Congratulations to PhilipCiampa.com who went live Tuesday with their new site.  We’re very please with the way the site came out, and there’s a few features that I thought were worth pointing out here.

First off, the site uses flash, but only on the homepage.  No splash screens – after all why would we want to ask a customer to “click to enter our site” when they have already clicked to enter our site? 

One of the things many of you will note is that I’ve been railing against pictures of young people in flash on corporate homepages.  Here we use pictures of young people, because it makes the point about their business, and I think the way Jill Cole accomplished this has worked very well.

We’re using a photo gallery as a virtual tour of the salons (click the “visit our salons” link on the homepage).  It works well, although as a note to myself, I think in the future we ought to use horizontal images or vertical images, not horizontal images *and* vertical images.

You’ll rarely see an all black design coming out of Vario.  In this case, again, it works because of the nature of their business.  Not every site will work in black.

More importantly, this is just the tip of the iceberg.  There are big things to come from Philip Ciampa Salon & Day Spa soon, including the grand opening of their Saugus location.  The new site is just one piece of their puzzle.