01
Luxury without excess
A restrained palette, large editorial typography and generous spacing create a premium feel without relying on excessive decoration or visual noise.
← Selected work
Case study / 2026
Salon Rebuild
The project revisits the type of salon website work I produced early in my freelance career and explores how I would approach the same broad category today using a more considered UI/UX and engineering process.
- Project
- Full Site Rebuild
- Content
- Fictional Concept
- Experience
- Sleek Luxury
01 / The problem
Revisiting the kind of salon website I originally built with WordPress.
One of my earliest freelance projects was a salon website built with WordPress. Several years later, I wanted to revisit the same broad type of brief and see how differently I would approach it with the design and engineering experience I have now.
This rebuild is not a redesign commissioned by the original business and does not reuse its content, staff information, pricing, testimonials or branding. Instead, it is a fictional salon concept designed specifically as a retrospective portfolio project.
The aim was to create a much more modern, responsive and deliberate experience while keeping the visual direction restrained: premium enough to feel appropriate for a contemporary salon without becoming decorative for the sake of it.
02 / Design direction
02
Mobile-first hierarchy
Content is structured to remain clear on smaller screens, with strong visual hierarchy, readable typography and responsive layouts that adapt rather than simply shrink.
03
Clear booking journey
Services, team information, gallery content and appointment calls-to-action are organised around the actions a potential salon customer is most likely to take.
03 / Technical approach
Simple architecture for a simple product.
The rebuild does not need a database, authentication system or client-side application framework. Go handles routing and renders reusable HTML templates on the server, while Tailwind provides the styling layer.
Keeping the implementation deliberately small makes the project easy to understand, maintain and deploy while still demonstrating a structured Go web application rather than a collection of disconnected static files.
01
Request
Go ServeMux
02
Application
Page handlers + PageData
03
Presentation
Shared Go templates + Tailwind
04
Response
Server-rendered HTML
04 / What changed
Same category. Completely different process.
Stronger typography and visual hierarchy
Responsive layouts designed intentionally for mobile
Clearer information architecture and calls-to-action
Reusable Go layouts and page templates
Version-controlled development with signed Git history
Defined scope instead of allowing the project to expand indefinitely
05 / Retrospective
The rebuild is as much about process as visual improvement.
The original salon project came from a point in my career where simply completing a real client website felt like the achievement. I had much less confidence around pricing, scope, design systems and the value of my own time.
Rebuilding the idea now made the progression easier to see. The difference is not just cleaner typography or a more contemporary colour palette. I approach structure, responsiveness, maintainability and project boundaries differently too.
That makes this project useful to me as more than a visual redesign. It is a record of how both my design thinking and engineering process have developed.
06 / Explore
See the finished rebuild and the implementation behind it.
The complete concept is deployed as a live Go web service, while the public repository exposes the implementation and development history behind the finished design.
Live demo hosted on Render's free tier. The first request may take a moment if the service has been idle.
Outcome