02 Services

WordPress Services for Media, Education & Government

Build, support, or train. The 20-minute call is free, and if it's not a fit you'll hear that on the call rather than in a proposal.

Recent client work

Engagements billed at $275/hr CAD for senior development.

Christopher Ross

I'm Christopher Ross.

19 years of WordPress for media, education, and government teams. WordPress.org contributor. Based in Fort Erie, Ontario. About →

Rates and fixed-scope diagnostics

Senior development $275/hr CAD Advisory & architecture $425/hr CAD Site audits Free · $500 · $1k · $2.2k WP-LMS review $4,950 · 7 days

Hourly rates anchor scoped work. Every build engagement includes a level-matched audit in its price; book one of the audit tiers below if you want a written read first. Book the discovery call.

02 Pricing bands

What each engagement costs

Bands, not quotes. Build prices include a level-matched site audit (free discovery, $500 pre-check, $1,000 mid audit, or $2,200 deep audit) — audits booked stand-alone credit dollar-for-dollar against the build that follows. Final scope comes out of the discovery call.

Site audits
Free · $500 · $1k · $2.2k
Discovery call to deep audit; credits against build.
Owner-Run Sites
$2.5k–$17k+
One owner, one operator — customer is the audience.
Team-Run Sites
$7.5k–$24k+
Editorial workflow, governance, real integrations.
Newspaper sites
$8k–$75k+
Local Leader through National Influencer.
E-commerce sites
$6.5k–$60k+
Launch shop through national brand.
Learning Websites
$5k–$30k+
K-12 through accredited post-secondary.
Curriculum development
$4.5k–$40k+
Pilot course through enterprise program.
WordPress specialties
$825–$22k
Speed, security, migration, plugin development.
Maintenance
$650–$4k/mo
Essential, Active, or Concierge care.
SEO retainers
$1.2k–$5k/mo
Oversight, standard, or enterprise.
Social Media
$1.5k–$7.5k/mo
Presence, Active, or Brand-led.
Training & enablement
From $1.8k/day
Live delivery for teams of six to twelve.

About this archive

WordPress builds, e-commerce, newspaper sites, learning websites, technical SEO, maintenance, social media, and curriculum design. From owner-run small businesses to media, education, and government teams at scale. I work from Fort Erie, Ontario; most clients are remote across Canada and the US.

Every build engagement includes a level-matched site audit in the price. Paid audits are also available stand-alone — the fee credits in full against the build if you proceed within 90 days. Every engagement starts with a 20-minute discovery call to map the problem to the right tier; if the fit is not there, you will hear that on the call rather than in a follow-up proposal.

Teams I've built for

  • M.L. Campbell (Sherwin-Williams) WordPress platform and LMS delivery work for training operations at enterprise scale.
  • Sayerlack Ongoing site support and technical delivery for a live production-facing brand surface.
  • Government of Ontario Public-sector web and training-adjacent delivery where accountability and documentation are mandatory.
Christopher Ross

Your consultant

Christopher Ross

I lead the work personally, from discovery and architecture through delivery and handoff.

  • Twenty-two years delivering training and nineteen years building with WordPress.
  • Direct delivery for media, education, and federal government programs.

Available Services

Build engagements

Fixed-band project engagements with a level-matched site audit included in the build price — the discovery call decides which tier and which audit depth fits the work.

Owner-Run Sites

For businesses where one owner, or a working pair, runs the site and the customer is the audience — the site sells you, books your work, and gets out of the way.

Same architecture, sized to where you are. Move up when you are ready.

  1. Start here

    From $2,500

    Start Here — Owner-Run Sites

    Owner-operators escaping Squarespace, Wix, or Webflow before renewal

    A real WordPress build on a stack you actually own. Five core pages, your brand applied properly, contact form wired to your inbox, analytics live. Live in three to four weeks so the renewal email lands on something you control.

    See Start Here

  2. Tailored start

    From $3,500

    Start Here, Custom — Owner-Run Sites

    Owners who outgrew templates and need a build shaped around them

    A custom homepage structure, two service templates, and SEO basics done by hand — schema, metadata, sitemap, redirects from the old URLs. Built so the site reads like you wrote it, not like a theme demo.

