Web Design
Deesigner Hair Studio
The old site had lost 173 of its 279 images. We rebuilt it bilingual, shot the salon properly, and moved thirty years of search history across in one hop.
Thirty years in the Buttermarket, and a website that had lost 173 of its photographs
Paul and Dee Rose opened Deesigner Hair Studio on 1 September 1995 and have run it from the Buttermarket Centre in Ipswich ever since. The salon was refitted in 2026. The website had not moved in years, and it was quietly falling apart.
What the audit found
We crawled all seventeen pages of the old IONOS MyWebsite build on 27 July 2026 and requested every image URL on it individually. 279 images, 173 of them returning 404.
Two entire galleries had lost their files: the 145-image styling portfolio, and the 28-image stylist page. For a salon those two pages are the shop window, and anyone visiting was looking at empty white boxes where the hair should have been. Everything outside the builder's gallery widget still loaded, including single images going back to 2016, which told us the problem sat in the platform rather than the server.
That answered the repair-or-rebuild question on its own.
Photography before design
A salon site is a photography site, so we did not start with layouts. We booked a professional shoot for 8 August 2026 and directed it against the page structure we intended to build: a studio portrait set for every stylist, the refitted room empty, and the team working on real clients. 197 frames came back. Everyone is in black, which is the salon's own dress rule, so the set holds together as one body of work instead of a mixed bag.
Three colourways, one decision
Paul saw the same homepage three times. Same layout, same photography, different palette: champagne gold, blush rose, soft lavender. He picked gold. Showing one design and asking for thoughts invites redesign by committee. Showing three finished versions of the same design makes it a choice.
The build
Astro, statically generated, 30 routes, no CMS to log into and nothing to patch on a Tuesday.
Every page exists twice. There is a second Deesigner Hair at Le Mesnil-Adelee in Lower Normandy, open by appointment since 2009, so the site runs in English and in French throughout. The French is written, not machine-translated, and on the France page it was drafted in French first because that is the version likelier to be read.
The full price list is published, all of it, from a £12 clipper cut upward. Booking goes through the salon's own Slick diary and can be started from a stylist rather than a service list, because a client of twenty years is booking a person, not a haircut.
Moving thirty years of search history
The old site had eighteen indexed URLs. None of them exist on the new one.
We archived the entire old site before the domain was disconnected and pulled its sitemap while it was still answering. Every one of those eighteen addresses now lands on its nearest equivalent in a single hop, through a 67-line nginx map. On top of that: a connected JSON-LD graph rather than scattered snippets, an FAQ block, a sitemap whose lastmod dates come from git history rather than the build clock, and an llms.txt for the answer engines.
The domain came off IONOS and the site went live at 09:41 on 11 September 2026.
What we are not claiming
It has been live for hours. There are no traffic or ranking figures here because there are none worth having yet, and anyone showing you numbers this soon after a migration is showing you noise. The redirects are in place and the old positions have somewhere to land. The figures go up when they mean something.
Scope
Design and build, art direction and photography brief, copywriting, French translation, booking integration, hosting, DNS and domain migration off IONOS, legacy URL mapping, technical SEO and answer-engine setup.
Technologies
- Web Design
- Web Development
- Photography Direction
- Bilingual
- Technical SEO
- Site Migration