Web Development · Ottawa, Ontario
Web Development in Ottawa — and you can go and check the work
nanushi is an Ottawa web development company. We build custom websites, web applications and online stores for local businesses, community organisations and research teams — and for clients across Canada and further afield. Every project below is live, named, and one click away.
You get a written scope and a fixed price before anything is built, you pay in stages as work finishes, and at the end the code, the accounts and the domain are in your name.
Ottawa web development work you can open right now
Most agency pages on this query open with adjectives. We would rather open with addresses. These are real clients, named with their permission, on live URLs — a hospital-affiliated research centre, a volunteer community association, a daily city publication, a SaaS platform and a village café. Three of them have a full written case study behind them.
Brain Heart Health
Bruyère Health and the Canadian Centre for Aging and Brain Health Innovation
A bilingual self-management guide for people living with heart disease. Six sections, separate paths for patients and caregivers, a services directory, and a full French mirror at parity with the English — not a partial translation and not a switcher that drops you back on the homepage.
The hard part: The audience is often older and reading on a phone, so type sizing, contrast and navigation were requirements rather than polish.
ottown
Ottawa city guide
A guide to Ottawa — news, food and drink, real estate, arts, events — that publishes every day with no editorial staff. A scheduled pipeline pulls sources, drafts and images articles, and publishes them, and the newsletter sends itself.
The hard part: The brief arrived as a question rather than a specification, so the first work was narrowing it to something that could be priced without either side guessing.
Stittsville Village Association
Volunteer-run community association, Stittsville
A rebrand and rebuild for the group behind the Parade of Lights, Canada Day, Arts in the Park, and Music and Movies in the Park. Events browsable by year, meeting minutes published as official records, sponsor recognition, and a dismissible banner for time-sensitive notices.
The hard part: The fatal problem was not the design. Every update had to route through someone technical, and for a board that turns over every year that means the site goes stale within a season.
Shopolo
SaaS platform for independent businesses
A full platform rather than a website: gift cards, loyalty, online ordering with card checkout, appointment booking, table reservations, email campaigns and a customer CRM, all in one merchant dashboard, with each business getting its own storefront.
The hard part: Payments settle directly into the merchant bank account through Stripe Connect. The platform never holds anybody else's money, which is an architectural decision made at the start rather than a feature bolted on.
Main Street Cafe
Family-owned restaurant, Stittsville
A small site done properly for a café that has been serving breakfast since 1992. Menu, gallery, hours and location, fast on a phone, with nothing on the page that a hungry person at 8am does not need.
The hard part: Most restaurant sites fail on the two things people actually came for. Hours and menu are one tap from the top on every screen size.
What web development covers here
Six kinds of project, in roughly ascending order of cost and complexity. Most enquiries turn out to be one of the first three. If yours is genuinely the second one and somebody has quoted you for the fourth, that is worth finding out before you sign anything.
Marketing and brochure sites
The most common request and the one most often overbuilt. A handful of pages that say who you are, what you sell, where you are and how to reach you — loading fast on a mid-range phone on mobile data, because that is how most of your visitors will arrive. Built from scratch rather than assembled from a page-builder, so there is no plugin stack to maintain and nothing to slow down over time.
- Home, services, about, contact, and whatever your business actually needs
- Responsive from 320px up, tested on real phone widths rather than a desktop browser resized
- Contact forms that deliver, with the submissions going somewhere you will actually read
- Google Business Profile, maps and structured data wired in where local search matters
Content-managed sites you can update yourself
Anything that changes — events, menus, staff, notices, posts, minutes — belongs behind an editor rather than in code. The test is not whether a CMS exists, it is whether the person who will actually be doing the updating can do them without phoning anyone. We set that up, put your real content into it, and walk you through it before handover.
- An editor chosen for the person who will use it, not for the developer
- Structured content types rather than one giant rich-text box
- Preview before publish, so nobody is editing live and hoping
- Written handover notes for the tasks you will do most often
Web applications
When the requirement stops being pages and starts being logic: accounts and sign-in, dashboards, bookings and availability, ordering, loyalty, internal tools, reporting. This is where the price and the timeline separate from a marketing site, and where scoping properly at the start saves the most money.
