Sagebrush Sites

The goal

Salons, barbers, nail studios, and spas depend on their website to turn a search or an Instagram click into a booked appointment. I wanted to launch a small web-studio brand aimed at that audience, and to build the site that sells the service as proof that I can deliver it.

What I built

• A seven-page studio site. Home, Work, Process, About, Skills, Free Website Check, and Contact, written by hand in semantic HTML, responsive CSS, and vanilla JavaScript.
• A Free Website Check offer. A page where a business owner can ask for a plain-English check of their site (speed, phone-friendliness, search basics, accessibility, and security), with a validated form that opens an email with the details filled in.
• Four concept projects. Each is a standalone live demo site with its own layout idea: Haven Hair Studio (masonry gallery), Bloom Nail Studio (bento-style gallery and pill-chip service menu), Ironclad Barber Co. (dotted-leader price ledger and scroll-snap filmstrip), and Still Water Spa (story-style sections and a calm sage palette), each with a written case study.
• A clear four-step process. Discover, Design, Build, Launch, with a promise of a clear quote before any work starts.
• Booking-platform awareness. The site speaks to linking or embedding the tools these businesses already use, such as Vagaro, Square, Fresha, and Booksy.

Decisions that mattered

• No frameworks. Hand-coded pages load fast and are easy to hand off to a small-business owner who just needs to edit text.
• Mobile-first layouts. Customers often look up a salon and book from their phone, so every page is designed at phone width first.
• Honest labelling. The Work page states plainly that the four projects are self-directed concept builds, not paid client work.
• A real brand identity, not stock imagery. The site carries a real brand logo, and the About page uses a monogram rather than a stock photo that would misrepresent a real person.
• A custom domain on free hosting. The site is served from GitHub Pages behind its own domain, so there is no hosting bill and no vendor lock-in.

What shipped

The site is live at sagebrushsites.com, with seven pages and four working concept sites, all hand-coded with no external dependencies. After launch I audited my own sites with a website-audit tool I built, then fixed what it found: text contrast, keyboard access, tap targets, search metadata, and heavier-than-needed images (now served as WebP with JPEG fallbacks).

Skills this project shows

• Semantic, accessible HTML and responsive, mobile-first CSS
• Vanilla JavaScript for interactive UI without framework overhead
• Translating a business goal (more bookings) into a site structure and process
• Deploying a site end to end: repository, hosting, DNS, and custom domain
• Auditing and fixing my own work: WCAG contrast, keyboard access, SEO basics, and image optimization