Web design and web development for Nanaimo businesses

Honestly, and by design. Everyday support — Microsoft 365, email, accounts, security, backups, device setup and the problems that surface on a Tuesday morning — is delivered remotely, and distance makes no difference to any of it. What distance does change is physical work. Reaching Nanaimo means a ferry from Horseshoe Bay or Tsawwassen, so on-site attendance is arranged in advance rather than called out on the day. We plan hardware, server and network work into scheduled visits, hold spare equipment on your premises so common failures can be swapped locally, and bring in a local trade when a job is mostly cabling.

Three things, in order. Battery backup on the server, firewall and switch, sized to ride out a short outage and shut everything down cleanly in a long one. Backups held off the Island and tested by actually restoring something, not by checking a green tick. And a written page naming who calls whom, how staff reach email and files from home, and which systems can simply wait. The December 2018 windstorm cut power and took the city's water treatment plant offline. November 2024 put Nanaimo among the hardest-hit communities on the Island. Neither was a surprise, and neither will be the last.

If your customers come over from the mainland, yes, but practically rather than decoratively. Say which terminal you are near, how long the drive is from the sailing, and where people park. Businesses selling to mainland buyers rather than visitors should do the opposite and make it obvious that distance is not an obstacle: shipping arrangements, remote consultations and turnaround times stated plainly. Either way it belongs on the page people actually land on, not buried at the bottom of a contact page. See web design for how we lay that out.

It depends mostly on scope: the number of pages, who writes the content, integrations like booking or payments, and whether you sell online. A written quote for a defined scope is the only reliable number — our website cost guide explains each cost driver and the ongoing costs to plan for.

Most of the timeline is decided by content, not code. A small business site moves quickly once page copy, photos and decisions are ready; larger sites with many pages, integrations or e-commerce take longer. We set a schedule at kickoff with dates for each review.

No honest designer can guarantee rankings. What we can do is build the foundations search engines reward — fast pages, clear structure, strong titles and descriptions, structured data and genuinely useful local content — and align the site with your Google Business Profile, which drives map results.

Yes. Your domain, hosting account, analytics and content should be registered to your business, with our access granted as a user. If you ever move on, you take everything with you.