- Authentication, roles and permissions done with a real auth provider, not hand-rolled
- A relational database with row-level access rules rather than trust in the frontend
- Admin views for the people running the business, not just customer-facing screens
- Email that actually arrives — transactional sending set up and verified on your domain
Ecommerce and taking payments online
Selling products, gift cards, deposits, memberships or bookings. The right platform depends on what you sell: physical goods with inventory, shipping rates and tax are usually better served by Shopify than by anything custom, and we will say so. Where a custom checkout is the right answer, payments go through a hosted checkout and settle directly to your bank account.
- Hosted checkout, so card details never touch your site or ours
- Payouts settling into the business account rather than sitting with an intermediary
- Order, booking and gift-card records you can search and reconcile
- Honest advice about when Shopify or Square is the cheaper correct answer
Rebuilds and migrations
Replacing a site that has aged out, or that nobody can maintain because the person who built it is gone. The risk in a rebuild is not the build, it is throwing away the search rankings the old site accumulated. Nearly all of that work happens before launch: inventory every URL that exists today, map each one to its replacement, and keep the redirects permanent.
- Full URL inventory from the sitemap, analytics and Search Console before anything changes
- One-to-one 301 map — no chains, no blanket redirect to the homepage
- Titles, descriptions and structured data carried across deliberately
- A post-launch crawl and a Search Console check a week later, rather than assuming
Integrations and automation
The unglamorous work that removes an hour a day from somebody's job: connecting the site to the tools the business already runs on, or replacing a manual copy-paste process with something scheduled. Sometimes that is a booking system talking to a calendar; sometimes it is a content pipeline that runs by itself, which is what ottown is.
- Payments, email, calendars, CRMs and mapping services
- Scheduled jobs and webhooks with retries and logging, not fire-and-forget
- AI used where it earns its place — drafting, classifying, summarising — and not where it does not
- A clear account of what happens when a third-party service is down
What we build with, and why it matters to you
You are not buying a framework and you should not have to care about one. But the choice has consequences you will feel, so here is the short version in terms of what it buys you rather than what it is called.
Next.js and TypeScript
Pages are rendered on the server, so they arrive fast and search engines can read them without executing anything. TypeScript catches a category of mistake at build time rather than in front of a customer. Practically: a site that loads quickly on a phone and does not break in a way nobody noticed for three weeks.
Supabase or Payload where a database is needed
Managed Postgres with authentication and access rules enforced at the database rather than in the browser. Practically: your customer data is not protected by the honour system, and there is no server for you to patch on a Sunday.
Stripe for anything involving money
Hosted checkout, so card details never touch your site. Funds settle directly into your bank account. Practically: you are not liable for storing card data, and there is no intermediary sitting on your revenue.
Vercel for hosting
Global delivery, automatic HTTPS, and a preview URL for every change so you can look at something before it goes live. Practically: no shared hosting control panel, and no deploy that takes the site down while it runs.
None of this is dogma. If your site is a shop that needs inventory and shipping rates, Shopify will serve you better than anything we would write, and we will say so on the call rather than after the invoice.
How a project actually runs
Five steps, and the two that clients tell us are unusual are the fixed written price and the staged payment.
- 1
Discovery call
Thirty minutes to work out what you actually need, which is sometimes less than you came in asking for. If part of the brief will not pay for itself, that is the point at which we say so. One client wrote afterwards that there were a couple of things he asked for that he was talked out of, and that we were right about both. That conversation is worth more than any amount of it later.
- 2
Written scope and a fixed price
Before anything is built you get a written description of what is in the project, what is not, and one number. Not an hourly estimate that drifts. If the scope changes mid-project because you have decided you want something else, we price the change and you decide — but the original figure does not quietly grow.
- 3
Build, in short review cycles
You see it repeatedly while it is being made, rather than once at a grand reveal. Changes are cheap while the context is fresh on both sides and expensive after everything is wired together, so we deliberately front-load the feedback.
- 4
Staged payment
You pay as parts of the work finish rather than all of it up front. It keeps the incentive pointed at shipping, and it means you are never fully paid up on something you are unhappy with.
- 5
Launch and handover
The code, the hosting, the database, the domain and the third-party accounts end up in your name. You get a walkthrough of the parts you will maintain, and written notes for the tasks you will do most often. Then it is yours.