    See Start Here, Custom

  3. Grow into it

    From $6,000

    Build Your Future — Owner-Run Sites

    Owners running the business while the site quietly leaks leads

    A site engineered to grow with you: lead capture you can actually read, a blog scaffold your team can post into, performance budget under 1.5s LCP, and a 90-day check-in so the gains compound instead of decay. Most owners stay here.

    See Build Your Future

  4. Scale up

    From $17,000

    Unlimited Growth — Owner-Run Sites

    Operators where downtime, slow pages, or stale content costs revenue

    Multi-template architecture, staging environment, edge caching, and a monthly retainer slot for the inevitable "the form broke during a campaign" Tuesday. Built so a junior on your team can update copy without breaking the layout or the schema.

    See Unlimited Growth

Team-Run Sites

For organisations where several contributors publish, edit, or operate the site every week — the build has to keep up with the team behind it as well as the audience in front of it.

Same architecture, sized to where you are. Move up when you are ready.

  1. Start here

    From $7,500

    Team Site — Team-Run Sites

    Teams of three to ten with editorial workflow, contributor governance, and one or two line-of-business integrations

    The site has more than one person logging in every week. That changes what it has to be: who can publish, who can review, who can edit a colleague's draft, what fields are required before a post can go live. We design that workflow first — roles, fields, taxonomy, the difference between draft and review in your house — then build the theme around it. CRM, mailing list, or one scheduling tool is wired in at the same time, not bolted on later.

    See Team Site

  2. Scale up

    From $24,000

    Custom WordPress Development for Editorial, Training, and Application Builds

    Media, education, and government teams running WordPress as production infrastructure with procurement scrutiny

    WordPress at the scale where it is no longer "the website" — it is a publishing platform with assigned editors, contributor onboarding cycles, integrations to CRM and SSO and reporting, accessibility commitments that come from procurement, and uptime expectations that come from finance. The brief is content modelling, role design, integration architecture, performance against Core Web Vitals, WCAG 2.1 AA, and the documentation a serious team can actually run from. Built so the next developer who picks it up can read what you bought.

    Recent: M.L. Campbell Website

    See Scaled Team Site

Newspaper sites

Local Leader, Regional News, National Influencer — newsroom builds sized to circulation, ad model, and editorial workflow, from a weekly community paper to daily-news production infrastructure.

Same architecture, sized to where you are. Move up when you are ready.

  1. Start here

    From $8,000

    Local Leader — Newspaper Sites

    Community publishers and weekly local papers running a digital edition alongside print

    A digital edition that supports the print operation rather than competing with it. Section structure that maps to the masthead, contributor accounts for your reporters and the freelancers you actually use, a newsletter sign-up that feeds the list you already mail, and obituaries and classifieds handled like they belong on a real paper's site. Built so your one digital editor is not fighting the CMS to get the Tuesday edition online.

    See Local Leader

  2. Grow into it

    From $20,000

    Regional News — Newspaper Sites

    Regional publishers with multiple titles, a working ad model, and a digital subscriber base worth protecting

    The shape changes when there are several mastheads under one owner and digital revenue is actually on the line. Cross-title syndication so a regional story runs in three papers without duplicate-content penalties, ad-stack integration that respects the deals your sales team has already sold, metered or registration-walled access tuned to your subscriber funnel, and a search experience that does justice to the archive. Editorial governance designed so the editors at each title keep their voice without each managing a separate CMS in their head.

    See Regional News

  3. Scale up

    From $75,000

    Newspaper Website Development

    Newsrooms running WordPress as core publishing infrastructure for daily-news editorial at scale

    Daily-news editorial WordPress at the scale where the CMS is core infrastructure — ad-stack integration, subscription mechanics, syndication, contributor governance across markets, and the operational reliability of running publishing software in production. Built for newsrooms whose business depends on getting this right: assignment desk, embargo handling, breaking-news workflow, paywall and metered access tied to your subscriber system, Google Ad Manager and header bidding wired in to the templates rather than dropped into the header, archive search that scales past a million posts, and the documentation and handover a working production team requires.

