Natuurkappers.nl

premium salon platform and smart salon directory

For Natuurkappers.nl, Milcraft developed a comprehensive WordPress platform where visitors can find natural hairdressers and salon owners can manage their own profiles. The website was built with WordPress, Avada, ACF and a customised plugin that provides the full platform logic.

Central to this is the comprehensive salon finder. Visitors can search by location, province, distance, salon characteristics, treatments, brands and price level. The results are combined with an interactive map based on Leaflet and OpenStreetMap. In doing so, salon maps and map markers come from the same central dataset, so the list and map continue to interact logically. Confirmed results are shown on the map, while unclaimed or less certain matches can be displayed separately as “Possibly also interesting”.

Besides the general search function, the platform includes dynamic county and city pages. This also allows visitors to search locally for natural hairdressers, while at the same time the site builds up a lot of SEO value around places, provinces and treatments. New city pages can be automatically linked to the appropriate salon data.

A private account environment has been built for salon owners. There, they can manage their salon information, such as contact details, description, opening hours, photos, brands, treatments, price indication and extra visibility. Changes are not immediately put live, but go through an approval flow. Claiming existing salon listings is also part of the platform.

On the management side, a CSV import with AJAX batches has been developed. This allows large numbers of salons to be imported in a manageable way.
The site also includes links to external product feeds and responsive product carousels. This allows products from denatuurlijkekappershop.nl, for example, to be displayed in relevant places within the platform. On mobile, the presentation scales back neatly, including horizontally scrollable tabs, compact maps and carousels that adjust per screen size.

As additional support for visitors, AI-bot Amy has been added to the site. Amy helps visitors with questions about hair care, products and finding appropriate solutions. This chatbot aligns with the platform's goal of helping visitors faster, providing better guidance and, where possible, referring them to salons, products or packages.

Technically, Natuurkappers.nl is set up as a premium directory platform that goes beyond a standard WordPress website. The customised plugin includes central helpers for search logic, map data, promoted listings, salon profiles, imports, account management and product feeds. The styling has been deliberately scoped to avoid the need for global Avada customisation and keep the site maintainable.