mitoro salon featured

Website: mitoro.com

2021-10-15
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Reading time: 3 minutes

After I had done the re-branding for Mitoro, I had to also create a new website for them. Their old site was built with WordPress and because it was using a very basic theme and for some reason was using multiple page builders and a whole lot of plugins. The old site can be still checked out with the archive.org way back machine HERE.

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The old website

The old site didn't just have a confusing construction, but it was also missing branding and there was barely anything actually related to the hairdressing.

Faster and better UX

For the new site, I decided to use Oxygen Builder which is still a fairly new site builder, but it's really lightweight and doesn't have any extra bloat on it.
Minus thing is of course that because Oxygen Builder disables WordPress themes, I'd had to build everything from the ground up. So everything you see on the new site is built by me with one exception on Tehden24 booking that is in an iframe. Personally, I'd like to build a better booking system because Tehden couldn't provide any better booking integration, but Mitoro was also attached to it, so it would have been really expensive to switch everything to some completely different system.

Because it would be really user-unfriendly to put Mitoro owner updating everything with the Oxygen Builder itself, I also added the Advanced Custom Fields plugin allowing them to update the services, prices etc. easily without requiring to contact me every time. Otherwise, there wasn't really anything out of normally used for the site.

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Design-wise my plan was to keep things simple and user-friendly. The front page layout came from the client, but otherwise, everything was up to me.
The Black and white theme was the client's request for all the photos on the site, but as the brand uses that bright green I thought I'd rather use saturation 0% filter on images and removing it on hover. Just a little detail that allows adding colored images and still keeping them in the theme.

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On the old site services and prices were on separate pages which were really confusing, so I decided to put them both under the services page. I created this fresh-looking menu for service categories that are linked with hashlinks to each service category and then I also added a "back to top" button so it's easy and fast to go there and back again smoothly.
This was also built considering mobile users first.

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About Us aka "Mitorolaiset" page and blog was fairly simple without anything out of normal on them. The blog wasn't used much when I built the new site so it didn't have a high priority.

The booking page was also fairly simple as I only had to add some text and an iframe. I would love to make it better, but unfortunately editing anything inside the iframe would be impossible. Maybe at some point, I get to sell and ideas for a new booking system for them. As I'm writing this, I've already heard it has some problems with some mobiles, but unfortunately, it's a bit out of my hands currently.

Overall this was a fun project and it was my first client site built with Oxygen Builder. When writing this I have way more tools to work with and an already built a couple more and even more incoming. Building websites may not be my main niche, but it's slowly growing to be a big part of my work schedule.

Richard Samael Forsman
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