WordPress Development Portfolio

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 Hands-On Support subscription is for. It's included with all plans except SiteMaker and means we'll take care of the changes 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 build your site on WordPress with our preferred visual editor: BeaverBuilder. This ensures optimal performance and reliability for your website. It also means that, unlike similar builders like Wix or Squarespace, your site is totally portable. You can take a backup and move it wherever you like without having to totally rebuild the site. Note: see the FAQ on "What happens if I cancel or downgrade my account with Websavers" for details on how our software licenses work.

We include your first year of hosting and bundle in either our Managed Troubleshooting or Hands-On Support add-on.

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.

With Hands-On Support you can leave the WordPress maintenance to us and get 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.

Renewals are at our current rates for WordPress hosting and Hands-On Support website management at the beginning of the second year. If you change or cancel your hosting plan, maintaining your domain registration is also at our standard domain registration rates, but this will not include your website.

Our usual turnaround time for these plans are as follows:

• SiteMaker: 1-3 weeks
• Premium: 4-6 weeks
• Corporate: 2-4 months

These time frames begin only when 1) the deposit invoice is paid, and 2) when we have received all content necessary for the site, including all text, images, video, logos, and branding materials. Any content not received before the start of the project may not be included in the final launch.

Other types of delays that can occur:

• Workload: If we have a busy workload for website builds, we'll let you know when we can get started on your site and, presuming all content is ready by that time, that will be your official start date.
• Seasonal: Due to summer vacations we have more capacity to build sites between November and May, and so during those months both turnaround times are frequently on the lower end of the above referenced completion times.

1 Year Time Limit

Starting from the day that we create your project and send the deposit invoice, there is a maximum 1 year time limit. If this 1 year limit is reached, the project is marked complete, we launch the site with the content we have, and your balance invoice is sent.

If you have Hands-On Support, you can certainly still request changes to the now-live site within the Hands-On Support plan FlexTime limits.

Yes! With the powerful 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:

1. Your business name, tagline, and distinction (how you differ from your competitors)
2. About you
3. Staff bio and photos
4. Product or service descriptions, pricing, how to buy, etc.
5. Contact info
6. A portfolio (if in an industry where this is valuable)
7. Testimonials / reviews
8. 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.

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 cancelling 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?

Here is a description of what happens if you cancel hosting and/or your Hands-On Support subscription:

Upon cancellation of Hosting

1. You may continue hosting the site until the end of the paid hosting period, although you’re welcome to suspend your website from within the hosting control panel if you really want it taken down immediately. 
2. If your domain has not expired, then you will have access from within our Client Centre to either renew it at our currently posted rates 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.
3. 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 your plan is terminated we may not be able to recover your site from backup.
4. Your email accounts will stop working. If your email is hosted with us and you’re using IMAP, you must be sure to download a copy of all messages you need prior to cancelation.

Upon cancellation or downgrade of the Hands-On Support Level we're contractually required to revoke some software licenses.

When we build your website, we make use of software components for WordPress that help your site perform well, remain stable, and ensure it's easy to maintain long-term. Some of those software licenses require that we hold a maintenance contract with you in order for us to be able to use the license on your site.

Support Levels and Software Licenses

The licenses we have used are necessary for the software to receive updates. As WordPress is updated over time (necessary for security), the commercial plugins and themes that we used to build your site will likely become incompatible with WordPress. It could be 6 months and it could be years before that happens.

• When your Support Level is Hands-On Support: core software licenses are included (and frequently some additional ones).
• When your Support Level is Managed Troubleshooting: some software licenses are included, such as BeaverBuilder and WP Compress
• When your Support Level is DIY, or if you cancel services with us: we are not able to include any software licenses and we encourage you to purchase a single-site license directly from each software vendor. Nearly all software that we use to build WordPress sites can be found in our Recommended Resources.

Even if you drop down to DIY Support, no part of your site will be directly disabled by this action and your site might continue to work well for months or even years.

That's up to you! All of the above WordPress development plans include our one-shot design which we tailor specifically to the branding materials you provide, like logo, flyers, branding guidelines, etc.

When compared to template-based designs, this type of on-the-fly website building results in a design that better matches your brand by ensuring there's no mismatched colours and fonts.

Furthermore this methodology means our prices can remain considerably lower than more traditional design firms.

But, it does come with one caveat: you don't get that traditional design process where you work with a designer to get exactly the look you want before the site is built.

If you're the type that wants everything to look a very specific way, we strongly recommend hiring a designer to get exactly the design specs you want. Then we'll build the specs into a fully functionality and performance (and search) optimized website.

Upon request we provide:

• A guide to general WordPress site administration
• Step-by-step written instructions for site-specific tasks, like adding events or products.
• For all plans except SiteMaker, a Hands-On Support subscription is included free for 1 year. During the subscription period, we're standing by to respond to any questions, so if anything isn't clear, we're happy to not only clarify, but also complete the change for you when possible.

Note: we don't do in-person training or video-chat training, though for those that think they need it, we regularly recommended a couple of Halifax-based WordPress experts that do this all the time!

Yes, each plan has a set page limit as described in the plan comparison chart above.

Each page is to have at most 5 major sections where a major section is either its own delineated row or one full average sized screen of content (this is typically a 13" display @ equivalency of around 900px height)