Somewhere on your website there’s a line that isn’t true any more, and you’ve been working around it for a while now. You tell people on the phone to ignore what it says online. Every time you say it, you think you should really get that sorted out one of these days.
That’s the job I want on this page. Shops, yards, contractors, garden centres, repair places, anybody around Niagara Falls with a truck out back and a counter out front. If that’s your business, this page is written for you.
The part that actually bothers you
It isn’t that the site looks dated. You could live with dated. What bothers you is that you can’t reach into it. Somebody built it, that somebody moved on, and now a two-word change means tracking down a person, explaining what you want, waiting, and hoping.
Whoever built it did the job they were asked to do. Most websites get built to be handed over and then left alone, and that choice almost never gets explained to the person who ends up living with it.
Think about the chalkboard by your till against a printed sign you had made at a shop. The chalkboard you fix in ten seconds with your sleeve. The printed sign looks better, and it’s also the reason you’re still advertising last spring’s price, because changing it means a phone call and a week of waiting. Most websites end up built like the printed sign. Yours doesn’t have to be.
What you’ll be able to change yourself
When I hand a site over, you can change your hours, your prices, and the photos of what’s on the lot this week, from your phone, without calling me first.
I’ll sit down with you once and show you how it works. It takes about twenty minutes, and you don’t have to memorise any of it, because I write the steps down in plain words and leave them with you. Whoever does your books can follow the same page.
If something breaks, or there’s a change you’d rather hand off, you call me and I do it. You’ll be calling me because you want to, not because you’re stuck.
The other half of that is being findable. When somebody two concessions over types your trade and your town into their phone, your name should come up with the right hours attached to it. That part is ordinary work, and I’ve laid out what usually goes into it on the local web presence page.
What it costs, and how I get to the number
My rate is $275 an hour, Canadian. The rate is the same whether I’m building a site from scratch or fixing the one you’ve already got. Most of what I build for a shop or a yard lands between $2,500 and $5,000.
Before any work starts, I put a fixed number on the job and you approve it. You pay that number. If the work turns out bigger than I judged, that part is mine to absorb, because I was the one who was supposed to know. If you decide halfway through that you want something added, I’ll tell you what it costs before I touch it.
I spell that out because of the worry I hear most often, which is the bill that keeps arriving after you thought the job was finished. That doesn’t happen here.
You’ll also get told, honestly, when a small repair is all the job calls for. Plenty of the sites I look at need an afternoon of work and a way for the owner to get in, and I’d rather sell you the afternoon.
Who you’d actually be dealing with
Me. I live in Fort Erie, about twenty minutes from the Falls. I’ve been building things for the web since 1996 and working in WordPress since 2007. There are twenty-one free tools with my name on them that other people in this trade use, and I speak at WordCamps, which are the conferences where people who build these things go to compare notes.
The part that matters more day to day is that when you call, you get me, and I’m close enough to drive over when driving over is what the job needs.
I write about what’s going on around here too. When people started worrying about the Fort Erie data centre, I went and found out what was actually on file with the Town, because the facts were hard to come by and the rumours weren’t. It’s the same habit I bring to a website: find out what’s true, then say it in words you’d use yourself.
If you run a law office or a clinic, you want the other page
There’s a second Niagara Falls page on this site, website design in Niagara Falls, written for the professional side of town. Law offices, medical practices, engineering and consulting firms, the organisations with a few people in the room for every decision. Longer timelines, and a different set of worries. If that’s your world, go there and you’ll get a straighter answer than this page gives you.
The tourism operators along the strip have their own trade and they know it well. It’s just a different trade from yours, and from mine.
This page stays with the counter-and-truck end of Niagara Falls.
If any of this sounds like where you’re sitting, send me a note and tell me what’s wrong with the site you’ve got now. I’ll tell you whether it’s a small repair or a rebuild, and roughly what each one would run, before you’ve spent a dollar with me.