WordPress Development Portfolio
About Websavers
Since 2004, we've been providing our customers with high-quality web hosting services coupled with the legendary East Coast Canadian friendliness. We are the company that thousands of individuals and organizations trust every day to keep their websites, emails, radio streams and other data secure and consistently available.
We consider ourselves socially aware and responsible. We sponsor industry meet ups, artistic ventures (we have a soft spot for theatre), and other community groups. We also offer generous discounts to all registered non-profit groups and charities. We operate our servers in one of the greenest data centres available; hydroelectrically powered and 98% air conditioning free.
Here's some of our recent builds so you can get an idea of the quality of our work.
Orthofit
C&C Cycles
NS Association of Architects
Escapade Escape Rooms
CCBT
Things to do in Halifax
Walt Music
Owner Shimon Walt previously had a raw HTML site, but wanted a touch more control over the content and a touch more elegance.
AJFF
Previously Loved Treasures
Jim’s Electric Dartmouth
Access Safety Consulting Services
GH Burn
When Hantian Labs came to us looking to integrate their modernized product branding with a fresh new website, we couldn’t resist the challenge. We transitioned the site from deep blacks to bright whites and clean lines.
Casino NS Artist in Residence
Classic Concerts NS
Classic Concerts had this site designed, but when it came time to implement the features necessarily to get it running, it was turned over to us. We added online payments for subscriptions and ad-spots along with a full-scale calendaring system.
Hypnosis in the City
Margot Schelew, the person behind Hypnosis in the City, came to us for help representing her business online. We created a great clean style to best represent the internal outcomes her Hypnosis aims to instill in her clients.
Coder Dojo Halifax
The founder of Coder Dojo, Joe Bassil, asked us to help implement a design on WordPress to make it easy to update and maintain. We took the design spec and implemented a solid events system.
Alpha Elite
After the creation of GHBurn’s new site, the Hantian Labs execs came to us for a modern design for their newest product, Alpha Elite. We used their top-notch imagery and font styles and built the content and design around it.
Canadian Asset Buyers
Both cash for gold and website services are fairly competitive industries, and both us and Canadian Asset Buyers are trying to represent a classier, more professional business in a cut-throat industry. This made building the site a challenging and fun task! In 2015 we rebuilt the site into the modern design that you see above. The original site, created in 2011, looked like the image below.
The Brood
The Brood had a beautiful site designed and built using Ruby on Rails, but without a CMS, making updating the content on the site quite a challenge. After we built an easily updatable site in WordPress for the Casino Nova Scotia Artist in Residence project, The Brood contacted us to make their new design just as simple to update.
Casino NS Music Hall of Fame
Team Own Your Life
Team Own Your Life is about making your life about what matters to you and not what society thinks it should be about in a variety of avenues.
Coastal Sports and Wellness
We had been hosting and helping periodically with the code for the Coastal Sports website for over a year when Suzanne asked us about reworking the site design into a new mobile friendly site. We rebuilt it, using Canvas as a base, into a responsive site ready to go for all sizes of screens.
Hantian Labs
TDK Mobile Phone Repairs
The Village Emporium
eKnives
FieldMasters Canada
Feathertale
Ignite the Maritimes
David Howe
Shftwork Coworking
Trainyard General Store
The Development Process
1. Connect & Learn
Fill out our online questionnaire to send over all the key information we will require to begin filling out your website with content. This will include text and images. Click here to take a look at or fill out the form.
2. Sign Up
Create your account and we'll set up your hosting and 30% deposit invoice. This will allow us to register your domain name and SSL certificate if applicable and begin the design and development process.
3. Development
The development process begins. We start with a blank canvas and build the design using your photos, text videos and logo. We work with the content and optional design spec to ensure the design of your new site best matches your brand.
4. Final Touches
We send off the completed website and request your final edits prior to going live.
5. Launch Your New Site
When all supplied content is inserted in the site and all looks good, we make your website visible to the world and ensure your email addresses are functioning as they should be.
