21 questions. Plain answers.

"Works" and "earns" are different tests. A site works if it loads. A site earns if a customer on their phone can tell what you do, where you work, and roughly what it costs, then book you without calling to ask. Most of the sites I get handed pass the first test and fail the second. The usual tells: it takes more than three seconds on LTE, the phone number isn't tappable, the service area is buried in a paragraph instead of being its own page, and there's no schema markup, so Google has to guess what kind of business you are. If none of that is true of yours, keep it. I'll tell you that on the call rather than sell you a rebuild you don't need.

You should, if you'll actually do it. The AI builders from Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy will get you a decent-looking brochure site for twenty or thirty dollars a month, and for plenty of businesses that is genuinely the right call. What they don't hand you is someone who owns the result. You still choose the pages, write the copy, size the photos, wire up the booking, set up the Google Business Profile, and fix it at 9pm on a Friday when the contact form quietly stops sending. I'm the option for the owner who has no time for that, no patience for it, or who wants one person accountable when something breaks. If you've got a slow week and you like this kind of work, use the builder. I'd rather say that than sell you something you didn't need.

The productized build is five pages (home, services, about, contact, and one service-detail page), which is the whole site for most of the businesses I work with. Need a sixth or a seventh? Those are $250 per additional page, and they add time to the 10-business-day schedule rather than squeezing into it, because the ten business days are the promise I am not willing to bend. If you need a separate page for every service line, a page per suburb, a CMS, or e-commerce, that's the Custom track, and the scoping call dials it in.

No. Copywriting is on the EXCLUDED list of the productized package. You bring the words (your existing site, your About text, your service descriptions) and I'll lay them out. If you want fresh copy, that's a custom add-on quoted separately. Most owners already have the words. They just need them well-placed.

Custom track. The productized build ships as static pages, because a CMS adds hosting cost and one more login somebody has to remember, and the care plan already covers the edits most businesses actually make. If you want a CMS (Sanity, Payload, Contentful), the custom track scopes it and quotes it. Expect the quote to move with how complicated the content model gets.

The ten business days start the day your content arrives, ideally at kickoff. Business days are Monday to Friday, excluding Ontario public holidays, so ten of them run about two calendar weeks: the days below count through them. Days 1 to 2 are kickoff: Day 1 is kickoff itself, a 60-minute call where the scope is confirmed and your content is collected, and day 2 is where I pull your current search footprint. Days 3 to 4 are design: mockups for every page, on desktop and phone, with one round of revisions. Days 5 to 9 are build, with schema markup, meta descriptions, and the Google Business Profile wiring done inside it. You get a staging link and a second round of revisions on the real thing. Day 10 is launch. Pages beyond the five are $250 each and add time to the 10-business-day schedule. If you respond within one business day at every revision step, the timeline holds. If you don't, the timeline slips.

Changing what's already there. New prices, new hours, a new service area, swapped photos, a staff change, a seasonal offer on a page that already exists, or fixing a typo you spotted on your phone. Ask for any of that on any plan and it comes out of your monthly minutes. The difference higher up: on Care Standard and above I swap your seasonal offers over myself, on time, without you having to ask, and that proactive work doesn't touch your minutes. What doesn't count as an edit at all: a new page, a redesign of an existing one, a new feature like a quote calculator or a gated PDF, or a rebuild after a rebrand. Those are builds, and I quote them before I start so nothing lands on an invoice you didn't approve. Minutes reset on the 1st of each month and don't roll over. Past your minutes, work runs at $120/hr in 30-minute blocks, and I ask before the clock starts.

No. Rank is the second half of the same product, and it ships inside the care plan you're already paying for the site. There's no separate SEO retainer, no per-keyword pricing, and no upsell call three months in. The build sets the technical foundation (clean headings, fast pages, schema markup), and the monthly work keeps it moving.

Indexing takes days. Ranking takes months. A new site on a new domain usually starts picking up long-tail searches ("emergency plumber Mississauga after hours" or "same day dental crown Vaughan", the long-tail kind nobody bids on) inside 60 to 90 days. The competitive head terms take longer and depend on how many businesses in your city are doing the same work. Anyone who promises you page one in 30 days is selling you something I won't.

It depends which care plan you're on, so here's the straight breakdown. Every plan gets the upkeep: schema kept valid as Google changes what it reads, page titles and meta kept current as your services and service areas change, your Google Business Profile kept accurate, and a one-page monthly report showing clicks from search, times shown in search, rankings on tracked searches, and calls from your Google Business Profile, plus uptime and site health. That is keeping what you have correct and measuring where it lands. Care Standard adds the proactive work: a quarterly check on where you stand against the other businesses going after the same searches (in search results and in what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers say), your seasonal offers swapped over without you having to ask, and a quarterly content refresh on the pages sitting just outside the results you want. Care Pro takes that from quarterly to monthly (active rewriting and restructuring to chase the terms you're closest to winning) and adds posts, photos, and drafted review replies on your Google Business Profile. On every plan, new pages beyond the ones in your build are quoted separately. That's a build, not care.

No. Nobody can guarantee that ChatGPT will recommend a particular business, me included. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers decide for themselves which businesses to name. What I can do is make your site readable to AI search tools. The website build I deliver checks that nothing blocks AI search tools from your pages and describes your business the same way on the site, in its schema markup, and on your Google Business Profile. Google says its AI answers are rooted in the same core ranking systems as its regular search, so ordinary search work is the foundation. On Care Standard and up, the quarterly competitor rank check also records what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers say when someone asks for your kind of service in your area. For a local business, your Google Business Profile and your reviews carry a lot of the weight. I set up the Google Business Profile. The reviews have to come from your customers.

