Frequently Asked Questions
Straight answers to the questions I get asked most often about building a website.
Do you only work with businesses in Belleville?
No. Belleville is home base and I meet local clients in person, but most of my work is for clients elsewhere. I regularly build for businesses in Quinte West and Trenton, Prince Edward County, Kingston, Oshawa and the Durham Region, and across the GTA, plus national organizations spread right across Canada. Distance has not been a limiting factor on a project in years.
How long does a website take to build?
A straightforward small business site is typically a few weeks from kickoff to launch. Larger sites with custom functionality, ecommerce, or integrations run longer, and membership platforms can run for months. The single biggest factor in the timeline is usually how quickly content and feedback come back from your side, which is worth planning for at the start.
Do you build on WordPress?
When it is the right tool, yes. WordPress makes sense when you need to publish content regularly and want to do it yourself without calling a developer. I also work with Shopify for straightforward retail. For anything with custom logic, membership tiers, complex forms, or integrations, a custom build is usually faster, more secure, and cheaper to maintain than fighting a plugin stack. I will recommend based on your project, not on what is easiest for me.
Will I be able to update the site myself?
Yes, for the things you should be updating: text, images, news posts, services, hours, staff. I build content editing into every site and walk you through it at handover. Structural changes and new features still come back to me, which is normal and is how you avoid accidentally breaking your own site.
Is SEO included, or is that extra?
The technical SEO foundation is included in every build: page titles and meta descriptions, structured data, clean URLs, fast load times, mobile-friendly layout, internal linking, and an XML sitemap. That is not an upsell, it is part of building a site properly. Ongoing SEO work, content strategy, and link building are separate engagements if you want them.
What happens after the site launches?
I do not disappear. You get a walkthrough of how to manage your content, and I am available for updates, fixes, and new features afterwards. If something breaks that is my fault, I fix it. Many clients keep me on for occasional work; others take the site and run it themselves, which is entirely fine.
Can you work on a site someone else built?
Often, yes. I take on rescue work regularly: fixing performance problems, repairing broken functionality, improving SEO, or picking up a project a previous developer abandoned. I will audit what is there first and tell you honestly whether it is worth repairing or whether a rebuild will cost you less in the long run.
Do you take on small projects?
Yes. Not everything needs to be a full build. A landing page, a set of fixes, a performance pass, or adding one feature to an existing site are all reasonable projects. If what you need is genuinely tiny, I will tell you rather than inflate it into something bigger.
Who owns the website when it is finished?
You do. The domain, the content, and the code are yours. I do not hold sites hostage or lock clients into proprietary systems they cannot leave. If you ever want to move to another developer, you take everything with you.
Do you write the content, or do I?
Either works, and it affects the quote. You know your business better than I do, so client-written content is often stronger and it saves you money. If you would rather not write it, that gets scoped into the project. What I will not do is fill your site with placeholder text and launch it that way.
Will my site work on phones?
Yes, and it is designed for phones first rather than adapted to them afterwards. For most local businesses the majority of traffic arrives on mobile, so the phone layout is the one that actually matters. Every site is tested on real screen sizes before launch.
Do you work with clients outside Canada?
Yes. Most of my work is Canadian, and this site is written for that audience, but I have built and maintained sites for clients in the United States as well. Time zones across North America overlap enough that it makes no practical difference to how a project runs. The one thing worth flagging early is anything involving sales tax or payment processing rules, since those differ by state and are cheaper to get right at the start than to retrofit.
How do I get started?
Send me a message through the contact page with a rough idea of what you need. We will have a conversation about the project, I will put together a scope and a fixed quote, and if it works for you we book in a start date. There is no charge for that first conversation.
Still Have a Question?
If your question is not here, ask it. I would rather answer it before you commit to anything than have you guess. You might also want to read about what actually drives the cost of a website, or look through recent projects to see the kind of work I take on.