6. Updates & Edits
We include 1 year of managed support in all web design plans except SiteMaker. Need to make a change to the text, image, or basic styling of your site? No worries! Send 'em on over and we'll take care of it!
All sites are hosted on our in-house built custom configured WordPress hosting platform that's built from the ground up for speed and security!
Why Create Your Site With Us?
We Have A Vested Interest
Since we're hoping you'll want renew your hosting and management services with us, we have a vested interest in seeing your business succeed. We help drive business to your website and will always send referrals your way if we get them. If your business is struggling, we are less likely to be paid, and let’s be honest, we love getting paid.
Increase your audience without increasing your bottom line
Why throw away money endlessly (in USD no less) just for a service where you have to build everything yourself? Get a professional site made for specifically for you with bargain basement recurring fees.
SEO Friendly
We offer one of the best search engine optimization packages in Canada, and this knowledge mixed with the rebirth of your website means you’re ready to go with the latest in SEO techniques. No hours of research or coding knowledge required.
One Point Of Contact
You don’t have to wonder who to call for any question. We are your one point of contact for anything web, email, or online business related. Gone are the days of one service provider blaming another and miscommunications that cost your business time and money. Anything you need is just one email away.
Here When You Need Us
When you get your website designed by a traditional freelancer, there is always a risk that when you need some help six months down the road, they are no where to be found. You don’t have to worry anymore. We've been growing steadily for over 12 years with no sign of stopping. With a track record like that, you can trust that we'll always be here when you need us.
eCommerce Ready
Getting started with eCommerce can be free! We don't up your monthly costs simply because you want to sell an item or two on your site and we don't take a cut of sales, like some of the other guys out there 😉
Development FAQ
You have the power to alter the content (text, photos, video) on your website whenever you need to. No more waiting for your website developer to change a paragraph around!
Can't find something? No worries! That's what our managed Platinum hosting is for. With all plans except SiteMaker, we'll take care of the change for you and tell you how we did it so you'll know for next time. Best of all, it's completely FREE for your first year!
We include your first year of Titanium web hosting and bundle in our Platinum add-on! This means you can leave the WordPress maintenance to us and get approximately 30 minutes every month from our trained technicians. They’ll update your website content for you if you’re too busy to manage it yourself or take care of changes to the code that you are unable to complete.
Your new website is built on our rock-solid turbo-charged web hosting service. We take care of the technical stuff, like super fast web server software nginx/php-fpm, configuring our adaptive firewall, and setting up automatic updates to ensure a malware-free website and the best possible performance.
Even better, your primary domain registration (or transfer) is included completely free of charge alongside your Titanium hosting plan. Keep on hosting and your domain remains free!
Renews at $120 / year for hosting and $39.99 / month (optional) for Platinum website management at the beginning of the second year. If you change or cancel Titanium hosting, your domain is just $20 / year.
Thanks to the power of WordPress, literally ANYTHING is possible with your website. whether you opt to play around with plugins yourself on a SiteMaker plan, or ask us to do it for you with Platinum management, your site will be ready to do just about anything you can imagine. And best of all? It's often free!
Yes! With the poweful and free WooCommerce plugin, you can set up products and manage sales directly on your website.
WooCommerce integration is included with all plans except SiteMaker. We'll ensure all WooCommerce functions are integrated beautifully with your site design, set up shipping, taxes, and your first product to ensure everything works smoothly. Sales and client data are all captured on-site -- no need to send your visitors elsewhere simply to process a transaction.
WooCommerce also manages product stock, shipping calculations to multiple destinations with variable pricing, provincial tax rates, product variations, coupons, and tons more. Even better, we've been working with WooCommerce since its first launch in 2011 -- that means we've got the experience to recommend the best extensions and custom develop any functionality you can dream up. Ask us about WooCommerce today!
The most common content we require to get your website online is for the following items:
- Your business name, tagline, and distinction (how you differ from your competitors)
- About you
- Staff bio and photos
- Product or service descriptions, pricing, how to buy, etc.
- Contact info
- A portfolio (if in an industry where this is valuable)
- Testimonials / reviews
- A few starting articles discussing hot topics within your industry
To send us this content, head to our new website content questionnaire!
