Free tools to hand a small-business client instead of building them a widget

Added by the archive's custodians, November 2026

This site preserves the weblog of 36 Degrees Design, a freelance web-design practice in Coventry and Liverpool, as it stood between 2005 and 2008. One of its February 2006 posts announced version three of the site's own Mac desktop widget, which added a search box on the front and recent Flickr photos on the back. The post invited readers to take the widget apart and make their own. This note was written in 2026 by the people who look after the archive and picks up the same small-tool theme for a present-day reader. The original author had no part in it.

Anyone who builds websites for small businesses will know the request. A salon, barber or café owner wants opening hours on the site, a price list that is easy to change and some way of selling gift vouchers before Christmas. Each one sounds like a small job. Built as a custom widget, each one also becomes something you look after: a plugin to update, a form to keep spam out of, and a phone call every time the hours change for a bank holiday.

Often the better move is to point the client to a free tool they can use on their own, and keep the website for the things only a website can do. Three that each do one job:

Opening hours

Moshee, which makes a booking app for salons, has an opening hours card maker that runs in the browser with no sign-up. The client sets their usual week, can add a lunch break or mark a day "By appointment", and saves the card for an Instagram grid post, a story, an A4 PDF for the door, or a web image and a snippet of code to paste into an HTML block. A separate Christmas option covers the days that are different and the day they are back.

Price lists

Moshee's price list maker works the same way. The client ticks the services they offer, types the prices and saves a grid image (1080 × 1350), a story (1080 × 1920), a print-ready A4 PDF and a web version. The page says the web code can go into Wix, GoDaddy or Squarespace. The draft stays on the phone or computer it was made on, so next year's price rise is a quick edit rather than a job for you.

Gift vouchers

For December there is a free gift voucher template. The client fills in an amount or a treatment, who it is for and when it runs out, then sends it as a picture on WhatsApp or prints it. There is also a sheet of blank vouchers, three to a page, each with its own number. The tool makes the voucher and that is all; the business takes the money in its usual way and keeps its own note of which numbers have been sold and used.

Before you hand them over

All three pages say that nothing typed leaves the device, and that the only thing counted is how many get made and saved. Each output carries a small "Made with Moshee" line at the bottom, which is worth mentioning to a client who cares about that. The tools are written with hair and beauty in mind, though the voucher page says it works for any small business.

A client who would rather design everything from scratch can do the same with a general design tool such as Canva, or a template in a word processor, at the cost of more fiddling. Either way the website ends up with an image or a pasted block, and the client can change their own hours without waiting for anyone.