About Salon Guinea Pig

The idea for Salon Guinea Pig came to me in the summer of 2008, after reading a thread on the excellent Salon Geek website where people could post if they were happy to help other therapists out by volunteering to be "guinea pigs" for salon treatments. Soon, the thread was several pages long, making it difficult to search through to find people for a particular treatment.

Hence, I thought, what if I were to design a website where people could register as guinea pigs, and people needing guinea pigs for a particular treatment could search for people in their area that were happy to volunteer for that treatment? The result, after several evenings and weekends of geekery, is this site as you see it now.

I've now designed several websites for people in the beauty, hair and nails industries, and am now at an advanced stage with the design of my own online salon management system where people will soon be able to book salon treatments via the Web. Creating the Salon Guinea Pig site has given me the opportunity to stretch myself and learn new skills and technologies in a non-business-critical setting, which could then be refined and tested to suitable quality and confidence levels for ultimate use in a mission critical salon management system. So users of this site are guinea pigs in more ways than one!

However, please bear in mind that Salon Guinea Pig is now a very old design compared to the latest stuff I have been working on for Salon Alchemy. I really want to re-work Salon Guinea Pig to take advantage of all the extra knowledge I've since gained over the last couple of years - which will greatly improve the speed and performance of the site - and also add lots of new features to make Salon Guinea Pig a much better experience for both salon trainees and professionals needing people to practice on, and people who are interested in volunteering for treatments.

Unfortunately, this will take time - which alas means money - so please consider making a donation by PayPal towards the cost of running the Salon Guinea Pig site and adding new features, by clicking the PayPal "Donate" button at the bottom of the page.

Please see the YouTube video below for more information about the Salon Alchemy website and salon management system.