What web development costs in Ottawa
Almost nobody on this search result publishes a number. We will publish ranges, with the caveat that a range is not a quote — the figure you get is fixed in writing after the discovery call, and it does not move afterwards unless you change what you are asking for.
$1,500 – $3,000
Marketing site
A few pages, your content, fast on a phone, findable on Google. Suits most small businesses, tradespeople and community organisations. Typically 1–2 weeks once your copy and photographs exist.
$3,000 – $8,000
Content-managed or larger site
Everything above plus an editor you can use yourself, more pages, events or menus or posts, bilingual content, or an accessibility standard to meet. Typically 2–5 weeks.
$8,000 – $25,000+
Web application
Accounts, payments, bookings, dashboards, integrations — anything with real logic behind it. The range is wide because the scope is: this is the band where the discovery call earns its keep. Typically 4–12 weeks.
What is not in the number
Domain registration and hosting are yours and billed to you directly, which is usually somewhere between nothing and a few hundred dollars a year depending on traffic. We do not mark those up and resell them, because that is how a business ends up unable to leave.
Ongoing costs
There is no mandatory retainer. Most clients come back for changes or a second phase, and are billed for that work when it happens. Nothing stops working if you stop paying us — that is the point of the handover.
What you own when we are finished
Ask this question of every developer you talk to, including us, and get the answer in writing. A surprising number of small businesses discover years later that their site cannot be moved, their domain sits in an ex-supplier account, or the CMS licence is not theirs. Here is our answer.
The repository
The full source, in your account, with its history. Any competent developer can pick it up. There is no proprietary builder in the middle that only we can operate.
The accounts
Hosting, database, email sending, analytics and payments are created in your name where possible, and transferred where not. You hold the billing and the ownership; we hold whatever access you decide to leave us.
The domain
Registered to you. The single most common way a small business gets stuck is discovering the domain is in a former supplier's account, and it is entirely avoidable.
The ability to leave
The practical test of all of the above: if you want to work with someone else next year, nothing breaks and nothing needs our permission. That is the standard we build to.
Built to be found, not optimised afterwards
A site that nobody can find is a brochure you printed and left in a drawer. So the search work is part of the build rather than a line item afterwards: per-page canonicals pointing at one host, a sitemap generated from the same source the router uses, structured data whose referenced images actually resolve, an OpenGraph image on every route, and Search Console connected before launch rather than six months after.
We know how badly that can go because we ran the audit on ourselves and published the result. Our own sitemap was advertising 24 URLs that returned HTTP 200 with "Not Found" on the page, and we had never once submitted the sitemap to Search Console. That single bug produced the duplicate-title, duplicate-description and multiple-H1 clusters our crawl reported. It is written up in full, mistakes included.
What we will not do is promise you a position. Google does not sell placement, so nobody can guarantee it, and anyone quoting you a ranking is guessing at best.
What clients have written
Three reviews, from named clients, on projects listed above. They are quoted from our Google Business Profile and trimmed for length, never reworded. We do not publish a star average or a review count on our own site, because self-reported rating markup is against Google guidelines and it proves nothing anyway. Read them at the source instead.
Price was fair and there were no surprises at the end, it was what we agreed on… We paid in stages as parts of it got finished, which made it a lot easier for us and honestly made me trust the process more.
ottown support
ottown.ca
They were easy to communicate with and extremely responsive to feedback throughout the project. They went above and beyond to build a website that better serves our target audience and is more accessible.
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
An Ottawa developer, working well beyond Ottawa
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 in Kanata, Barrhaven, Nepean, Orleans, the Glebe, Westboro, the ByWard Market and out through the Ottawa Valley.
Being local genuinely matters in two situations: when a project needs in-person time, and when local search ranking is the point — because map-pack visibility depends on a complete Google Business Profile, consistent contact details and location pages that say something real rather than the same paragraph with the suburb swapped out.
It matters less than agencies claim the rest of the time. We also work with clients elsewhere in Canada and internationally, and the process is the same: a call, a written scope, short review cycles, a handover.
When we are the wrong choice
If you need a one-page site up this week and cost is the only constraint, a template on Squarespace will do it faster and cheaper than we can, and you should do that. Come back when the template stops fitting.
If you sell physical products and your requirements are inventory, shipping rates and sales tax, Shopify has solved those problems better than a custom build will. We can design and set up the storefront, but we will not pretend the platform underneath needs writing from scratch.
