About Becker Design

Bryn got into websites sideways. He was at the University of Saskatchewan, finishing an honours English degree and working at The Sheaf, the campus newspaper, when somebody needed to look after the paper’s website. He put his hand up. Two years of running that site taught him things the degree couldn’t: how the web actually works, what readers actually click, and how much of a website’s success gets decided where nobody’s looking.

Graduation came and went without a single job application. beckerdesign.ca was registered in June of 2012, and the shop has run continuously ever since — same founder, same city, same phone number.

The early years were all over the map: graphic design, photography, videography, billboards, TV spots, murals — freelance and agency work all over Saskatoon. If it needed designing, Bryn designed it. It amounted to an accidental apprenticeship in dozens of industries, which is why so little about anyone’s line of work surprises us now.

Websites slowly crowded everything else out, for a simple reason: they kept needing him. A billboard goes up and the job is over. A website launches and the job starts.

Eventually the sideline became the whole job. Bryn stopped taking the billboard work, the video work, and the everything-else work, and put all of it into one thing: designing and developing websites, then keeping them running. Narrowing down was the point. A generalist can do a passable job on a dozen things; somebody who has built hundreds of websites has seen every way one can go wrong, and has fixed most of them twice.

The platform question had an easy answer. WordPress is powerful open source software, and everything Becker Design builds on it is hand-built: a fully bespoke WordPress Content Management System (CMS) backend and a 100% custom front-end design, made for that client and nobody else. No themes bought off a shelf, no leftovers from the last job, and nothing a client can’t take with them.

Once the job starts it never really ends, and Bryn took that seriously enough to build the thing most shops this size rent from somebody else: the infrastructure. Every site Becker Design builds lives on a high-end cloud server tuned specifically for WordPress, in Canada or the United States, with a complete copy of the site held by a separate provider in a separate part of the continent, ready to take over if the primary ever falters. The standby has never once been needed. It’s there anyway.

A firewall turns away the automated junk before WordPress ever sees it, a year of backups sits ready to restore in minutes, and monitoring watches every site around the clock, so he hears about a problem before the client does. It’s more infrastructure than a one-person company has any business running, which is exactly why it exists. All of it ships as one flat-fee plan, Enhanced Ongoing Services: hosting, updates, upkeep, backups, security, and support, for the life of the site. Sites Bryn launched more than a decade ago are still running on it today.