Because each customer’s requirements are different, you can choose from the following additional features to create just what you need.
One of the great benefits of working with WordPress is that powerful functionality can be added affordably to your website using off-the-shelf plugins. We’ll install, configure and visually customize your required plugins to integrate seamlessly with your site’s design. Popular plugins include:
Need a custom feature in your website that lets you interact with your customers in a unique way? A feature that your competition may not have? If an off-the-shelf plugin isn’t available, we’ve got the technical skills to create it from scratch, either as a custom plugin or by integrating custom code into your theme.
Many of our clients maintain mailing lists and send out regular announcements or newsletters. Let us take your branding to the next level by customizing your MailChimp email to coordinate with your website.
Many social media sites allow you to display your organization’s logo in several different locations. However, the aspect ratio in which the logo is displayed may vary for each location, resulting in your logo being stretched, or pixelly, or some of it being cropped out. We’ll create a version of your logo for each social media site you use, which correctly fills the space allowed, without distortion or loss of information due to cropping.
If you’d like to go beyond uploading your logo, to have your social media page styled to match your new website, we’ll work with the features offered by each social media platform you use to achieve the best result.
Writing copy can be time consuming and challenging. If you’d like to hand that task off to an experienced writer, we’ll create compelling and engaging text that communicates your message clearly to your audience.
For the best marketing results, you’ll want to present a consistent brand identity in all your communications. A style guide is a document that summarizes all the fonts, colours and images that comprise your corporate image, and provides guidelines on how to use them consistently. This is particularly useful if there are multiple people in your organization preparing marketing materials.
We don’t just design for the online world. Our team is proficient at creating elegant and effective printed marketing materials. Let us design your printed materials to ensure consistency across all your marketing, including:
If you’re interested in any of the options on this page, drop us an email and we’ll send you our complete pricing PDF.
Your corporate image tells an important story to your clients, indicating the level of quality and service they can expect when dealing with you. A contemporary, high-quality logo and carefully chosen fonts and colours reassure customers that you’re a professional organization and can be relied on to deliver what you’ve promised.
Your logo, fonts and colours are integral components around which your website can be designed, so if you are planning for both a new corporate image and a new website, you’ll get the best results (in terms of both quality and cost) by doing the corporate image first.
There are two types of logos, and we offer both.
A wordmark is a logo containing only text. Famous wordmarks include Coca-Cola, FedEx, Facebook and CNN. A wordmark typically includes your business name (or an abbreviation of it), and may occasionally include a tag line. Multiple fonts, font sizes and colours may be used.
A LogoMark is a unique graphic element, which may or may not include some text. Famous examples include the Nike ‘swoosh’, McDonald’s ‘golden arches’, and Apple’s apple.
We’ve also helped clients update outdated logos, keeping their original concept intact, while freshening up colours, fonts and shape. If you’re interested in this, send us an image of your current logo and we can advise you of the anticipated cost to update it.
If you’re ready to showcase your organization to best effect, contact us today to discuss how we can achieve that.
Our SEO Starter offering is a cost-effective way to increase your new website’s ranking on search engines like Google and Bing. This package is available for WordPress sites (which are NOT built with WordPress.com) and for SquareSpace sites. It is designed for websites that have not had prior SEO work. Here’s how it works.
You provide us with two phrases (keywords) that you want your website to rank for. (For example, for our site those might be “web design, vancouver, bc” and “web development, vancouver, bc”.) Then we make a set of changes to your website to improve its ranking for those phrases.
Note: Due to the complex and ever-changing nature of the web, we cannot guarantee particular rankings as a result of our work. If your business works in a highly competitive industry, with many local competitors, it is more difficult to rank near the top than if you are a unique business, with few competitors. If we identify up-front that your web designer has already implemented the SEO strategies that are part of this package, we will advise you not to purchase the package.
The package includes the following:
With these techniques, we were able to bring a new townhome development in a small town to the number #1 spot on Google, and to bring a custom home builder, with a number of competitors, to #7 and #8 on Google (after they started out not even ranking for their desired search term on any of the 6 pages of results).
