Prince Albert Web Design
Becker Design builds websites out of Saskatoon, an hour and a half down Highway 11. We don’t have a Prince Albert office and never have — but four businesses with P.A. addresses run on sites we built, and two of them are on the same industrial drive.
Two of them on the same street, which we found out afterward
Thorpe is at 428 South Industrial Drive. NexGen Mechanical is at 390, a few doors down — we built both sites, years apart, and neither project mentioned the other. Vern’s Pizza is on 15th Street West. Legal Aid Saskatchewan works out of the McIntosh building on Central. None of them hired us from Prince Albert; all of them ended up with a P.A. address on a site we’d built.
An hour and a half, and what it actually buys you
Home base
This page
An hour and a half is a strange distance. It’s too far to pop in and close enough that “remote” sounds like an excuse. So here’s how it really goes.
The kickoff is a call. The written content lives in a shared document you can open from your phone, and gathering it is the part that decides your timeline — not us, and not the highway. The build happens on a dev site, a private space on the web where the new website comes to life, and you get the link on day one so you can watch it take shape from your own desk. When it’s finished we flip a switch at the domain and the new site is live.
What the drive is for: photographs of the actual yard, a walkthrough of the shop, a morning sitting with whoever’s going to keep the site current afterward. Highway 11 is four lanes the whole way and we’ve done it more times than we’ve counted.
Then the part that doesn’t end. Hosting, updates, upkeep, backups, security, and support — six things, one bill, no surprises. Distance has never once been why a site went down.
When you should hire somebody in Prince Albert instead
If what you need is somebody who can be in your building repeatedly and on short notice — monthly photography, training a counter staff that turns over, sitting in on meetings — hire local. We’d say that on the phone before you asked. It isn’t modesty; we’d be the wrong tool and you’d work that out by month four.
What we’re built for is the other case, which is most of them. You want the thing built properly once, looked after for years without you thinking about it, and you’d rather email one person than manage an agency. That works exactly the same from 141 kilometres away as it does from across town — and it’s what we’ve been doing for 14 years.
The rest of the province, while we’re at it
P.A. is one market on a list that runs from Estevan to La Ronge and out past the provincial line. 14 years, hundreds of builds, mostly service businesses within a day’s drive. A few below.
The industries we’ve actually done this for
Four of these have a Prince Albert address behind them and we say which. The other three are honest about not having one. Seven cards rather than fifteen, because the other eight would just be us describing industries at you.
- 01P.A. YARD — SOUTH INDUSTRIAL
Construction companies — including one on South Industrial
Thorpe runs three companies out of one site, and the Prince Albert yard is on South Industrial Drive. We folded the whole group into a single website — every service with its own page, because that’s how people actually search. More on construction websites.
- 02P.A. OFFICE — SOUTH INDUSTRIAL
Contractors — including one a few doors down
NexGen Mechanical keeps a Prince Albert office at 390 South Industrial Drive, with its own phone and its own crew. Their site had to make it obvious that P.A. isn’t a service area for them, it’s a base. More on contractor websites.
- 0315TH STREET WEST
Restaurants — including the one on 15th
Vern’s Pizza, home of the Original Thick, on 15th Street West. The site’s entire job is getting a hungry person to the ordering page without a detour. More on restaurant websites.
- 04CENTRAL AVENUE
Law firms — including Legal Aid Saskatchewan
Legal Aid Saskatchewan’s P.A. office is in the McIntosh building on Central, serving people who need an answer today. The old site buried what those people came for; the new one puts it in front, and their staff maintain it themselves. More on law firm websites.
- 05
Mining and heavy industry
Our mining work sits with the Northern Strands companies and Fortis, south of here. If you supply the northern operations out of a P.A. base, this is how we structure it.
- 06
Health care and clinics
Nothing in Prince Albert yet, which is a gap given what the city is to the whole north. Prairie Diagnostic Services and the Canadian Retina Society are the closest comparables we’ve built. More on health care websites.
- 07
Nonprofits
Pink Wig Foundation, Saskatoon Youth Orchestra, Shifting Ground. A board, a donor and a volunteer coordinator all want different things from one small site — that, not the donate button, is the actual difficulty. More on nonprofit websites.
Four reasons a P.A. business picks up the phone
Nobody calls a web designer because things are going well. Roughly in order of how often we hear it:
- 01
The person who built it is gone
Small-town builds have a way of belonging to one guy who has since moved, changed careers, or stopped answering. If nobody can log in, that’s the first thing we fix and it’s usually fixable.
- 02
It doesn’t say what you actually do now
Businesses grow sideways. The site still describes the company from six years ago, and the most profitable thing you do isn’t on it anywhere.
- 03
It falls apart on a phone
Most of your traffic is somebody standing in a parking lot. If the menu doesn’t work with a thumb, that visit is over.
- 04
There’s no obvious next move
Somebody reads three pages, nods along, and leaves — because nothing told them what to do. Every page needs an answer to “and now what?”
Questions we actually get asked
Mostly in the first ten minutes of the call.
Where are you, actually?
Saskatoon — 141 kilometres down Highway 11, about an hour and a half. We’ve never had a P.A. office and we’re not going to invent one, but we’ve had Prince Albert work on our servers for years.
Have you built anything in Prince Albert?
Four sites are running at P.A. addresses: Thorpe and NexGen Mechanical on South Industrial Drive, Vern’s on 15th Street West, and Legal Aid Saskatchewan on Central. You can look them all up in the portfolio.
Would you actually come up here?
Yes, and we do. Photography, a shop walkthrough, a morning training whoever’s going to run the site — those are worth the drive and we don’t ration them. What we won’t do is pretend we’d be up every second week, because we wouldn’t.
How long does it take?
About three months from deposit to launch, and the biggest variable isn’t us — it’s how fast the written content comes together. The first few weeks are the quiet ones.
What happens after it launches?
We keep it. Hosting, updates, upkeep, backups, security, and support — that’s Enhanced Ongoing Services, and it’s how every site we build is looked after.
Tell us what you’re working on
Tell us what you do and what the website has to do for it. We’ll send back a scope, a timeline and a number, in writing, before anything is committed. If you’d rather talk first, 306.292.7660 — and we’re up the highway often enough that a meeting isn’t a production.