Websites and Booking for Ottawa Salons and Spas

A salon website is a booking funnel with photographs attached. Shinobi Media builds sites for Ottawa hair salons, barbershops, nail and lash studios, day spas and medical aesthetics clinics, with booking that works on a phone, a portfolio that sells the work, and the local search presence that fills the chair.

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Why businesses like yours call us

  • Booking lives entirely inside Instagram direct messages, which nobody can staff properly
  • Your booking platform's page is what ranks, so the customer relationship belongs to the platform
  • Clients cannot see prices, so they message to ask and half of them never message
  • The gallery is on Instagram and the website shows stock photos of someone else's work
  • No-shows cost a full appointment slot and nothing captures a deposit
  • You are not in the map pack for your own neighbourhood

What the work covers

  • Online booking on your own domain, wired into the system you already use, with deposits where no-shows are a problem
  • A service menu with real prices or honest starting ranges, because a hidden price is a lost booking
  • A portfolio of your own work, pulled from your own photography, not a stock library
  • Individual stylist or technician pages where clients book a person rather than a service
  • Instagram feed integration so the site stays current without becoming another thing to update
  • Google Business Profile with services, products, booking link and the photo cadence that keeps you visible
  • Gift cards and packages, which move a large share of revenue in December and around holidays
  • Local SEO for the neighbourhood and the treatment, which is how people search for this

What we have learned about this market

Most salons are already discovered. The leak is between discovery and the booking: a client finds you on Instagram or Maps, wants a price, cannot find one, sends a message, and waits until the impulse passes. Publishing the service menu with real numbers and putting booking one tap from every page recovers more revenue than any amount of additional traffic would, and it costs nothing to run afterwards.

What a website for this costs

Most businesses in this category take the Business tier at $1,199: up to fifteen pages, a page per service, Google Business Profile set up, local SEO built in, and a booking or quote flow, at a final price with no tax added. A simpler site is $799 and a custom build with integrations is $2,399.

Further reading

Other industries we build for

Areas we serve

Frequently asked questions

Should I put prices on the website?

Yes, or at least an honest starting price per service. The argument for hiding them is that consultation should come first, and the reality is that a client who cannot find a price leaves to find someone whose price they can see. A starting figure with an explanation of what moves it does the filtering job without committing you to a number that will not hold.

Can I keep my existing booking system?

Almost always. Square, Fresha, Vagaro, Booksy, Acuity and the rest all expose a booking widget or a link, and we embed yours so a client books from your site with your branding around it. Where it matters is the ranking: the platform's page ranks for your name and you do not, and pulling that back onto your own domain is a significant part of the point.

How do I stop losing appointments to no-shows?

Take a deposit at booking for the services where it hurts, and send automated reminders. Most booking systems support both and most salons have neither switched on. It is a settings change with a revenue effect, which makes it the cheapest fix on this page.

Do I need a website if my Instagram is busy?

You need a booking path you own. Instagram is rented reach that can change its terms, lose your account, or bury your posts, and it is not where someone searching "balayage Ottawa" ends up. A small site that ranks, shows the menu and takes bookings turns the audience you have built into appointments and keeps working when the algorithm shifts.

How long does it take?

Usually two to three weeks. Photography is the part that most often sets the timeline, and it is worth doing properly because the gallery is doing most of the selling.