Web Design · Ottawa, Ontario
Web Design in Ottawa — designed, built and handed over
nanushi designs and builds websites for Ottawa businesses, community organisations and research teams, and for clients across Canada. The same shop does the design and the build, so what you approve is what launches — no file thrown over a wall to be reinterpreted.
Fixed written price before anything starts, payment in stages as work finishes, a site you can update yourself, and the code, accounts and domain in your name at the end.
Ottawa websites we designed, and the problem each one solved
Named clients, live URLs, and the actual design problem rather than a screenshot gallery. Three of these have a full written case study behind them, including the parts that were difficult.
The problem: Two decades of community work — the Parade of Lights, Canada Day, Arts in the Park, Music and Movies in the Park, monthly public meetings, board minutes as official records — behind a site that looked like none of it had happened.
The design: A full visual rebrand, and an information architecture organised around the three reasons residents actually arrive: what is the next event, how do I volunteer, and what did the board decide. Events browsable by year, minutes published as records, sponsors given real recognition, and a dismissible banner the board can use for time-sensitive notices without touching code.
The problem: Evidence-based clinical research that needed to become something a patient managing a heart condition — or the family member helping them — could read and act on, in English and French.
The design: Six sections with separate paths for patients and for caregivers, a services directory, and a French mirror at full parity. Designed mobile-first with accessible type sizing, colour contrast and navigation, because the audience skews older and reads on a phone.
The problem: A family-owned Stittsville café serving breakfast since 1992, with the warmth of the room not showing up anywhere online.
The design: A design that feels like the place, with the two things a hungry person came for — menu and hours — one tap from the top on every screen size, and nothing else competing with them.
The problem: A daily Ottawa publication covering news, food and drink, real estate, arts and events, where the volume of content arriving each day would break a fixed layout within a week.
The design: A template system rather than a set of pages: a hierarchy that gives a lead story weight, category surfaces that stay readable whether four articles arrive or forty, and a design that holds up when nobody is arranging it by hand.
What web design means here — six stages
Four of these happen before anything visual is drawn. That order is the whole argument: a site that looks good and is organised badly loses to a plain one that puts the right thing in front of the visitor.
What the site is for
Before anything visual, the plain question: who arrives, what are they trying to do, and what counts as this working. Most bad website design is not ugly, it is well-executed decoration wrapped around a page that never worked out what it was asking the visitor to do. This is also where things get removed — one client wrote that there were a couple of things he asked for that he was talked out of and that we were right about both.
- The two or three jobs the site has to do, in priority order
- The audiences, including the ones you had not planned for
- What comes off the list, and why
Structure and navigation
The sitemap and the page hierarchy, decided before a pixel is drawn. This is the part that most affects whether people find what they came for, and it is nearly invisible once it is right. Navigation labelled the way your visitors describe things, not the way your org chart does.
- Page inventory and hierarchy
- Navigation labels tested against real visitor language
- What lives on a page versus what lives behind a click
Content, then layout
Designing around real copy rather than placeholder text, because a layout that works with lorem ipsum and fails with your actual three-sentence paragraph is not a design, it is a picture of one. If your copy does not exist yet this is when we say so, because it is the single biggest cause of a project running long.
- Real copy and images in the design, not placeholders
- Page templates that hold up at both minimum and maximum content
- An honest read on whether you need help writing it
Visual design
Type, colour, spacing, imagery and motion. Restraint is the operative principle: a small type scale used consistently, a palette that passes contrast requirements, and space doing most of the organising work. The aim is a site that still looks composed in three years, not one that looks like the year it was made.
- A type scale and palette applied as a system, not per-page decoration
- Contrast checked rather than eyeballed
- Motion where it explains something, and nowhere else
Responsive and accessible
The narrow layout is designed as a real layout, not a squeeze of the wide one, and the accessibility work happens here rather than at the end where it becomes expensive. Semantic structure, keyboard navigation, alt text, focus states, and contrast that holds up in bright daylight on a phone.
- Designed from 320px upward and tested at real device widths
- Keyboard and screen-reader navigation that follows the visual order
- Contrast and type sizing that meet a standard, not a vibe
Build and handover
We build what we designed, which removes the most common failure in web design: a beautiful file handed to a developer who interprets it differently. Then the content goes behind an editor, and the code, accounts and domain go into your name.
- The designer and the developer are the same shop
- A content editor set up with your real content in it
- Code, hosting, database and domain owned by you
Redesigning a site you already have
Most enquiries are redesigns rather than first sites, and a redesign carries a risk a new site does not: throwing away the search visibility the old one spent years accumulating. Here is what a redesign involves beyond the design itself.
