25 Years of Service
When we started in 1999, our idea was to build a directory of every business website in Canada. People would be able to search by word, category, or location, and it would be free to use and free to add a business. We would also create a website building software that would allow people who didn’t know anything about programming to set up and update their own website.
Now, more than 25 years later we’ve built more than 5,000 websites for small businesses in every province and territory in Canada in over 800 cities and towns and in every industry imaginable.
Our directory of Canadian business websites has gone through a lot of changes, is bigger and better than ever, is still free to use, and you can still add your business for free if it isn’t in there yet: https://websites.ca/signup
Our website service has changed a lot too. We found that most businesses are too busy to update their website themselves and would rather have us just take care of the updates for them. Now they just call or email with changes and we take care of their updates for them – usually within a day or two. We also take care of their domain names, email, hosting, and SEO.
In 2011, we switched to the WordPress platform for building and managing websites for our customers. More than 40% of all websites are built with WordPress now so there is a huge development community helping us make our customers’ websites better and better. As of 2024 we’ve built more than 2,000 WordPress websites!
We’ve recently gone a step further and have built our own Managed WordPress Hosting platform. Now we can host our own customers’ websites on a system fine-tuned for WordPress, optimized for lightning fast page-load speed, with 24/7 security monitoring and automatic nightly backups, and enabled for easy WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates.
Our office is still in Winnipeg, and we have addresses in Calgary, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, Montrreal, and Halifax. Not a customer yet? You can switch to Websites.ca for free!
Looking forward to another 25 years,
John Hart
Co-Founder
Websites.ca Web Design
Our Team
John Hart
Co-Founder
Ryan Desmarais
Sales
Sean Corbett
Marketing
Nara Munro
Design
Nara has been with Websites.ca for over 10 years. She lives in Eastern Ontario with her husband and daughter, and knows the struggle of rural internet service. When she isn’t designing websites you will find her cooking or practicing her photography.
Stephanie Haderer
Onboarding
Onboarding and Support Specialist, Stephanie is a University of Manitoba graduate living in Winnipeg. Second to Super Meat Boy, nothing satisfies her more than troubleshooting or sorting out a DNS mess.
Paul Renault
Design
Ingrid Pedersen
Support
As a former Creative Communications student, Ingrid juggles various media related tasks. Fluently bilingual, she enjoys traveling to visit her family in Montréal and discovering new local Winnipeg restaurants.
Isaias Garcia & Jessica Paiva
Design
Isaias & Jessica are Toronto-based web designers and co-founders of I&J Designs, a small web and graphic design boutique. When not working you’ll find them exploring inside open world video games, because the real world is scary enough as it is. Check out their work at www.ijdesigns.ca
Larissa Greening
Support
Marisa Walters
Directory
Marisa manages our Websites.ca Business Directory from Montreal. She has many years in customer service and in her free time she loves baking and playing video games with her friends!