    See National Influencer

E-commerce sites

WooCommerce builds sized to where the store actually is — a fifty-SKU launch, an operating store adding wholesale or subscriptions, or a national brand running commerce as one channel inside a larger operation.

Same architecture, sized to where you are. Move up when you are ready.

  1. Start here

    From $6,500

    Starting Out — E-commerce Sites

    New WooCommerce shops launching with up to 50 SKUs and a single shipping region

    A real store, sized to a real launch — not the maximalist plugin stack that breaks on the first Black Friday. Product pages that read like product pages, a checkout that actually works on a phone, payments via Stripe or PayPal set up in your name, shipping rules for one region, and tax handled correctly for where you ship. You can add products, edit copy, and run a sale yourself afterwards. If your first hundred orders come through this site, it will hold.

    See Starting Out

  2. Grow into it

    From $15,000

    Expanding — E-commerce Sites

    Operating stores adding product lines, fulfilment integrations, or new payment paths the original build did not anticipate

    The original store works. The next move doesn't fit inside it — wholesale alongside retail, a subscription product alongside one-time purchases, a fulfilment integration with ShipStation or a 3PL, a tax engine for multi-province or cross-border sales, an inventory feed from a supplier. We map what's there, what's changing, and what needs to be rebuilt versus extended, then ship a store that handles the next year of growth without a second rebuild in nine months.

    See Expanding

  3. Scale up

    From $60,000

    Ecommerce Website Development on WooCommerce

    National brands and multi-channel retailers on WooCommerce with 100+ SKUs, multi-currency, and fulfilment complexity

    National-brand ecommerce on WooCommerce when the storefront is one channel in a larger commerce operation — ERP or PIM integration as the product source of truth, multi-currency with locale-appropriate tax and shipping, fulfilment across regional warehouses or 3PLs, a customer service surface that talks to your support stack, and a performance budget that holds during campaign traffic. Built with the merchandising team in mind alongside the customer, so the people running promotions and the people running operations are using one system rather than three.

    See National

Learning Websites

K-12 through post-secondary — public-facing programme sites, registration flows, and the LMS plumbing that has to talk to whatever your registrar or training operation already runs on.

Same architecture, sized to where you are. Move up when you are ready.

  1. Start here

    From $5,000

    Junior Learner — Learning Websites

    K-12 schools, tutoring programmes, and small training providers with a public site and light course delivery

    A school or tutoring site that does the public-facing job properly — staff bios, programme pages, registration forms, parent communications — with a light LMS bolted on for the handful of courses or resources you actually deliver online. No enterprise platform you cannot afford to maintain. The teachers can update their pages. The office can publish a closure notice. Course content lives where it belongs without you paying for a Moodle install you do not have anyone to run.

    See Junior Learner

  2. Grow into it

    From $15,000

    LMS development

    Training organisations operating LearnDash, LifterLMS, Sensei, or Moodle alongside their public WordPress site

    You run actual courses for actual learners and the LMS is doing real work — enrolment flows, progress tracking, certificates, integrations with the CRM or membership system the org runs on. This engagement picks the platform on the merits (or works with the one you have already chosen), models the courses correctly, designs the learner and instructor experience for the audience you actually serve, and ships an LMS your staff can administer without a vendor on speed-dial.

    See Senior Solution

  3. Scale up

    From $30,000

    Post Secondary — Learning Websites

    Colleges, universities, and accredited post-secondary providers with curriculum review processes and LMS at institutional scale

    Post-secondary delivery where the curriculum answers to an accreditor, the LMS connects to a SIS, and accessibility is not optional — WCAG 2.1 AA and AODA documented at the artefact level. Programme architecture and course catalogue modelled to how your registrar actually thinks, SSO with your campus identity provider, SCORM and xAPI delivery for content authored elsewhere, and reporting your programme reviewers can read. Designed with the academic operation in mind, not retrofitted from a marketing template.

