A stylist answers the same three questions all day. One page can answer all three.

Walk into a salon on a Saturday and count the phone calls. Almost every one is the same three questions: how much is a cut, how long will it take, and will it be more because my hair is long. None of the three is a website problem in the usual sense — nobody needs a blog, a shop or a booking engine to answer them. They need a table with four columns in it, in a place the client can reach before they call.

A restaurant's problem is different. A restaurant has sixty dishes and a menu board that goes out of date; that is why the menu page is a different job from this one. A salon has maybe twenty services, of which twelve matter, and the thing that makes the price move is not the dish but the head in the chair. That single difference — the price depends on the client, not only on the service — is why salon price lists end up as a paragraph of emoji in an Instagram caption, and why the same three questions keep being asked out loud.

Why a hair price list is harder than a menu

Three variables move a hair price, and every one of them is invisible in a flat list:

• Length. The same cut takes twenty minutes longer and uses more product on hair past the shoulder blade. Every salon charges for this; almost none of them writes the rule down where a client can read it before booking.
• Colour history. A full head of foils on hair that has been box-dyed black is a different job from the same foils on virgin hair — more lift, more bowls, sometimes two visits and a strand test. A flat price is a promise the salon cannot keep, which is why colour quotes end in a consultation.
• Who does it. A senior stylist and a newly qualified stylist are different prices for the same service, and both are fair. A list that hides the level makes the price look random.

So the page is not “here are our prices”. It is here are the four columns, and here is what moves the number inside them. Written that way, it answers the phone call before it happens; written as a bare list, it produces the argument at the desk that the salon was trying to avoid.

The four columns

Four columns fit on a phone without sideways scrolling if the service names are short. That is the whole design constraint: at 390 px wide, “Balayage, shoulder-length or longer, senior stylist · 180 min · $260–$320” wraps to three lines and stays readable. Anything wider than that is a table built for a desktop and abandoned by the client.

The twelve lines

Twelve is not a limitation of the tool; it is what a person reads while standing in a queue. Pick them by how often they are booked, and keep the structure identical for every line: name, who, minutes, price.

1. Cut and blow-dry — the anchor. If a client reads one line, it is this one.
2. Cut, no blow-dry — a real service in most salons, and usually missing from the list.
3. Blow-dry on its own — the line that fills weekday mornings.
4. Fringe trim — often free for regulars, priced for everyone else, and a frequent question.
5. Child's cut — with the age ceiling printed, because “child” without a number is an argument.
6. Root touch-up — colour, application only, with the processing time separate.
7. Full colour — the banded line: price by length, quoted at the consultation.
8. Foils / highlights — partial and full as two lines, because clients think in those terms.
9. Balayage or freehand lightening — the highest-ticket line, and the one that needs its own note about lift.
10. Toners and gloss — the add-on that is really a service, and the one clients forget to budget for.
11. Treatments — bond builders, scalp treatments, in-salon masks, priced by the service not the product.
12. Add-ons — long-hair surcharge, extra colour bowl, blow-dry with a treatment, and the one-off charges a salon makes at the desk.

Everything else — the keratin, the extensions, the bridal package — belongs in the booking tool or behind a “call us” line, because each of those is a consultation with a range so wide that printing a number would be a lie.

The one line that stops the argument

If a salon changes one thing this month, make it this: put the length rule on the page, with a threshold and a number.

Long hair (past the shoulder blade): +$20 on any cut or colour. Shampoo, dry and sectioning take longer, and the product is dosed by length. Quoted at booking, charged at the desk.

It reads cold on paper and it is the warmest line in the whole list, because it removes the moment where a client hears a number they did not expect. The threshold has to be one a person can check in a mirror (the shoulder blade, not “medium length”), the number has to be a number, and it has to appear in three places that cannot drift apart: the page, the printed price list, and the service list inside the booking tool.

Two more lines from the same drawer:

• Colour corrections: “Quoted at a free 15-minute consultation — corrections depend on what is already in the hair, and a strand test may be needed.” This is what turns “how much to fix this” from a phone argument into a booked consultation.
• Patch test: if the salon requires one before a first colour service, say it in the colour block, in the client's words and with the window — usually 24 to 48 hours before. A patch test buried in the terms page is a client turned away at the door.

