Orléans, Ontario
Half your customers are reading in French.
Orléans is the most francophone part of Ottawa, and most websites out here are built as though it is not. Bilingual sites for the east end — done properly, or not claimed at all.
What Orléans is like to sell in
Bilingual is a customer, not a checkbox
Orléans has the highest concentration of French-speaking residents of any part of Ottawa, and it behaves accordingly. People search in French, read reviews in French, and phone expecting to be served in French — while living in Ontario, paying Ontario taxes and being subject to Ontario rules. It is a genuinely bilingual market rather than a French one, and that specific combination is what most east-end websites get wrong.
The common failure is not absence of French. It is bad French. A site run through machine translation, or half-translated so the service pages are bilingual and the booking flow is not, reads as carelessness to exactly the customers it was meant to reach — and it performs worse in search than having no French at all, because duplicate thin translations compete with the pages they were copied from.
The honest answer is usually narrower than a full bilingual build. Translate the pages that convert — the services people search for, the booking flow, the contact page — and translate them properly, with the URLs, the page titles and the language tags set up so a search engine knows which version to show whom. Forty half-translated pages is worse than eight real ones.
The other east-end fact is reach. Orléans runs out into Cumberland, Navan and across the county line toward Rockland, and "do you come out this far?" is asked constantly. Naming the places you actually serve settles it.
What gets asked for first
Four jobs for a bilingual east end
French that a French speaker would have written
Translated by someone who speaks it, not generated. Scoped to the pages that earn something, so the budget goes into quality rather than coverage.
Set up so search shows the right language to the right person
Separate addresses per language, language tags declared, and each version pointing at its counterpart. Without that, the two versions compete with each other and both lose.
A service area that crosses the county line
Orléans, Cumberland, Navan, Sarsfield, Rockland — named where they are genuinely served, so a search from out east finds you rather than someone in Vanier.
Answers before the phone call, in both languages
Hours, whether you take a plan, how far you come, roughly what it costs. A repeat question asked in French is still a repeat question.
What is in every build
The floor, east-end version
Bilingual structure done correctly where French is built — separate URLs, language tags, and paired versions that do not compete in search
Human translation for anything published in French; no machine output shipped as though it were written
East-end service areas named where they are genuinely served, out to Cumberland, Navan and Rockland
Google Business Profile claimed and filled in, in both languages where it applies
Accessible to WCAG 2.2 AA, which is also how AODA is satisfied
Owned by you outright — domain, hosting, code, analytics
Who this tends to be
The Orléans businesses this fits
How it goes
Across the city, and it changes nothing
The studio is in Ottawa. The project runs the same from either end of it: a discovery call, a written scope you keep whether or not you hire us, a build with something to look at early, and a launch you are walked through.
The one addition on a bilingual project is that translation is scoped and priced on the discovery call rather than discovered halfway through. It is the single most common thing that quietly doubles the size of an east-end build.
See how we buildTell us what you're trying to get done.We'll tell you what it takes.