Work out what is actually failing
Slow, unreadable on a phone, impossible to update, or simply dated? The first three are structural and no amount of new visual design fixes them. The fourth is genuinely a design job and often cheaper than people expect. We will tell you which you have before quoting.
Keep what is working
If certain pages bring in enquiries, we find that out from the analytics before redesigning them into something different. Redesigns that ignore this are how a business ends up with a prettier site and fewer leads.
Protect the rankings
Every existing URL is inventoried from the sitemap, analytics and Search Console before anything changes, then mapped one-to-one to its replacement with permanent redirects — no chains, no blanket redirect to the homepage. Titles, descriptions and structured data are carried across deliberately.
Verify afterwards
A post-launch crawl, and a Search Console check seven to ten days later. Most redesign disasters are not caused by the launch, they are caused by nobody looking afterwards until traffic had already gone.
A design you can live with, and update without us
The most expensive design failure is not an ugly site. It is a site nobody in the organisation can change. We rebuilt the Stittsville Village Association site for exactly that reason: every update on their old site had to route through someone technical. For a commercial business that is an annoyance. For an all-volunteer board it is terminal — volunteers turn over, the person who knew how to post an event steps off the board, and the events page stops updating. Within a season the site is stale, and a stale community site is worse than none, because residents check it, find last year's Canada Day, and stop checking.
So anything that changes goes behind an editor, chosen for the person who will actually be doing the updating rather than for the developer. Events, menus, posts, staff, minutes, notices. Structured fields rather than one giant rich-text box that degrades every time somebody pastes from a Word document, and a preview so nobody is editing live and hoping.
At handover you get a walkthrough of the tasks you will do most often and written notes for them. The measure of success is that you do not need to call us — as one client put it, the site has been live a few months and he barely touches it.
Design decisions that decide whether you get found
Search visibility is usually sold as a separate service bought afterwards. A good deal of it is settled at design time, and undoing those decisions later costs more than making them correctly.
Text that exists in the page
Headings and copy rendered as real text on the server, not baked into images or assembled by script after the fact. If a crawler cannot read it, it does not count, however good it looks.
One heading structure, used honestly
A single H1 that says what the page is, and subheadings that describe sections rather than being chosen for their font size. This is also what makes a page usable with a screen reader.
Images sized for the web
The most common cause of a slow site is a designer-supplied hero image at print resolution. Modern formats, correct dimensions, and explicit sizing so the layout does not jump while it loads.
A page per thing you sell
A single services page listing eight offerings will not rank for any of them. Deciding the page structure is a design decision with a direct commercial consequence, and it belongs in stage two rather than in a marketing conversation a year later.
What web design costs in Ottawa
Design and build are quoted together, because a design handed off for someone else to interpret is how sites end up looking nothing like the mockup. These are ranges, not quotes — your figure is fixed in writing after the discovery call and does not move unless you change what you are asking for.
$1,500 – $3,000
Designed marketing site
A handful of pages designed around your content and built. Suits most small businesses, trades and community groups. 1–2 weeks once your copy and photographs exist.
$3,000 – $8,000
Larger or content-managed site
More pages, a content editor you use yourself, events or menus or posts, a second language, or an accessibility standard to meet. 2–5 weeks.
Quoted per project
Rebrand and redesign
Where identity work sits alongside the site, or where an existing site has rankings and content that must survive the move. Priced after we have seen what exists.
You pay in stages as parts of the work finish rather than the whole amount up front. Hosting and the domain are billed to you directly and not marked up, and there is no mandatory retainer afterwards.
What clients have written
Named clients, on projects listed above, quoted from our Google Business Profile and trimmed for length rather than reworded. We do not publish a star average or a review count on our own site — self-reported rating markup is against Google guidelines and proves nothing. The profile is one click away instead.
They went above and beyond to build a website that better serves our target audience and is more accessible. Would recommend them to others!
Centre for Care Access and Equity Research
brainhearthealth.ca
Very professional, down to earth and takes the time to understand needs and make recommendations. Was very pleased with the final result and will be recommending Nanushi to my peers!