Yes. Setup and cleanup are part of the build, on every plan. That means claiming or reclaiming the listing, fixing the category, hours, and service area, matching the name, address, and phone number to what the site says, and wiring the profile to the site so the two reinforce each other. For a local business, the profile often drives more calls than the website does. Keeping it accurate month to month as your hours, services, and service areas change is on every care plan, Lite included. Posts, photos, and drafted replies to your reviews are Care Pro. That's active work on the profile, not just keeping it correct.

Sometimes. If your current site is fast, mobile-first, and structurally sound, I can take on the Rank half as a custom engagement. Bring it to the scoping call and I'll tell you straight. More often the site itself is the ceiling: slow pages, no schema, headings that say "Welcome to our website". In that case the build is the cheaper path, because tuning a foundation that can't hold rankings is money spent twice.

Your site keeps working. It's a static site, not a rented page on my platform. Nothing switches off at midnight and no login of mine holds it hostage. When you cancel by email there's a 15-day handover: I export the source files, move hosting and the domain into your name, and hand over the Cal.com, form, and analytics wiring. After that you can run it yourself, hand it to another developer, or leave it alone for two years and it will still load. What stops is the monthly work (the edits, the search work, the reporting, the patching), not the website.

Almost certainly not, and I won't pretend otherwise to sell you something. Ontario's AODA web content standard (WCAG 2.0 Level AA under the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation) legally binds public-sector organizations and private organizations with 50 or more employees. If you have fifteen employees, that rule is not pointed at you. Other parts of AODA still are, including providing information in an accessible format when someone asks. I build to WCAG 2.2 AA regardless, because more than a quarter of Canadians aged 15 and up report a disability and a site a screen reader can't read is a site that loses those calls. If you bid on public-sector or municipal work, or you're heading past 50 employees, say so on the call. Then it stops being a quality default and starts being a requirement.

Toronto, Ontario. Ontario Master Business Licence registered under trade name DigiCatalyst Systems, BIN 1001585874, HST 779120153RT0001. Service area covers the GTA primarily; out-of-area work is taken case-by-case if it's fully remote and matches a productized scope.

Interac e-Transfer or card. Every build invoice gives the e-Transfer address, and the money deposits automatically, with no security question. To pay by card, use the Pay Now button on the invoice. Stripe handles the payment. You pay for the written audit by card at checkout. The build fee is due when you buy and onboarding starts, or spread out on the payment plan. Monthly care-plan billing starts the day the site goes live, by card. Every price on this site is in Canadian dollars before tax. Ontario HST of 13% is added as a separate line on the invoice. Clients elsewhere in Canada pay their own provincial sales tax where it applies; US clients pay no Canadian tax. If you need a manual invoice for your bookkeeper, ask and I'll send one.

Yes. The build is $2,750 plus tax, and you can take it as three equal installments across the project or on a 25/25/50 split: 25% at kickoff, 25% at mockup sign-off, and 50% on launch day. Same total either way. The plan exists so cash flow isn't the reason you wait. It isn't a lever to talk the price down. I don't discount the build, because the price is the scope, and cutting one means quietly cutting the other.

• Every figure, on the pricing page→
• What a small business website costs in Toronto→

A paid, written audit of the site you already have. I read every page, check every link and file, and look up where you stand on Google and Google Maps for three searches. Up to three competitors go next to your home page on a phone, and your Google Business Profile is checked against your site. You get the fixes most important first within three business days, plus an optional 30-minute call to go through them. It's $49 plus tax and it's yours to keep. Take it to any developer you like, including one who isn't me. If you hire me afterwards, the $49 gets credited toward any build booked within 30 days of paying for the audit (the tax on it is not). Not available to businesses billed in Quebec.

The ten business days start when I have your text and photos, not when you sign. You get 5 business days from kickoff to send them, so the easiest way through is to have them ready before the kickoff call. Copywriting is not part of the build, so if writing the text is what holds you up, I can write it as a paid add-on, quoted before I start. Miss that window and the project goes on hold rather than launching half-empty. Your slot is released, and the project takes the next opening once your content arrives. If it has been on hold for more than 30 days by then, restarting it carries a $150 plus tax reactivation fee. If the project is still on hold 45 days after it started, with nothing sent, I close it out in writing and keep 25% of the project fee, meaning the build plus any extra pages or add-ons, for the work already done: kickoff, discovery, scoping, and the build slot I reserved for you. That retention never exceeds what you have actually paid, no further installments come due, and anything you have paid above it comes back to you. Send your content on time and none of this comes up.

The build is a one-time engagement, not a term. The care plan ($99-$299/mo) is opt-out at any time by email to support@digicatalyst.ca, with no notice period and no cancellation fee, followed by a 15-day handover where I export your source files, transfer hosting and domain ownership, and hand over any integrations. On top of that there's a 30-day post-launch satisfaction guarantee: tell me inside 30 days of launch and you keep every artifact. That guarantee is the artifacts handover, not a cash refund. The build fee covers work already delivered, so if you are paying by installment the remaining installments stay due on their original schedule. The relationship runs on a Master Services Agreement with a Statement of Work setting out deliverables, timeline, and acceptance criteria.