Full Service Web Development
We offer full service web development solutions. Whether it be building your site from scratch, or replatforming your existing site into something new. This covers everything from design and development to hosting and search engine optimization, and everything in-between.
Content Management System
We use Drupal (free and open source) to manage your content. Drupal has been around for over 20 years – used in large scale industries across the world. Companies such as NASA, the US Department of Energy, Tesla, among thousands of others trust and use Drupal.
It's likely you've heard of Wordpress – which has many similarities to Drupal. They both help manage content in an efficient way, although we prefer Drupal for various reasons:
- Essential functionality adding modules (known as plugins in Wordpress) are covered by Drupal's security team and security advisory policy (this is not in place within Wordpress)
- It's generally more secure
- It's more tailored for customizing to your specific needs
- It's generally more scalable
A content management system allows you to make content edits and additions yourself, without touching code – ultimately saving you time and money.
Accessibility
Accessibility (or a11y for short) on the web is comparable to having braille on elevator buttons. It's having proper tools in place to allow all users (such as the visually impaired, people with impaired motor function, etc.) to use your website and all of its functionality with ease.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an organization who set out universally acceptable a11y standards. They release guidelines called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Provinces such as Ontario has made compliance of WCAG required if you meet the specific criteria. British Columbia has recently put into place such standards as well. If you meet the criteria and don't meet the WCAG requirements you may be fined.
Fortunately I've been working in the government sector for nearly 3 years and will implement at the very least WCAG 2.0 AA standards (if not, higher) in all corners of your site.
Some of the principles include focus states, aria attributes, contrast, touch target sizes, font sizes, alternative text on media, heading hierarchy, descriptive link and button text, proper use of HTML elements, etc.
Having these tools in place will ultimately get you more traffic to your site as it organically boosts your search engine ranking, while allowing users with limited abilities to access your services.
User Experience
Proper user experience implementations are very important in retaining users on your site and reducing your bounce rate. Along with converting their presence to actions such as booking an appointment, using your contact form, downloading a resource you supply, etc.
Good user experience (UX) implementation are aspects such as proper use of white space, good readability, easy to use navigation, large touch targets, obvious link indications – all of which go hand-in-hand with accessibility (covered above).
Mobile Friendly
Mobile phone internet usage now supersedes desktop – having a site that works on mobile is just as important as having a desktop friendly site. Our designs ensure ease-of-use for all screen sizes. Read more on this within our accessibility section.
Conversion centric approaches
Your online presence shouldn't just sit there and do nothing – your website design and implementation will be centred around getting you customers, supporting your pre-existing ones, and supplying everyone with essential information. This includes everything from search engine optimization (SEO) to carefully placed call to action buttons and content above the fold, among several other aspects.
SEO includes proper social sharing configurations for popular platforms like Facebook and Twitter – with proper metatags in place to ensure the display of page descriptions, titles, images and more.
Newsletters and Social Media Integration
You shouldn't have to log on to all your social media accounts and make a post on each to share that nifty new post you just published. With our integration services we allow a one-click solution for publishing of posts on all major social media platforms through Zapier.
We also offer one-click newsletter mailout integration through Cyberimpact – which is CASL (Canada's Anti-Spam Law) compliant.
Security
Drupal is inherently secure, and widely recognized as so within the industry (as such, big name corporations use and trust Drupal, this is covered in the CMS portion of the page).
Drupal’s security ensures:
- User Access Control
- Database Encryption
- Information sharing via security reports
- Auto-update and core validation work in partnership with GitHub
- Prevention of malicious data entry
- Mitigation of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks
- Patching of issues before they’re exploited
The managed web hosting platform I use (outlined within the Hosting section of the page) also uses top industry standards to ensure the highest level of security.
Your website will also be on its own dedicated cloud server (with its own dedicated IP address), resulting in a secure and performant website.
We also implement security measures such as Google's ReCaptcha anti-spam tools on all forms within your site, along with several other common security practices.
Your site will include an SSL if you end up hosting with us – all traffic on your site will be fully encrypted.
Rest assured, your site is safe with us.
Performance
Aside from your website being hosted on a performant dedicated server, there are several other optimizations that are in place to ensure the highest level of performance.
Our servers use LiteSpeed caching, Drupal has it's own built-in caching along with several other technologies such as Facebooks speedy BigPipe page loading technique. Our CSS and JS techniques ensure the least amount of browser resource usage and requirements. We aggregate, minify and compress site theme files and images. We also use various modules and configurations that improve performance
This gist of it is, we use reliable, widely used techniques to provide your users with the fastest, most reliable experience – no matter which device and network speed your users have.
Support
We offer a customizable post-launch plan to fit your needs. Once your services are launched we're still right beside you in case you need any sort of support.
Comprehensive Video Help Guides
Do you often make content edits throughout your site? We offer comprehensive video tutorials to help guide you along without needing to contact us, or pay for something that you can do on your own.
Hosting
We host all of our websites using the widely used and trusted DigitalOcean through their managed hosting provider Cloudways. Managed hosting is essential so I can focus on your front-end needs, while professionals focus on your back-end needs.
Cloudways advanced security practices allow them to guarantee the highest security level available – along with 24/7 customer support. You can sit back and relax, and let us take care of the rest.
Read more on Cloudways security and performance.
We put your site on a dedicated resource instance in conjunction with your own dedicated IP address. This is important for security and performance reasons.
Design
I am by no means a designer – although I've picked up essential techniques from my several years within the industry, working alongside professional designers and researching. I hand select design styles from the professionals throughout the web and tailor them for an approach that works for you.
Ecommerce
While I don't specialize in ecommerce, I do offer such services. Please contact me to see what we can make happen.
Photography
I am passionate about photography, check out some of my work here instagram.com/4oh3/. If you end up needing supplementary media for your website, social media, or anything else we can discuss options.
Free website improvement audit
Not sure if you really need a new website just yet? Fill out this free website improvement audit request to find out.