Note: This is an implementation package, not a consultation package, so the following items are not included in this package.
We have the skills in-house to go beyond information-only websites, to create fully custom web-based software. Here are examples of some of the ways we’ve helped our clients reduce business costs, increase efficiency, and succeed online.
If you’re interested in developing custom web-based software, please contact us. We’ll email you our proprietary Project Discovery Worksheet, which will help you identify both the target audience for your software and what you need that software to achieve. If you require, we’ll sign a non-disclosure agreement before you share your discovery sheet with us. We’ll review your worksheet, and if we think we can help, we’ll offer a one-hour complimentary call to discuss the project.
Depending on the complexity of your project, we may be able to prepare a fixed price quote following that call, or we’ll recommend working together on an hourly basis to identify and write up detailed project requirements, which you can then use to shop around for multiple bids. Alternatively, if your requirements are evolving, and our schedule permits, we can develop your software on an ongoing hourly basis.
After your site is launched, we offer long-term support to ensure your site stays up-to-date and functioning properly in the face of software upgrades. Here are just a few of the tasks we can take care of for you:
For some clients we are an integral part of their team, carrying out a variety of online and graphic design tasks every month. Others only need us a few hours a year. Whether you need occassional assistance, or a major feature like ecommerce, we’ll be here.
Our prepaid hourly packages address this wide range of client needs. Hours are good for one year from the purchase date.
If you wish to have us work hourly (instead of purchasing a prepaid package) and invoice you at the end of each month for the amount worked, this option is available at an hourly rate of $110/hour + GST.
There are a myriad of hosting companies out there, and it can be difficult to know who to choose to host your website.
Because many clients come to us with prepurchased hosting, we’ve had the opportunity to compare the offerings of a number of hosting companies, including the speed of their servers, the responsiveness and helpfulness of their support staff, and the simplicity of their customer interface. We’ve also spent hours researching options for Canadian web hosting. Below we share our recommendations.
[Tip: Wondering what hosting is and whether you need it for your website? Check out our post Hosting vs Domain Registration.]
Most well-known hosting companies in North America (like Amazon and GoDaddy) store your website on a server (computer) located on United States territory. All data on their servers are then subject to US laws: the American government can require hosting companies on their soil to hand over all the data from their servers, which includes not only data displayed on the website, but also any orders and customer data stored by ecommerce software, and any emails sent from and received by email accounts that are stored on the server.
Because Digital Dandelion is based in Canada, and most of our clients are in Canada, we are frequently asked to recommend hosting that is geographically located in Canada. There are several reasons you might want to have your website stored on Canadian soil:
It can be tricky to find an ideal web host in Canada. We have a smaller population here, so hosting companies are usually smaller, with fewer staff and potentially longer response times for support requests. On top of that, when a company does gets quite successful, it often gets bought out by international mega-companies who then move the hosting out of Canada. This happened to our previous favourite Canadian companies, BlueFur and Site5.
After extensive research, and trials with several Canadian hosting companies, we have selected Web Hosting Canada as our recommended provider of Canadian web hosting. We’ve installed more than a dozen client websites – and two of our own – on their hosting.
Their prices and plans are competitive and their support team is knowledgeable and helpful – and bilingual (in English and French). The company is Canadian (not a US company with servers in Canada), so pricing is in Canadian dollars. They will even move your website to their server for free!
Most of the websites we’ve put on their server have been WordPress sites – which their servers are optimised for – but we have also installed a custom PHP-based web application with great results. We also appreciate their occasional email newsletters, which share useful information for webmasters and website owners.
Click the logo below to see the different plans they offer.
If fast response time on your support requests is more important to you than where your site is hosted geographically – or if you prefer hosting located in the United States or Europe – we recommend ICDSoft. Their packages are competitively priced and their support is excellent.
Click the logo below to see the different plans they offer.
[Transparency: The images above use affiliate links to take you to those hosting companies’ websites. This means we will receive a payment from them if you purchase one of their plans after clicking the link. (That payment comes out of their profit; you do NOT pay more.) These payments help fund the ongoing research we undertake to identify and recommend suitable hosts to both our clients and readers of this website.]