    See Post Secondary

WordPress specialty engagements

Targeted technical work on an existing WordPress site — speed optimisation when Core Web Vitals are slipping, code-level security review when a scanner is not enough, rank-preserving migrations, and purpose-built plugins for the gaps the .org repo does not cover. Four parallel specialties, not a tier ladder.

Same architecture, sized to where you are. Move up when you are ready.

  1. Start here

    From $825

    WordPress Speed Optimization

    WordPress sites failing Core Web Vitals with measurable load-time problems on the templates that drive traffic

    Core Web Vitals improvement, image pipeline, caching, and hosting configuration for WordPress sites that are too slow to rank or convert. Measurable improvements — not just a score tweak.

    See speed optimization

  2. Tailored start

    From $1,375

    WordPress Security & Hardening

    WordPress sites carrying real stakes — membership, media, e-commerce, government — that need code-level review beyond plugin scanners

    Malware cleanup, plugin audit, user permission review, and server-level hardening for WordPress sites. Systematic security improvement for organizations that cannot afford downtime or data exposure.

    See security & hardening

  3. Grow into it

    From $1,375

    WordPress Migration

    Rank-preserving migrations from Squarespace, Wix, Drupal, a broken WordPress install, or host-to-host moves where the SEO equity has to survive

    Safe, rank-preserving migrations from Squarespace, Wix, Drupal, or a broken WordPress install. Content, redirects, SEO signals, and media — all accounted for before the new site goes live.

    See migration

  4. Scale up

    From $2,750

    Custom WordPress Plugin Development

    Sites that have exhausted the .org repo and need a purpose-built plugin written to WordPress Coding Standards for a five-year maintenance horizon

    Purpose-built WordPress plugins for integrations, workflows, and features that off-the-shelf plugins cannot deliver cleanly. Built to WordPress coding standards — no bloat, no plugin dependencies.

    See plugin development

Ongoing partnerships

Monthly partnerships billed in 30-day cycles. Cancel any month, no minimum term; the right tier is whichever one matches the real response window your site needs.

Maintenance

Predictable monthly care so a working site stays a working site — three tiers from essential upkeep to mission-critical concierge with same-day senior response.

Same architecture, sized to where you are. Move up when you are ready.

  1. Start here

    From $650/mo

    WordPress Maintenance and Support: Predictable Monthly Care

    Live WordPress sites that need predictable monthly upkeep without a full retainer relationship

    Updates, backups, uptime monitoring, and a senior pair of eyes on the security log every month. Done quietly. If something breaks during a routine update I roll it back and tell you what happened. One small content edit a month included — change a phone number, swap a headshot, fix a typo. Anything bigger gets quoted before I touch it so you are never surprised by an invoice.

    See essential care

  2. Grow into it

    From $1,800/mo

    Active Care — Maintenance

    Operating sites with regular minor work and a faster response window than monthly check-ins allow

    Everything in Essential, plus a working budget for the small jobs that come up every month — a new landing page, a form change, a plugin swap, a content type tweak. Two-business-day response on anything that is not on fire, same-day on anything that is. The right tier when the site is actively earning and you want a known person picking up the phone rather than opening a ticket with a queue.

    See active care

  3. Scale up

    From $4,000/mo

    Concierge Care — Maintenance

    Mission-critical sites where downtime, regression, or a slow response carries a material business cost

    Senior-level monthly retainer for sites where the cost of a four-hour outage is more than the cost of the engagement. Same-day response in business hours, on-call for genuine production incidents, monthly planning conversation with whoever owns the site internally, and a standing block of senior hours each month for whatever the site needs — a performance pass, a refactor, an integration upgrade. The right tier for newsrooms, ecommerce sites in season, and operational platforms where the site is not a marketing surface, it is the product.

    See concierge care

SEO retainers

Technical SEO from oversight-only audit-light to multi-property enterprise — audits feed implementation, implementation feeds reporting, reporting feeds the next month's decisions.

Same architecture, sized to where you are. Move up when you are ready.

