You do
A salon's website is its portfolio, and the portfolio changes every day. If adding a photo needs a developer, the gallery is frozen at launch and the site slowly stops representing the work. The answer to "who updates the photos" has to be the salon, from a phone, in a minute, with no risk of breaking anything. Here is how a site is set up so that is true.
What a stylist can do
- Add a piece of work to the gallery: upload from their phone, pick the service and tag themselves, tick the client-consent box, save. It appears in the gallery, on the service page, on their profile.
- Replace their profile photo.
- Remove a piece they no longer want shown.
Three actions, each under a minute, from the phone they took the photo on.
What the manager can do, in addition
- Add and remove stylists, with photos.
- Reorder the gallery or pin pieces.
- Change the hero image on the home page (from a set the photographer supplied, or a new one that meets the size rules).
- Swap photos in fixed slots: the team photo, the salon exterior, the interior shots.
What stays with the developer
- Adding new photo slots to page layouts.
- Changing how the gallery is laid out or filtered.
- Anything in settings, plugins or theme.
The line is: content changes are yours; structure changes are ours.
How it is made safe
Upload rules enforced by the site. Every image uploaded is automatically resized to a maximum long edge (2000 pixels), converted to a modern format, compressed, and given the size variants the gallery needs. A stylist uploading a 6 MB phone photo produces a 200 KB web image without knowing. The site cannot be slowed by an upload because the upload cannot be huge.
Fixed slots with fixed ratios. The hero, the team photo and the interior shots are slots with a set aspect ratio. Whatever is uploaded is cropped to fit (with a focal point the uploader can set), so a portrait phone photo dropped into a landscape hero does not break the layout.
Gallery tiles cropped consistently. All gallery images display as a consistent ratio in the grid and full-size on tap, so a mix of orientations does not jumble the page.
Fields, not free placement. The uploader picks a service and a stylist from lists; they do not choose where on the page the image goes. The template does that. Nothing they do can move a Book button.
Roles. Stylists are Contributors or Authors: they can add and edit gallery items and their own profile photo, nothing else. The manager is an Editor. Nobody at the salon is an Administrator day to day.
Consent as a required field. A gallery item cannot be published without the consent box ticked. The site enforces the policy.
From Instagram
Most of the work is already on Instagram. Two options, and both are better than a live embed:
- Re-upload the best pieces to the website gallery with service and stylist tags. Five minutes a week by the manager, and the site's gallery becomes curated rather than everything.
- A server-side Instagram grid on the home page: the site fetches your latest nine posts hourly and renders them as its own sized, lazy-loaded tiles linking to Instagram. Fresh content with no third-party script and no layout shift. Set up once by the developer; then it maintains itself.
The live Instagram embed widget is avoided: it is the slowest element on most salon sites.
The routine
- Stylists: add their best piece or two each week, tagged, consented. A minute each.
- Manager: a monthly look at the gallery for anything off-brand, and a check that the team page is current.
- Quarterly: a fresh set of interior and team photos if anything has changed, or at least once a year.
- The maintenance report shows page weight monthly; if a stylist's uploads ever slip past the rules, it is caught there.
What about a photographer?
A half-day shoot at launch for the space, the team and a set of hero-quality pieces gives the site its foundation. After that, phone photos in good light are fine for the gallery; clients expect to see real work, not editorial. Rules for stylists: daylight or the salon's ring light, a plain background, hold still, five shots and keep the best.
Where this sits
Every salon website we build hands the gallery and profile photos to the salon on launch day, with the upload rules, roles and consent field doing the safety work and a two-minute recorded walkthrough showing a stylist how to add a piece from their phone. A site the team keeps fresh themselves is the only kind that still looks like the salon a year later.