Glammatic is a website platform built for salons, not expensive agencies
Wix is a fantastic website builder, but it’s built for designers and agencies. Not salon owners. While powerful, Wix is complicated to set up and to keep up-to-date. And having an out of date website is not a good look for any salon.
Glammatic is purpose-built to enable salon owners to get online quickly. We handle everything for you, allowing you to rest assured that you’re making a beautiful first impression. We make sure your website not only has the right content, but that it is also optimized for great performance.
Why salons choose Glammatic over Wix
Here are some of the top reasons salon owners prefer Glammatic.
Done For You
Unlike DIY solutions, Glammatic takes care of everything from design to development to launch.
Professionally Designed
Glammatic’s team has been building websites since 2004. We’ve kept current with best practices and trends to make your salon’s website look and perform great.
Available by email, text, or phone
We’re always available to help you. From marketing advice to simple website updates, we’re behind you 100%.
Dedicated Support
Marketing your salon takes time and effort. But with a dedicated support team, you can easily show up online consistently because we do it for you.
Glammatic vs Wix: Which is Right for Me?
Both Glammatic and Wix are excellent ways to build and maintain a web presence. With both services, you can build a great looking website, showcase your staff, take bookings online, and promote the services your salon offers.
Where Glammatic and Wix differ is in the time, effort, and experience that’s required for your salon to have a great web presence.
Wix provides all of the tools you need to make your website look and work great, but it has a steep learning curve and can easily be misconfigured. Without proper optimization, your site may not perform well in search (this process is often called search engine optimization). You may also run into issues with your website on mobile; tuning a website to look great on every screen — phones, tablets, and computers — takes experience and comprehensive testing.
Like Wix, Glammatic provides the tools to make your website look great, but it’s also paired with world-class support. Instead of doing it yourself, Glammatic does everything for you. We have a simple process where we ask you the basics about your business (e.g. what services you offer, what your hours of operation are, who your stylists are, where you’re located) and we gather content for your website (e.g. any photos or videos that you may have). Most customers complete the onboarding process during a 15 minute call.
From there, Glammatic takes that information and builds a great looking website that is on brand and performs well technically. This process usually takes less than a week.
4 to 12 weeks
1 to 2 weeks
Average time to launch a Glammatic website
Since we built Glammatic specifically for salons, we have deep industry expertise that allows us to deliver high quality websites that help you book appointments and attract new high-quality clients.
Do-it-Yourself versus Do-it-For-Me
One of the main difference between Glammatic and Wix is who is responsible for creating content and getting your website set up.
Wix is a DIY website builder. While it provides all of the technical capabilities that Glammatic offers, it leaves the actual implementation up to you. For many of the businesses we’ve worked with in the past, this can be daunting. Even if you get your website looking great, it can still leave some things to be desired under the hood, especially regarding website performance and Search Engine Optimization
Glammatic is a DIFM website platform. While you still can use our dashboard to make common content changes, website setup and design is handled for you by Glammatic.
Our dashboard allows you to update your salon’s hours of operation, contact information, photos, staff profiles, and services listings.
Customizability
Both Glammatic and Wix provide customization over the content of your website.
Wix is a full website builder which allows you to customize every aspect of the layout of your website and the design elements. This level of control is extremely powerful, but also error prone. Since Wix is built primarily for agencies and experienced designers, it is easy to make mistakes that affect usability, performance, mobile-friendliness, and SEO. Fixing these issues can be costly too: the cost of a skilled Wix designer can be $75 or more per hour. In fact, many of Glammatic’s customers started with Wix and switched when they faced roadblocks when trying to build their website.
Glammatic provides less customization than Wix and is more narrowly focused on the needs of salons. While endless customization can seem like a good thing, it is usually the source of more problems than the value it creates: put bluntly, most salon websites underperform because they’re poorly designed, lack optimization, and lack vital information about the business.