  1. Start here

    From $1,200/mo

    Audit-Light SEO — SEO Retainers

    Smaller sites that need technical SEO oversight from a senior practitioner but not a full implementation retainer

    Monthly diagnostic SEO without the agency overhead — I look at the data, name what's moving, flag what's breaking, and write you a short note your developer or maintenance partner can act on. No keyword spreadsheets, no link-building scheme. The right tier for a site that ranks well enough today and needs someone watching it so it stays that way.

    See audit-light SEO

  2. Grow into it

    From $3,000/mo

    Technical SEO Services — Audits, Implementation, Monthly Retainers

    Sites with rankings to protect, a decision-maker who can act on the audit, and a real implementation surface

    Technical SEO at the level where the audit feeds implementation and implementation feeds the next month's reporting — Core Web Vitals, indexation, internal linking, schema, content gaps that matter, and the integrations between SEO data and the editorial calendar. Monthly working session with whoever runs the site, written deliverables your team can hand to a developer or maintenance partner, and visible movement in the metrics that actually correlate with revenue for your business.

    See standard SEO

  3. Scale up

    From $5,000/mo

    Enterprise SEO — SEO Retainers

    Multi-property publishers, large ecommerce operations, and enterprise marketing teams with ongoing implementation capacity

    Enterprise SEO where there are several properties in the portfolio, an in-house dev team that needs technical specifications rather than recommendations, and a reporting cadence that goes to people who do not work on the site day-to-day. Programme-level work: site architecture across properties, migration risk management, log-file analysis where it earns its keep, schema strategy at scale, and the senior judgement calls that an in-house lead needs an outside peer to validate before committing the team.

    See enterprise SEO

Training engagements

Live instructor-led delivery for teams of six to twelve, curriculum design from single course to full program-scale, and speaking engagements on request — one practitioner, one method, one accountability surface.

  1. Teams of six to twelve who need to change how they work after the session — not sit through one

    From $1,800/day

    Training and enablement

    Live instructor-led training on WordPress, Microsoft Office, or operational software your team actually runs on. Built around your install, your governance rules, your file conventions — not a generic walkthrough. The day is exercises and applied work, not slides; participants leave with reference materials they can use the next morning. $1,800/day remote, $2,250/day onsite. Up to twelve participants. The format choice is logistics, not quality.

Curriculum development

Instructional design from a single pilot course to a full program-scale curriculum — competency mapping, assessment blueprints, SCORM and xAPI delivery, and the documentation that holds up when a learner challenges a result.

Same architecture, sized to where you are. Move up when you are ready.

  1. Start here

    From $4,500

    Pilot Curriculum — Curriculum Development

    Programmes building a single course or module that has to hold up under review

    One course, designed once, audit-ready. Competency mapping with your SMEs, an assessment blueprint that does what an assessment is supposed to do, storyboards your reviewers can read, and SCORM or xAPI packaging for whatever LMS you run. Priced per finished hour because "a course" is not a unit of work — a twenty-minute compliance refresher and a four-hour certification are very different jobs. Designed to defend, not just to engage.

    See Pilot Curriculum

  2. Grow into it

    From $15,000

    Program Curriculum — Curriculum Development

    Training programmes building a multi-module course with assessment, accessibility, and pilot evaluation built in

    A program of several connected modules sharing a competency framework, an assessment system, and accessibility commitments documented at the artefact level. Designed with the cohort experience in mind — sequencing, scaffolding, where the assessment lands and what it actually measures — and built so a contracted facilitator or an in-house instructor can deliver from the same materials with consistent outcomes. WCAG 2.1 AA and AODA designed in from the outline, not retrofitted at QA.

    See Program Curriculum

  3. Scale up

    From $40,000

    Enterprise Curriculum — Curriculum Development

    Enterprise L&D and accredited training providers building a full curriculum with competency mapping, multi-course delivery, and validation

    Full program-scale curriculum where the deliverable is a competency framework, a multi-course delivery system, an assessment programme with defensible scoring and item analysis, and the validation evidence a regulator or accreditor expects to see. The work runs over months with named SMEs, scheduled review cycles, pilot-cohort data feeding revision, and design-rationale documentation that ships with the package. Built for programmes whose curriculum has to survive an audit, a public-sector review, or a learner challenge — not just a launch announcement.