What the page carries, top to bottom

1. Name and the one-line difference — “Hair, Balayage, Busan” is enough; a slogan is not.
2. The price table — the twelve lines, four columns, before any photograph.
3. The length rule and the colour note — immediately under the table, not on a second page.
4. Hours, with an open-now state — “open until 19:00” answers the 18:40 question that a plain list of hours cannot.
5. Book — the booking link and a number that dials, side by side. Some clients want the app, some want to talk.
6. Where — the address with a Directions link, parking, and the entrance if it is not obvious from the street.
7. Photos last — six pieces of the salon's own work beat thirty reposts, and they belong under the prices, not above them.

Eight blocks, one screen, no scroll-hijacking. The test is brutally simple: can a first-time client answer how much, how long, when, where and what happens if they are late, without sending a message? If yes, the page has replaced a week of direct messages.

Where the code goes in a salon, in millimetres

A salon has three reading distances and needs three sizes. These are the measured figures from the print files this site produces, not estimates from a mock-up:

Three rules follow from the numbers rather than from taste:

• The mirror sticker is smaller than the reception card and that is correct, because the mirror is read from closer. Do not scale the reception artwork down by eye; the 40 mm code exists as its own piece for exactly this reason.
• The window poster is the one place a big code is mandatory. 126 mm of code survives the 2 m distance through glass and a reflection; a 48 mm card taped to the inside of the same window does not.
• Nothing goes inside the quiet zone. Four modules of empty white on every side — the margin Denso Wave's FAQ and the GS1 retail guideline both require. A logo, a border line or a nail varnish bottle printed over the corner of the code is the most common reason a pretty sign does not scan.

Print at 100%, never “fit to page”: A4 artwork on US Letter is scaled to about 94%, and every module shrinks with it. Matt laminate on the mirror sticker, because a gloss finish under a salon's downlights throws a highlight across the code exactly when the client tilts the phone. And test with two phones — one iPhone, one Android — in the chair, with the lights on, before the batch is printed. The arithmetic behind the 48 mm and 126 mm choices is worked through in the millimetres guide.

Keep the paper, and keep one list

A code does not replace the printed price list, and a salon is the clearest case. The client in the chair with wet hair, or waiting twenty minutes for a colour to develop, is not going to walk to the desk and scan a sticker. A printed A4 price list on the wall answers them where they sit, and it is the piece clients photograph.

But paper and page only work together if they are generated from one list of twelve lines. Three copies of the same list is not bureaucracy; it is the only way a client stops hearing two different numbers — one from the caption they read last month, one from the stylist. When a price changes, it changes in one place, and the page, the printed sheet and the service list in the booking tool all follow.

That is also the practical answer to the question “who updates the website”. In a salon, the person who updates it is the owner, at 9pm, from a phone. If publishing a price change means opening an editor, finding the table block and hoping the mobile view did not break, the price list will be six months out of date by February. If it means typing a number into a list, it will be right.

The booking tool stays where it is

Nothing on this page replaces a booking system. The calendar, the deposit, the reminder text and the no-show protection are a separate product and worth paying for. What the page does is own the place the link lives, so the link is not a story highlight that expires in 24 hours.

The three we priced on 14 November 2026, from the vendors' own pages, before tax:

• Square Appointments — $0 for one person, $49 a month for a small team, $149 a month per location.
• Booksy — $29.99 a month, plus $20 a month for each extra user.
• GlossGenius — $24 a month billed annually, $28 billed monthly.

Any of the three will hold a calendar better than a web page can. The page's job is to say, before that link is tapped, what the booking tool does not: how long each service takes, the length rule, the deposit, and the two-line lateness policy that saves the Friday evening argument.

What the monthly route costs over three years

The same list prices, read on the vendors' own pricing pages on 14 November 2026, before tax, annual billing where the vendor states it:

Put those numbers against the ticket. At $65 a service, $504 over three years is about eight services — for a link list that cannot show a price at all — and $684 at Squarespace Basic is about ten. The monthly plans are not silly: they buy an editor, a blog, a shop and an email address, and for a salon that sells retail online or runs a page per stylist they are the right purchase. The question is narrower: does a salon need to rent an editor for three years to publish twelve lines and one link?