Indeed you do. Self-service hosting is the industry we originally started in over ten years ago. This means you get access to the Websavers client centre for administering your account. What can you do with the client centre?
- Register a new domain or update your domain registration details
- Manage your affiliate account so that you make money off every person you refer
- Login directly to your Plesk hosting panel to add or remove email addresses, set up a subdomain, secure a directory and tons more!
- View and update your support tickets – very handy if you ever run into problems with your email
- Order new add-ons for your website, like our e-commerce integration, social media management and more!
- Update your credit card details or input a new credit card for automatic billing
- Change your contact information
- Much more!
Yes, it's true! Our SiteMaker plan is super cheap. And even our higher end web design plans are at least half the price of other reputable design firms in Halifax.
To help answer how we can do this, here's some background:
We’ve encountered way too many people who, after shelling out thousands of dollars for their website, became angry, frustrated or completely fed up with their service provider. Most of the time it’s been due to a lack of communication alongside a lack of performance — their provider either didn’t talk to them or they didn’t deliver on their promises (or both). Either the website never gets completed or it’s completed but isn’t available for updates at a reasonable price.
Since we were originally purely a web hosting provider, our incoming clients were telling us about these kinds of experiences with other companies on a weekly basis. We decided to do something about it!
We strongly believe in long-term relationships with our customers, and we think there’s no better way to ensure a great relationship than by having a give-and-take situation. Rather than asking you to pay 10k+, we offer more approachable rates for high quality websites. You only pay 30% up-front and 70% once you’re satisfied with the final website.
Our web design pricing can be so cheap because when you're happy with your site, you'll surely continue hosting the website with us. This way we’re held responsible with keeping you happy, otherwise you have the option of simply canceling your hosting plan and halting payment, which doesn’t benefit us at all.
With some of our website creations, we actually lose money or pull even at the outset, but we think you’ll place as much value in having us there for you as we do in having you as our customer. Isn’t that what business should be all about?
Upon cancelation of hosting, the following occurs:
- You may continue hosting the site until the end of the pre-paid hosting period, although you’re welcome to suspend your website from within our control panel if you really want it taken down immediately.
- If your domain has not expired, then you will have access from within our Client Centre to either renew it at the standard rate of $20 / year or transfer it elsewhere if you wish (transfer codes are available to you at any time within our Client Centre without contacting us). You may also let the domain expire.
- If you wish to keep a copy of your website, then you must download a copy of all relevant information before your website is terminated. We provide multiple website backup tools to help with this. After it is terminated we may not be able to recover your site from backup and thusly we are not responsible for the data. If you wish to manually back up your data, rather than use the provided utilities, you can access all files via Plesk File Manager or FTP/SFTP and the database via phpMyAdmin within Plesk at any time within the period of your subscription.
- Your email accounts are suspended. If your email is hosted with us and you’re using IMAP for synchronized mail, you must be sure to download a copy of all messages via POP before submitting for cancelation.
- All software licenses are revoked. When we build your website, we make use of cutting edge software that ensures your site is easy to maintain long-term. While the software does not require a license to continue operating your website, it does require licensing to obtain updates to the software. As the WordPress core continues to be updated, these commercial plugins and themes that make parts of your site work will likely become incompatible with WordPress core over time. It could be 6 months and it could be years before that happens.
As these licenses are agency-level and apply to multiple websites, they cannot be directly transferred to you (doing so would even be a violation of their license). But that's not a problem! We absolutely love our chosen software vendors and so we encourage you to purchase a single-site license directly from them. Simply ask us how to do so and we'll point you in the right direction.
Websavers Inc will take complete responsibility for any problems with updates and licensing while your Platinum subscription remains active with us. Websavers is not liable for the software, licenses, updates or any problems caused by the upgrades of the software at the point your Platinum subscription lapses and until you resume your Platinum subscription.
How to Cancel: details on canceling your account can be found within our knowledgebase here.
Ready to find out more?
Drop us a line today for a free quote!