Damon Cox
stittsvilleva.com
Site's been live a few months now and I barely touch it. Articles go up daily on their own, newsletter sends itself, and it's fast on a phone… Had one problem after launch and she sorted it the same day.
ottown support
ottown.ca
Designing for Ottawa, and for everywhere else
We are based in Ottawa and a good share of the work is local. Main Street Cafe and the Stittsville Village Association are both in Stittsville. The Brain Heart Health guide was built for a research centre affiliated with Bruyère Health. ottown is a publication about this city. We work with businesses across Kanata, Barrhaven, Nepean, Orleans, the Glebe, Westboro, the ByWard Market and out through the Ottawa Valley.
Designing for a local audience does change things. Bilingual content is a genuine requirement here far more often than it is elsewhere in Ontario, and it is a design constraint rather than a translation task — French runs roughly fifteen to twenty percent longer than English, and a layout that only works at English lengths breaks the moment the second language arrives. Local businesses also need the map, the hours and the phone number treated as primary content rather than footer furniture.
Beyond that, design work does not require proximity. We work with clients elsewhere in Canada and internationally, and the process is identical: a call, a written scope, short review cycles, a handover.
Reading on web design
Written to be useful whether or not you hire us — including the ones that argue against spending money on a redesign.
five signs your website is hurting your business
How to tell whether you have a design problem or a different problem entirely.
mobile-first design, and why it matters
What designing for the narrow screen first actually changes.
the ROI of a website redesign
When a redesign pays for itself, and when it is an expensive repaint.
building trust online as a small business
The design decisions that make a stranger believe you are real.
landing page best practices
What a page has to do when it only gets one screen to do it in.
redesigning without losing your rankings
The pre-launch checklist that protects what the old site earned.
Show us the site you have, or describe the one you want
A short call, an honest read on whether you need a redesign or something cheaper, and a written scope with a fixed price if you do. We reply within one business day.
Start a conversationOttawa web design FAQ
How much does web design cost in Ottawa?
For a designed and built marketing site, typically $1,500–$3,000. Add a content editor, a larger page count, events or menus, a second language or an accessibility standard to meet and it usually lands between $3,000 and $8,000. Design and build are not priced separately here, because handing you a design file that somebody else has to interpret is how sites end up looking nothing like the mockup.
Do I need a redesign, or just a refresh?
Ask what is failing. If the site is slow, unreadable on a phone, or nobody can update it without a developer, that is structural and a refresh will not touch it. If it simply looks dated but the structure and the content work, new type, colour and photography can do a great deal for a fraction of the cost. We will tell you which one you have, including when the answer is the cheaper one.
Will the site work properly on phones?
It is designed for phones first, because that is where most of your visitors are. That means designing the narrow layout as the real layout rather than squeezing a desktop grid into it, tap targets big enough for a thumb, text that does not require zooming, and testing at real device widths rather than a desktop browser dragged narrower.
Can I update the design myself afterwards?
You can update the content yourself — text, images, events, menus, staff, posts, notices — through an editor chosen for the person who will actually use it. Changing the underlying design is a design job, and pages that let a non-designer move anything anywhere tend to drift into something worse within a year. The line we draw is: you own your content, we keep the design coherent.
Do you do accessible and bilingual sites?
Yes, and we have shipped both. brainhearthealth.ca was built for an audience that is often older and reading on a phone, so contrast, type sizing and navigation were requirements rather than finishing touches, and the French site is a full mirror at parity with the English rather than a partial translation or a switcher that dumps you back on the homepage. If your organisation has an accessibility obligation, raise it at the first call — it changes design decisions rather than being added at the end.
Do you use WordPress or a template?
Neither by default. Sites are designed for your content and built from scratch, so there is no theme to fight and no plugin stack to maintain. That said, if the honest answer for your business is a good template on Shopify or Squarespace, we will say so — a template you can afford and actually launch beats a custom design you defer for a year.
What do you need from me to start?
Your content, or a realistic plan for getting it. Copy and photographs are the single biggest cause of a design project running long, so we ask early. If you do not have photography, say so at the start; it changes how a design is composed, and a design built for images you never take will always look wrong.
How long does a website design take?
A marketing site is usually 1–2 weeks from the point your content exists. A larger content-managed or bilingual site is 2–5 weeks. You see it repeatedly while it is being made rather than once at a reveal at the end, which is deliberate: changes are cheap early and expensive once everything is wired together.
Do you work outside Ottawa?
Yes. We are Ottawa-based and much of our work is local, but design work does not require proximity and we have clients elsewhere in Canada and internationally. Being local matters most when a project needs in-person time or when local search visibility is a goal.
Need something with logic behind it — accounts, bookings, payments, a dashboard? That is web development in Ottawa.