Who you'll actually be working with

Hiring someone to build your website is an odd kind of purchase. You'll depend on the result every day for years, and most of what decides whether it works is hard to see from outside: who actually does the work, what it's built on, and what happens when they move on.

So here's the plain version. Uniweb Studio is two things at once: a team in Ottawa that does the work, and a Canadian software company behind it that owns the platform your site runs on. Each half covers the other's weak spot.

The team you'll talk to

We keep it personal on purpose. When you call, you reach the people who design and build your site — not an account manager relaying messages, and not a ticket queue in another time zone. Whoever is on your first call stays on your project through launch day, and after it.

• A reply from a person within one business day. Usually sooner.
• In person, if you'd like. A coffee near your shop, or ten minutes behind the counter, tells us more than any questionnaire.
• We write the copy. One 30-minute interview and we take it from there. You shouldn't be writing web pages at 11 pm.

Being local isn't nostalgia, either. We know the neighbourhoods your customers live in, which matters when the goal is to be the first thing people three streets over find.

Where web agencies usually go wrong

It would be dishonest to pitch "local and personal" without saying how that usually goes wrong. Web shops tend to fail their clients in three predictable ways:

1. The person leaves. A freelancer takes a full-time job, and your site turns into a login nobody remembers.
2. The tools belong to someone else. Most agencies assemble a site from a website builder, a booking app, a store plugin and a mailing tool. When one of them raises its price or drops a feature, you absorb it.
3. The unglamorous work slips. Updates get skipped, and nobody checks whether someone using a screen reader can actually book.

Our answer to all three is the company behind us.

The company behind us

Proximify is a Canadian software company that has been building and running web platforms since 2012, mostly for universities and public institutions. That is a demanding clientele: accessibility audits, security reviews and uptime guarantees are the price of entry, not extras.

Uniweb is Proximify's own platform. More than 8,000 profiles run on it, and Proximify manages more than 100 websites, including faculty sites and research portals for the University of Ottawa, Université de Montréal, the University of Guelph and École de technologie supérieure.

We don't resell somebody else's software. The studio exists to bring that same engineering and hosting to businesses like yours, sized and priced for a salon, a clinic or a shop.

What institutional-grade means for a bakery

"University standards" sounds abstract, so here's what it means in practice:

• Accessible by default. Sites are built to WCAG 2.1 AA, so a customer using a screen reader or a keyboard can find your hours, book a table and pay. Nobody has to remember to check, because it's how the platform works.
• Security you don't manage. There's no plugin for you to forget to update. We patch the platform, and every site on it gets the fix at once.
• Uptime in writing. A 99.9% uptime SLA works out to less than nine hours of downtime across an entire year — written into an agreement, not promised on a sales call.
• A platform that can change for you. Because Proximify builds Uniweb, "the software doesn't do that" isn't the end of the conversation. If your business needs something new, it can be built in.

What happens if you ever leave

Nobody likes planning for this, but you should ask every agency about it before you sign.

Your domain is registered in your name, not ours. Your customer list and your data are yours. Your content lives in plain files, kept apart from the design and the code, so you can take it with you. We'd rather keep you because the work is good than because leaving is hard.