Websites for Kingston's seasons and customers

Kingston runs on its own calendar, and a build that ignores it is the mistake I'd want to avoid on your behalf.

Three schools set the rhythm. Queen's University, the Royal Military College, and St. Lawrence College bring a large crowd of people to town who arrive in late August knowing nothing about where to eat or who fixes a laptop when it breaks. Every fall you get a fresh crowd of customers who have no idea you exist and who will find you almost entirely through a phone. Then there's the other Kingston: government offices, hospitals, the correctional and defence employers, the people who live here year-round and aren't going anywhere.

And on top of both, the tourists: the waterfront, the limestone downtown, the Thousand Islands boats. Summer is loud, February is not.

So a Kingston business is usually serving two or three different audiences on two or three different schedules, and the website has to work for all of them without anybody rewriting it four times a year.

What the calendar asks of a small Kingston site

Hours come first. In a city with a student term, a tourist summer and a quiet stretch in between, "are you open" has more than one answer a year. In my experience, stale hours cost more customers than bad design does, so the site needs one place where you can change them in a minute, and they need to match your Google listing.

Then the audiences. A student in September, a visitor in July and a resident in February arrive with different questions, and each of them types something different into Google. Say who you serve in plain words near the top of the page. If you're an electrician who does residential panel upgrades in Kingston and Amherstview, that sentence should be on the page.

How many pages that takes depends on the business, and what pages a Kingston business site needs shows how to build the list from your own week. If you're after the numbers, what a website costs in Kingston covers the three fixed sizes and the four things that move any quote.

Downtown storefront or service business, the site is not the same

If you're downtown, your site is mostly answering: are you open, where do I park, what does it cost, is this the sort of place I want to walk into. Photos matter, hours matter, and being findable on maps matters more than almost anything else.

If you run a service business from a truck or a home office out toward Amherstview, Gananoque or Napanee, the questions are different. Do you cover my area, are you licensed and insured, how fast can you come, and can I reach a person today. Put those answers high on the page where people will actually find them.

Same city, two very different builds. When the site is ready to go live, the launch checklist covers what has to be right on the day.

A local resource worth knowing

If you're getting established here, the Greater Kingston Chamber of Commerce is a genuinely useful place to start. Membership gets you into the room with people who already know the local market, which is worth more early on than most marketing spend. The Downtown Kingston BIA is the equivalent if your business lives in the core.

I mention them because they're useful to you whether or not you ever hire me.

If your project is bigger than a small site, such as a custom WordPress build, an online course or accessibility work, my own practice at thisismyurl.com has a website design page for Kingston.

Questions I get asked

Talk to me about your site

Tell me what your business does and what you want the site to do for it. If I'm not the right fit, I'll say so and point you somewhere better.

Call 613.480.1345, or email hello@kingstonwebdesigner.com if that's easier.