront from the street, so a new client knows the door.
More designs
Tallowood Electrical, the electrician, Wattlewater Plumbing, the plumber, Stillwind Air, the air con business and Glenrock Support, the NDIS provider are the others. Every starting design is on the website examples page. A design like this can be built as any of our three packages: The Starter at $1,800, The Growth from $3,500, or The Authority; the details are on the packages page.