Brockville proved what one attraction can do to a downtown. The businesses that got the benefit were the ones somebody could find before they arrived.
Work is done remotely, and after launch monthly care covers the updates, backups and monitoring if you want it.
Building on the web since 1996, in WordPress since 2007 · accessibility built in from the first commit, AODA and WCAG 2.2 AA · WordCamp speaker at 18+ events · Fort Erie, Ontario
Brockville is the eastern end of the Thousand Islands, and I summer on the other end of that same river. If you run a business here that gets a visitor season on top of a steady local trade, this is for you.
Map of Brockville with the surrounding villages marked: Brockville, Lyn, Maitland, New Dublin, and Mallorytown. Christopher Ross builds and supports websites for businesses here, working remotely.
What the tunnel actually taught this town
The railway tunnel under downtown Brockville is the first railway tunnel built in Canada. Work started in September 1854 and the first train came through on the last day of 1860. It sat unused for a long time, and when it reopened to the public in 2017 as a free seasonal attraction, twenty five thousand people walked through it in the opening weekend alone.
What happened next is the part worth paying attention to if you trade here. New businesses opened in the core, including a brewery and a restaurant, and the ones already there saw more people through the door. A single free attraction changed the traffic pattern of a whole downtown. The businesses that converted that traffic were the ones a visitor could find, check the hours of, and decide about before they got out of the car.
Three markets in one city
- Visitors on the waterfront. The tunnel, the Aquatarium, Blockhouse Island and Hardy Park bring people downtown with an afternoon to fill and a phone in their hand. They are deciding between you and whatever else is within a short walk. Hours, location and one clear reason to choose you will settle it.
- Steady local trade. Brockville does not empty out the way the smaller river towns do, which is an advantage worth using. A site that serves residents in February as well as visitors in July is doing two jobs, and it usually needs pages for each rather than one page trying to speak to both.
- Trades and services across Leeds and Grenville. Your customers are in Lyn, Maitland, Mallorytown, New Dublin and Athens as much as in Brockville, and they search by those names. The single most valuable sentence on a trades site is the one almost nobody writes: which communities you serve and how far you travel.
Working with someone who is not down the road
I work from Fort Erie, and I would rather say so up front. The build is done remotely, which for a website is the better arrangement anyway: you pay for the work instead of the driving, and the site goes up on a private staging link while it is being built, so you are reacting to real pages rather than approving a picture of one.
Where a Brockville business gets known
No arrangement, no referral fee, nothing in it for me. These are simply where a business here gets found and gets known locally, and being listed and active in them does more for a small business than most of what gets sold as marketing. Talk to them before you talk to me.
- Brockville and District Chamber of Commerce (opens in a new tab). The room, and the advocacy, for businesses across the area.
- Downtown Brockville (opens in a new tab). The core that the railway tunnel reshaped. If you trade downtown, they are already promoting the traffic you want.
- Brockville Tourism (opens in a new tab). Where the visitor-facing listings live, including the tunnel and the waterfront attractions.
What to ask before you hire anybody, me included
Ask who owns it when the work is done. The honest answer is you: the domain, the hosting, the content, all in your name. You want the site to keep working whatever happens between you and whoever built it.
Ask whether another developer could pick it up. A site built on standard WordPress can be handed to any competent developer if life happens to the one who built it. Worth confirming early, while it is still an easy question.
Ask what happens after launch. Plugins update, browsers change, and security matters. You do not have to hire locally to get straight answers to any of this, and you should ask it of whoever you choose.
Common questions
How much does a website cost in Brockville?
Most local builds start at $2,500 CAD. It is a fixed price agreed against a written scope before the work begins, so the number does not move once you have said yes to it. What changes the figure is how many pages you need and how much of the writing and photography you already have. You get a real number after a twenty-minute call.
Should my site target Brockville or the wider county?
Both, and the order matters. Say clearly where you are, then say just as clearly which communities you serve and how far you travel. Businesses here lose more work to being unfindable in Mallorytown or Athens than to being insufficiently Brockville.
Tell me about your project
The fastest way to a straight answer. Tell me what you need and I will reply within a business day, honestly, even when the answer is that I am not the right fit.
Prefer to talk? Call 647-641-0643
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