If what you actually need is marketing rather than a website — ads, sustained content, a sales process — a new site alone will not fix that, and we would rather say so before the invoice than after it.
And if you want a supplier who will keep the accounts in their own name so you have to come back, that is genuinely a business model, but it is not ours.
Reading before you commission anything
Written to be useful whether or not you hire us. Several of these argue against spending money.
how much does a website cost in Canada
What the ranges actually reflect, and which parts of a quote are negotiable.
freelancer vs agency vs doing it yourself
An honest comparison, including the cases where hiring us is the wrong call.
how to brief a web developer
What to bring to the first call so the quote you get back means something.
Next.js vs WordPress
When the page-builder is genuinely the right answer, and when it is not.
custom web app vs off-the-shelf software
The question worth answering before you commission anything custom.
how to redesign without losing your rankings
The migration checklist, written for the person signing off on the rebuild.
Tell us what you are trying to build
A short call, an honest opinion about whether it is worth building, and a written scope with a fixed price if it is. We reply within one business day.
Start a projectOttawa web development FAQ
How much does web development cost in Ottawa?
A few-page marketing site is typically $1,500–$3,000. A site with a content editor, bookings, a menu system or several dozen pages usually lands between $3,000 and $8,000. A custom web application with accounts, payments and a dashboard behind it generally starts around $8,000 and runs to $25,000 or beyond depending on how much logic is involved. Those are honest ranges rather than a price list: the number you get is fixed in writing after the discovery call, once we both know what is actually being built.
Why can nobody quote a price before talking to me?
Because the same sentence — I need a website for my business — covers a five-page brochure site and a booking platform with staff schedules and card payments. The two differ by a factor of ten. Any agency publishing one number for both is either quoting the cheap version and adding to it later, or quoting the expensive version and hoping. We would rather spend thirty minutes narrowing the brief and then commit to a figure that does not move.
How long does a project take?
A marketing site is usually 1–2 weeks from the point your content exists. A web or mobile app with real logic behind it is 4–12 weeks. The single biggest cause of a project running long is not development, it is waiting on copy and photographs from the client, which is why we ask for them at the start rather than at the end.
Do I own the code?
Yes, and the accounts and the domain with it. At handover the repository, the hosting account, the database, the domain registration and any third-party services are in your name, with you as the owner and us removed or downgraded to whatever access you want us to keep. This is worth checking with anyone you hire: a site you cannot move is a site you are renting.
Can I update the site myself afterwards?
That is the design goal, not an upsell. Where a site has content that changes — events, menus, posts, staff, notices — it gets an editor a non-technical person can use, and we walk you through it at handover. The Stittsville Village Association rebuild exists because their old site required a technical person for every update, and for an all-volunteer board that is fatal.
Do you only work with Ottawa businesses?
We are based in Ottawa and a good share of our work is local — Stittsville, Kanata, the Glebe, Barrhaven, Orleans, the Ottawa Valley. But the work is not geographically limited and we have clients elsewhere in Canada and internationally. Being local matters most when a project needs in-person time or when local search ranking is the point; otherwise it mostly means we are in your timezone and easy to reach.
WordPress, Shopify, or custom?
Whichever is right, and we will tell you when the cheap answer is the correct one. If you sell physical products and need inventory, shipping rates and tax handled, Shopify is usually a better use of your money than a custom store. If the site is content that changes often and nothing else, a CMS may be all you need. We build custom when the requirement is genuinely custom — logic, integrations, performance, or a workflow no off-the-shelf product models properly.
Do you take over a site somebody else built?
Often, yes. The first step is a read-only look at what exists — the codebase or platform, the hosting, who owns the accounts, and what is actually broken. Sometimes the answer is a rebuild and sometimes it is three days of fixes, and we would rather say the second when it is true.
What happens after launch?
You get the handover documents and the accounts, and the site is yours to run. Most clients keep us on for changes, new sections, or a second phase once real usage has taught them something. There is no mandatory retainer, and no arrangement where the site stops working if you stop paying us.
How do payments work?
In stages, tied to work being finished, rather than the whole amount up front. It keeps the incentive pointed at shipping and it means you are never fully paid up on something you are not happy with.
Looking for the design side rather than the build? Web design in Ottawa. Already have a site that nobody can find? Start with an SEO audit.