A WordPress that grew with the business, because someone maintains it

The business

GIGI Nails is a nail salon with several locations in Panama City: manicure, pedicure, gel, polygel and nail design. When we started working together, in 2022, they had a single landing page, and bookings were managed outside the website.

With more than one location and more than one person working, the website itself needed to become the place to book, with the diary built into the same site.

From a landing page to a system

There was no big project with a delivery date. There was a landing page that fell short, and from there a site that kept changing at the pace of the business: first the ability to book online, then the second branch with its own diary, then charging at booking time, then loyalty.

Each version added what the operation was asking for at that moment, on the same foundation. That is how it usually goes: a business discovers what it needs as it goes along, and it helps when the site can grow with it instead of being rebuilt every couple of years.

Why was WordPress right here?

This portfolio includes several cases of moving a client off WordPress. Here we did the opposite, and it is worth explaining why.

WordPress works well when what the business needs fits what the platform does well (content, bookings, an operation of reasonable size) and someone keeps it up to date. The trouble usually comes from the opposite: sites nobody updates, accumulating extensions nobody remembers the purpose of. For GIGI Nails it was the right tool and the simplest one to run, together with a commitment to maintain it.

What we built

• Online booking, with service, date and time, straight from the website.
• Choosing your technician. In this sector clients tend to come back for a specific person, and being able to ask for them is part of the service.
• A diary per location. Each branch with its own availability, without treading on the other or waiting for someone to coordinate centrally.
• Points-based loyalty, built on the same system that records the appointments, so the programme wouldn’t be a separate spreadsheet someone had to reconcile.

Payments: Yappy and PagueloFácil

The system charges at the moment of booking, so the gateway matters: if the charge fails, there’s no appointment. We integrated Yappy and PagueloFácil, the two most widely used payment methods in Panama. Offering the one the client already knows avoids bookings abandoned at the last step.

Much of the work is in the edge cases: what happens when a payment stays pending, when the client retries, when confirmation arrives late or arrives twice. That is why the charge was built as a replaceable part: there is one flow, and the provider plugs in behind it.

Local SEO

Beyond the system, we work on their local visibility, including optimisation of their Google Business listings.

For a salon with physical locations it is a decisive channel, because the goal is to attract new clients, and someone who doesn’t know GIGI Nails yet is unlikely to search for it by name: they will search “nails in Costa del Este” from their phone and pick from whatever appears on the map. A well-kept listing, with hours, services, photos and reviews kept current, helps win that comparison before anyone reaches the website.

And whoever does reach the website finds a place to book: the listing attracts, the site converts and the per-branch diary keeps it organised.

Maintenance and backups

We have maintained the site continuously since 2022, and it runs with automated backups.

It is the least visible part and one of the most important: a booking system is part of how the business operates. If it goes down, you don’t lose traffic; you lose appointments, and with them the trust of whoever tried to book and couldn’t. That is why automated backups aren’t a configuration detail: they are what makes it possible to get back up quickly if something fails.

A site that follows the business

What is in production at any given moment is what the business needs at that moment. Adding a feature when a branch opens and retiring it when it’s no longer needed is part of the same work: maintaining a site also means keeping up with those changes.