    See Enterprise Curriculum

  1. WordCamps, association programmes, and L&D leads booking a senior practitioner for a working keynote or session

    On request

    Speaking

    Keynotes and conference sessions on WordPress in production, instructional design that survives audit, and what nineteen years of paid WordPress work has taught me about the gap between what gets sold and what gets shipped. Topics scoped to your audience — owner-operators, in-house teams, post-secondary L&D, or the WordPress practitioner community itself. Fee on request based on travel, prep, and whether the session is keynote, workshop, or panel.

Common questions

How does the discovery call work?

Twenty minutes on a call. You describe the situation, I tell you which engagement fits and roughly what the band looks like. No prep needed; no slide deck; no proposal afterwards. The discovery call is the free entry to the 4-tier audit ladder — if a paid audit is the right next step we set it up on the same call. If the fit is not there, you will hear that directly rather than in a follow-up sales pitch. Book the discovery call →

What is the difference between Owner-Run Sites and Team-Run Sites?

Who logs in to the site in a normal week is the question. Owner-Run Sites are for businesses where one owner, or a working pair, manages the site and the customer is the audience — the site sells you, books your work, and gets out of the way. Team-Run Sites are for organisations where several contributors publish, edit, or operate the site every week and the build has to keep up with the team behind it as well as the audience in front of it. If you have a team of three or more, contributors you do not personally manage, a membership, or content that needs governance — you are Team-Run, even if it feels owner-run.

How do the four audit tiers work?

Four paid options, scaling by depth. A free 20-minute discovery call to figure out which conversation you are actually having. A $500 pre-check with a 2-page written read on headline risks. A $1,000 mid audit with a 10–15 page diagnostic and a 30-minute debrief call. A $2,200 deep audit with a 30–50 page report covering architecture, performance, accessibility, integrations, and a written risk register. Any paid audit fee credits in full against a build engagement booked within 90 days of report delivery. A level-matched audit comes free with every build — the paid ladder is for buyers who want diagnostic work before deciding whether or what to build.

We already have a developer — why hire you?

For the work in-house developers are not set up to do or do not love doing: paid audits at four tiers ($500 through $2,200), platform migration scoping, performance triage, accessibility remediation, and second-opinion architecture reviews where an outside senior pair of eyes saves the team from validating their own decisions. Every audit is documented so your team owns the result afterwards — no lock-in, no retainer obligation. If the gap is steady upkeep rather than a project, see Maintenance at $650/mo and up.

What does a typical project look like?

Scoped against a price band — never an open-ended hourly. Discovery call → level-matched audit (free, $500, $1,000, or $2,200 depending on scope) → written scope with a fixed tier in the band → delivery in weeks, not quarters. The audit fee credits against the build if you proceed within 90 days; a level-matched audit is included in every build price. Use the WordPress Project Scope Estimator to land in the right tier before the call, or skip it and we will figure it out together in twenty minutes.

Do you work on sites built by other developers?

Yes — audit and remediation work on existing sites is a large part of the practice. Most of those engagements start with the $2,200 deep audit so we both understand what is there before anyone commits to a build. The $1,000 mid audit is the right depth when you have already named the issues and need order-of-operations on the fixes. The discovery call is the right place to figure out which tier fits.

Do you work with clients outside the Niagara region?

Yes. Build, audit, and SEO work is fully remote; clients are based across Canada and the United States. Onsite training and onsite delivery are limited to the Niagara region — remote training runs across Canada and beyond. See Training and enablement for delivery options and rates.

How does the senior rate compare with agency pricing?

The headline number on an agency proposal is the developer hour. The all-in number adds the producer, the account manager, the designer, and the rework cycle when a brief drifts. On my side, you talk to the senior doing the work, scope is fixed against a band, and there is no context-switching premium when the brief shifts mid-project. Most engagements come out flat or cheaper all-in than the agency equivalent, and the calendar time is consistently shorter.