Ottawa, Ontario
An Ottawa studio for Ottawa businesses.
Websites and custom software for the trades, clinics, restaurants, studios, firms and agencies working across the National Capital Region — built here, and built to be found here.
What Ottawa is like to sell in
A capital city that does not behave like one
Ottawa is a government town with a private sector living underneath it, and the two buy completely differently. One side runs on procurement, security questionnaires and a fiscal year that ends in March. The other is a clinic on Carling, a contractor working out of a truck in Barrhaven, a restaurant in Hintonburg — businesses where the owner is also the person who answers the phone at 4pm.
This site is built for the second group. Not because the first is uninteresting, but because a small business here loses money in a specific, fixable way: the same four questions, asked by phone, all day, that a website should have answered before anyone dialled.
The city adds its own version of those questions. Ottawa sits on a provincial border, so half the region's customers are reading in French and looking for a parking answer on the wrong side of a bridge. It is genuinely seasonal — a hardscaping contractor has a window that closes in November, a patio has one that opens in May — so the same page has to do different work in different months. And the region is spread thin across Kanata, Orléans, Barrhaven and the rural townships, which means "do you come out this far?" is a real question and not a rhetorical one.
None of that is exotic. It just means a page that works in Toronto is usually missing three things here: the service area, the language, and the season.
What gets asked for first
The four jobs Ottawa businesses bring us
In roughly the order they come up on a first call.
Be findable for the neighbourhood, not the country
Someone searching "emergency plumber Nepean" or "walk-in clinic Orléans" is three minutes from booking. Ranking for that means the service area is written on the page, the Google Business Profile is claimed and filled in properly, and every location the business actually serves is named somewhere a crawler can read it.
Answer the repeat call before it happens
Hours over a long weekend, whether you take a plan, whether you come out to Manotick, what a job like this usually runs. Every one of those is answerable in advance, and every one of them is currently costing somebody an hour a day.
Work in both languages without being two websites
A large share of the region reads in French, and Gatineau is a fifteen-minute drive from downtown. That does not always mean a full bilingual build — sometimes it means the pages that convert, done properly in both, rather than all forty done badly.
Take the repeat work off a small team
Intake forms, booking, quoting, dispatch, the spreadsheet that three people edit and nobody trusts. In a business of six people, an hour a day of retyping is a meaningful fraction of the payroll, and it is the thing custom software actually fixes.
What is in every build
The floor, not the upsell
These are not options. A site that ships without them is not finished.
Local search set up properly — service areas on the page, Google Business Profile claimed, and the business marked up so search engines can read where it works
Fast on a phone on a bad connection, because that is where most local searches happen
Accessible to WCAG 2.2 AA, which is also how Ontario's AODA requirements are met rather than argued about
Every enquiry landing in one place, whether it came from the form, the profile or the phone
Written so the answers people phone about are on the page, in the words they would use
Owned by you outright — the domain, the hosting account, the code, the analytics
Who this tends to be
The Ottawa businesses this fits
Six industries, each with a page on what it usually needs first.
How it goes
Near enough to meet, structured enough not to need to
Being in the same city means a first conversation can happen over a coffee if that is what you want. It does not mean the project depends on it. The work runs the same way for a business in Vanier as for one in Vancouver: 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 rather than handed.
The practical Ottawa difference is timing, not proximity. If your season starts in May, the build works backwards from May. If your quiet month is January, that is when we do the work that needs your attention.
See how we buildTell us what you're trying to get done.We'll tell you what it takes.