Glammatic provides a dashboard that lets you customize your website content, photos, and branding. For 90% of our customers, that’s all that’s needed to have a great website. For the other 10%, we provide expert website managers at no additional cost to add custom content and sections to your website.
Online Bookings
Technically speaking, neither Glammatic nor Wix provide support for online appointment bookings out of the box. However, Glammatic specifically partners with leading salon booking companies, such as DaySmart and Boulevard, to provide easy setup and great integration between your booking system and your website.
Why don’t you offer an Online Booking feature?
At first glance, it can seem simple to set up an online booking system. After all, it’s basically just a calendar, right?
It’s actualy a bit more complicated than that — experience has shown us that online booking systems work best when they’re integrated with staff management and point of sale systems. There are two related benefits to doing it this way and both have to do with money. On the staff management side, using a full service online booking platform ensures you’re paying your stylists and technicians properly. For point of sale, integrating your booking system ensures you properly generate invoices and collect payments for services.
That’s why Glammatic partners with companies like DaySmart, Booksy, and Boulevard to provide our customers with choice around which online booking system they want to use. We designed Glammatic to work great for small and medium salons (if you have more than 6 locations, consider hiring an agency to build out your website).
Don’t you use templates? What’s up with that?
All website builders use templates, at least as a starting point. But not all templates are created equal. There are four common types of templates in existence:
- Base templates. These templates provide the basic building blocks for a website. They are mostly focused on covering the common design elements in a webpage, but do not include any functionality that is relevant to a specific industry.
- Industry specific base templates. These templates are designed for specific industries. They typically contain placeholders and example pages that are relevant to a specific industry. These templates are designed to look good for the industry they’re for, but they often lack critical components necessary to a high performing website.
- Optimized website templates. Optimized templates are industry specific templates that have been designed for the needs of a particular industry and vertical. These templates not only have an aesthetic suited to salons, they have the functionality that’s required for a salon website to work well as a tool for acquiring and converting customers.
- Customized templates. Customized templates are typically created by design agencies for $3,000 to $25,000. While they’re often built to spec for your brand, they are best suited to large salons (typically franchises with more than 6 locations).
Optimized website templates is the type that Glammatic uses. In our specific case, we’ve worked hard to not only ensure your website has the right sections and content, but is also optimized to perform well for bookings and conversions. And since we work with a large number of salons, we’ve had the time to perfect our websites to ensure they work great for the unique needs of salons.
Why are templates used in the first place?
Technically speaking, templates provide a way for a content management system to place text, photos, and videos onto the correct areas of your website.In plain English: templates are used so you can focus on having the right information on your website, not placing it correctly.
Well-designed templates, including all of the ones built by Glammatic, are designed to look great on all size screens.
Who should use Wix vs Glammatic?
Wix is a perfect fit for salons that meet any of the following criteria:
- Salons with more than 6 locations or 100 stylists.
- Salons that employ a full time designer/developer or have significant budget for a website.
- Salons willing to spend $5-50K to hire out the development of their website.
- Salon owners with the time to vet potential designers and ensure they are experienced working with salons.
- Salon owners who are experienced building websites and have ample time to spend on building, testing, optimizing, and maintaining a website.
Glammatic, however, is better fit for salons that:
- Have a small number of locations (less than 6).
- Have a limited budget to spend to take a website live.
- Don’t have an owner or operator with deep expertise building websites.
- Don’t have an owner or operator with ample time to build out the website.
Cost Comparison of Glammatic vs Wix
At first glance, Glammatic may appear to be more expensive. But, when you consider all of the costs of building, optimizing, and maintaining a website, Glammatic is a smart choice.
| Glammatic | Wix Business | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup Cost | $0 | $0 |
| Time Spent Building ($) | $106 (2 hours)1 | $4,240+ (80 hours) |
| Maintenance Cost | $02 | $1,500 (20 hours)3 |
| Monthly Cost | $149 / mo | $32 / mo |
| Domain Cost | $0 (forever) | $14.95 per year (first year free) |
| Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)4 | $5,470 for 3 years | $6,922 for 3 years |