For a salon that only needs the floor — prices, durations, hours, a booking link, a phone number, a map — the three-year cost calculator takes the salon's own monthly figure and puts it beside a page that is paid for once. The honest version of the comparison is on that page, including the cases where the monthly plan wins.

The eight files a salon actually gets

The printed kit was built for restaurants, where a table card is the point. A salon has no tables, so the kit has a second shape: the same price, six pieces fewer, and nothing about the page changes.

With tables — fifteen pieces. Live page · delivery note · A4 QR poster · QR image · print menu · table cards · Business Profile kit · table tent · 70 mm stickers · Wi-Fi cards · menu screen · edit runbook · delivery-app notices · review cards · bring-a-friend cards.

No tables — the page plus eight files. Live page · delivery note · A4 QR poster · QR image · print price list · Business Profile kit · edit runbook · review cards · bring-a-friend cards.

Six pieces come out, and they are the six that need a table: the table cards, the table tent, the 70 mm stickers, the guest Wi-Fi card, the menu screen for a wall, and the delivery-app notices. What stays is everything a salon uses — the A4 poster for the window, the printed price list for the wall, the QR image for Instagram and the Google Business Profile, the review cards for the client who says “that was exactly what I wanted”, and the runbook so the next price change is a five-minute job rather than a phone call to whoever built it.

If the salon has a guest Wi-Fi network, the Wi-Fi card comes back for the price of asking — it is one of the six, and it is generated from the same record, so the password on the card and on the page cannot disagree (the string and its traps are in the counter-card note).

Every package gets the same files: $49 is the whole kit for ten tables, $89 for thirty, $149 for a hundred and a faster first draft. The contents do not change with the price — only the count of printed cards and the revision rounds.

Doing it in one evening

1. Write the twelve lines on paper — name, who, minutes, price — from the salon's own booking tool, because that list is already the truth.
2. Decide the length rule and the colour note. One threshold a client can check in a mirror, one number, and the consultation sentence for corrections.
3. Put the eight blocks in order on the page, prices before photographs.
4. Print one A4 poster and one reception card at 100%, scan both with an iPhone and an Android from where a client actually stands.
5. Put the poster in the window, the card at reception and the sticker on one mirror — not all of them, one, and see whether the phone calls change before printing the batch.

That is the whole job: four columns, one length rule, three sizes of code and one list that all of them are generated from. It is not clever. It is the three questions answered on paper, at the size that a phone camera can read from where the client is standing.

Questions that come up

Related reading: what a salon's Instagram bio link should open, what a barbershop or salon site should cost in 2026, a nail salon's price list without a monthly fee, and the trade that sells appointments. For the code sizes on every printed piece, the millimetres guide; for a shop with no tables at all, the eight-file kit.

Or make the page first — thirty seconds, free, no account, and it stays free:

Create a page — free   See three live samples   For barbershops and salons

Sources, read on 14 November 2026. Vendor prices are list prices on each vendor's own pricing page, before tax, annual billing where the vendor states it: Linktree Pro $14 a month billed annually ($17 monthly); Squarespace Basic $19 annual ($25 monthly); Wix Light $17 on a yearly plan; Square Appointments $0 / $49 / $149 per location per month; Booksy $29.99 a month plus $20 per extra user; GlossGenius $24 a month billed annually ($28 monthly). Print geometry — the 93.0 × 127.5 mm card with 8 mm gutters and a 48 mm code, the 70 mm sticker with a 40 mm code, the A4 poster's 126 mm code, the four-module quiet zone (4.7–5.2 mm on the counter card) and the module sizes — was measured in the PDFs generated by this site's print kit, not estimated. The printer floor of about 0.17 mm per module, the four-printer-dots-per-module recommendation (0.33 mm at 300 dpi) and the four-module margin are from Denso Wave's QR FAQ; the quiet zone as four times the X-dimension also appears in GS1's 2D Barcodes at Retail Point-of-Sale Implementation Guideline (release 1.1.0, ratified December 2025). The 1:10 code-size-to-scan-distance figure is an industry rule of thumb, not part of ISO/IEC 18004. Salon practice — length surcharges with a threshold, stylist levels, colour quoted at a consultation, and a patch test 24–48 hours before a first colour service — is described as common practice rather than as a dated statistic, because no single survey is being quoted for it; a salon should print its own rule and its own number.