Team Project · WooCommerce Site

The Sassy Spaw

A booking-first website for a one-pet-at-a-time grooming salon in Richmond, BC, built around its promise: "Humanity over vanity."

Visit live site
Course
Capstone Project
Team
Talia, Frances, Sara & Jake
My role
Project management, content, SEO, client tutorial
Built with
WordPress, WooCommerce, ACF, Yoast SEO
The Sassy Spaw home page: the headline Happy Pets, Happier Humans beside a photo of a smiling woman hugging a dog and a cat, with New paws? Start here and View services buttons
The home page gives new clients a clear first step: "New paws? Start here."

Overview

The Sassy Spaw started as my own business idea, from when I was a professional dog groomer and had my late Standard Poodle, Tiya. For our Capstone Project, we brought it to life as a boutique grooming salon in Richmond, BC that grooms one pet at a time. Its promise is "Humanity over vanity": a calm, unrushed groom matters more than a perfect coat.

The site had one goal: get a new client to book online, then bring them back on the Spaw Schedule, the salon's prepaid plan for regular grooms. We built it as a team of four on WordPress and WooCommerce, with every service set up as a bookable product.

What I did

  • Project management: kept four people and four areas of work (design, templates, booking and content) organised and on schedule.
  • Content: the site's copy, written in the salon's warm, slightly sassy voice while staying clear about services, prices and policies.
  • SEO: local-search page titles like "Pet Grooming in Richmond, BC", a unique meta description on every page, and Yoast SEO for canonical URLs, link previews, breadcrumbs and the XML sitemap.
  • Client tutorial: a guide that shows the client how to keep the site up to date on their own.
The Full Groom service page: a photo of a groomer clipping a Yorkie beside a Book this service form with a groomer menu, a calendar and a pet size menu
Every service books in one form: groomer, date, time, size and add-ons.
The FAQ page: a sidebar of topics and a search box beside expandable questions such as How do I book a Spaw Day?
The FAQ groups answers by topic, with search.

Inside the site

  • Booking

    Each groom is a WooCommerce product: choose a groomer, date and time, your pet's size and add-ons, then pay a 50% deposit.

  • Welcome Consultation

    Free, and required for every new pet, so they meet their groomer before the first groom.

  • Spaw Schedule

    A prepaid plan every 4, 6 or 8 weeks that saves on each visit. Members rebook with their Spaw Day code.

  • Our Team

    Profiles for five groomers, each with their own specialty, and you can pick your favourite when you book.

  • FAQ & policies

    Answers grouped from booking to at-home care, with search, plus policies every client agrees to when booking.

  • Journal

    Pet-care posts, like why matted pets get shaved and paw care in rainy Vancouver winters.

How we worked

Each of us owned one part of the site:

  • Frances led the design and front-end.
  • Sara built the templates, ACF blocks and client profiles.
  • Jake set up WooCommerce and the booking system.
  • I managed the project and handled the content, SEO and client tutorial.
The Sassy Spaw home page on a phone, with the headline, both buttons and a five-star review stacked above the hero photo
The same booking path on a phone.

What I learned

Managing a team of four showed me that most of the work happens between the tasks. Design, templates, booking and content all moved at the same time, so the hand-offs mattered as much as the parts themselves.

Doing the content and the SEO together changed how I write. Every page title and description had to say what the page is and where the salon is, in a few words, and still sound like The Sassy Spaw.

Writing the client tutorial was a good test of the whole site. When a step was hard to explain, it usually meant the editing experience could be simpler.