Website design and development for businesses ready to upgrade from a brochure into a site that actively earns its keep — from $3,500 starter sites to $56,000 custom builds.
Recent work: Sherwin-Williams · M.L. Campbell · Sayerlack · canada.com on WordPress VIP
Practitioner context: on the open web since 1996, working professionally since 1998, and on WordPress since 2007.
Most businesses I take on come in with the same problem stated different ways: “our website doesn’t reflect where we are now,” “we built it ourselves and outgrew it,” or “we paid an agency twenty grand and got something that doesn’t convert.” The work splits naturally into three tiers based on what the site is being asked to do. A focused starter site for a new venture or freelancer needs different decisions than a 25-page conversion-tuned business site, which needs different decisions than a custom-coded site with integrations and editorial workflow. Each tier has a clear deliverable, a clear timeline, and a price that reflects the scope of the actual problem.
A redesign that doesn’t change conversion is a redesign that costs a lot of money to produce the same outcome with newer typography.
Who this is for
- ✅ Established businesses where the website is part of how customers find or evaluate you — and the gap between current performance and what’s possible is large enough to justify the spend.
- ✅ Startups past initial product-market fit that are ready to invest in a real web presence rather than another templated landing page.
- ✅ Existing sites that are functional but underperforming — slow, hard to update, missing the conversion plumbing that actually moves numbers.
- ❌ Brand-new businesses still validating the offer. A focused single-page site or a Squarespace template gets you to validation faster than commissioning a build.
The six things every good website does
Most of what’s broken on a website is invisible until you sit beside someone who’s never seen it before and watch them try to use it. Six things show up over and over, regardless of industry.
The first thing visitors see
When someone lands on your website, they’re holding a question: “do these people do the thing I need, for someone like me?” The big headline at the top of the page should answer that question in one plain sentence. Three seconds in, a visitor either keeps reading or doesn’t, and most sites lose that moment because the headline is a slogan instead of a real answer.
The things that make a visitor believe you’re real
Stock photos of glass office towers and silhouetted handshakes have to go. In their place: actual client names when those clients give permission, careful descriptions when they don’t (“a Canadian university with 8,000 students”), real photos of the people the buyer would actually work with, real cities, real numbers with real sources behind them. A buyer reading a website is essentially trying to figure out whether the business is real or just a polished façade — and what convinces them is the small, specific stuff.
The “what should I do next” question, answered
Every page should have an obvious primary action — book a call, request a quote, buy the product, download the resource — visible without scrolling, even on a phone. And there should be a quieter alternative for the visitor who isn’t ready for the primary action but would happily take a smaller step. Some buyers are calendar people. Some are email people. Forcing one to behave like the other costs you whichever half doesn’t fit.
The way the website talks
The way a website sounds should match the way the person behind it actually talks. Most sites fail this in one direction: they sound like they were written by a committee that nobody invited the owner to. I write in plain first-person when that’s honest, “we” only when there genuinely is a team, and concrete words instead of vague ones.
How it behaves on a phone
Most prospects size you up on their phone before they ever open a laptop. That means buttons big enough to tap with a thumb, forms that don’t ask for a fax number in 2026, the primary action staying with the visitor as they scroll instead of disappearing into the menu, and a navigation that collapses cleanly on small screens without burying the way to get in touch.
How fast the page actually loads
The pages that matter most — the ones a buyer lands on from a Google search — should load in under three seconds on a phone. Full stop. Faster pages rank better in Google, and faster pages turn more visitors into action, and those two effects multiply on top of each other. A site that loads in two seconds doesn’t just outrank one that loads in four; it gets more of the same traffic to actually do something.
If your current site is doing three of those six well, the right call is usually to refine what’s there. One or none, and you’re looking at a rebuild. Two is the conversation worth having.
Tiers and what each one builds
I bill at $275 an hour. The tier you land on reflects the scale of the problem the site has to solve, not the rate. Three tiers cover most engagements:
If you’d like a faster read on which tier your project sits in before you book a call, the WordPress Project Scope Estimator is eight questions and lands on the same numbers — useful as a sanity check on a brief, or as a way to walk into the discovery call already in roughly the right neighbourhood.
| Investment | Hours | What this tier builds |
|---|---|---|
| $3,500–$6,800 | 10–25 | Starter site. A focused single-page site or up-to-five-page small business site. Static, fast, professional, ready to grow into. Best for freelancers, new ventures, and businesses validating an offer before scaling spend. |
| $6,800–$20,000 | 25–75 | Business site. A 10–25-page site with conversion paths designed in, basic SEO plumbing, and an editorial system the team can actually run. The most common engagement — covers most established small and mid-sized businesses. |
| $20,000–$56,000 | 75–200 | Custom build. Custom-coded site with integrations (CRM, e-commerce, membership, learning platform, custom workflows), full editorial workflow, multi-author governance, and a performance budget that actually gets enforced. Best for established businesses where the site is core operational infrastructure. |
What the price covers, regardless of tier
I plan it, design it, build it, and I’m the one you call when something needs attention afterward. The first thirty days post-launch are on me — anything that breaks because of my work, I fix on my time.
What the engagement looks like
Timeline scales with tier. A starter site can ship in two to four weeks; a business site runs six to ten weeks; a custom build runs ten to fourteen. The phases are the same:
- Week one — Discovery. One- to two-hour conversation about what the business does, who it’s for, what proof we have that you do it well, and what visitors should do next. Every page is built from that document.
- Architecture and design. Sitemap, page templates, visual system — designed against the actual words from discovery, not against placeholder text. Real copy reveals problems pretty placeholder text hides.
- Build. I write the pages with you and build the site. You can watch the work on a private staging environment and flag things that need adjusting in real time.
- Launch and the first month. Going live, redirecting old links, telling search engines about the new pages, and watching closely for anything that misbehaves. The first thirty days after launch are reserved for active attention from me.
What I’ve built, and who it was for
The work worth pointing at most directly:
The longest-running engagement of this kind is the M.L. Campbell Training Centre described above — a WordPress-based learning system running LearnDash with extensive customizations built for a Sherwin-Williams industrial coatings brand, still running today. The work that surrounds it:
- M.L. Campbell Website — the public-facing site for the same Sherwin-Williams brand.
- Sayerlack Website — a wood coatings brand selling across Europe and North America.
- o.canada.com — a high-traffic news property on WordPress.
Earlier in my career I led WordPress development across the Postmedia network of Canadian daily newspapers — the National Post, Financial Post, Vancouver Sun, The Province, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Windsor Star, Regina Leader-Post, and canada.com — handling theme development, performance optimisation, and editorial workflow at the scale of national news traffic.
Most day-to-day client work happens with businesses in the Niagara region of Ontario, but I take engagements remotely across Canada and into the United States. I’m easy to verify: LinkedIn, GitHub, WordPress.org, and X are all under the same name, all cross-checkable in a couple of clicks.
Whether the larger tiers pay for themselves
The math worth running once you have a rough sense of where your project sits on that range is the conversion math. A worked example with realistic assumptions:
1 missed inquiry per week × 50 weeks = 50 missed inquiries per year
50 inquiries × a 1-in-10 close rate = 5 missed customers
5 missed customers × $5,000 average value = $25,000 in lost revenue this year
A $20,000 rebuild that fixes the leak pays itself back inside the first year and keeps earning every year after that. Plug in your own numbers — bigger average customer value shortens the payback; higher close rate shortens it further. At typical small-business numbers, a website that converts even slightly better is worth more than the cost of building one that does.
