Victoria Web Design
Becker Design is in Saskatoon — about 1,600 kilometres and one ferry away. We’ve built one website in Victoria, and it runs four offices up and down Vancouver Island from a head office on Johnson Street.
Johnson Street, and everywhere it reaches
AVI Health & Community Services works out of the Access Health Centre on Johnson Street, with offices in Nanaimo, Courtenay and Campbell River. It’s a health and community organization whose visitors are often having a bad day, which makes the website’s job unusually simple to state and unusually hard to do: the person arriving has to find the right thing on the first screen, every time, on whatever phone they have. One client is a short list. This one earned the page.
Sixteen hundred kilometres and a boat
Home base
This page
This is the farthest anything on this site gets from our desk, and getting here involves a ferry, so let’s not pretend a road trip is part of the offer.
Our Island work is remote work. Kickoff is a video call. The written content lives in a shared document, and how quickly it fills in is what sets your launch date — the geography changes nothing about that. The build happens on a dev site, a private space on the web where the new website comes to life, and you have the link from day one, so you’re reviewing the real thing in a browser rather than approving pictures of it. When it’s done we flip a switch at the domain.
What the distance costs you is a person in the room. There are none. If a build needs photography, you hire an Island shooter and we direct it — which for an organization with four offices is what you’d want anyway.
The part that runs for years afterward — hosting, updates, upkeep, backups, security, and support — is completely indifferent to where anybody is. Six things, one bill.
We are not your local option, and that’s fine
Victoria has designers. If you want somebody you can meet for coffee, walk through a building with, or pull into a board meeting, hire one of them — and we’d tell you that on the first call rather than let you discover it in month three.
The reason an Island organization hired a Saskatoon studio anyway is worth stating plainly: they wanted the website built once, built properly, and then looked after by the same person for years — not handed to whoever is free that quarter. When you hire Becker Design you get Bryn. That’s the entire pitch, it has nothing to do with geography, and it’s why we’re still working with essentially everyone we’ve ever built for.
Mostly Saskatchewan, occasionally the Island
14 years and hundreds of builds. Home is Saskatoon; the work has reached Victoria, Vancouver, Kelowna, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal. A few below.
Five we can speak to
Two of these have a Victoria address behind them — the same one, doing two jobs at once. The other three don’t, and say so.
- 01VICTORIA — JOHNSON ST
Health care and clinics — including one on Johnson Street
AVI Health & Community Services runs health and outreach services from Johnson Street and three more Island offices. Their site has to serve a patient and a referring worker at the same time, in plain language, with accessibility that isn’t an afterthought. More on health care websites.
- 02VICTORIA — JOHNSON ST
Nonprofits — the same organization, the other half of the job
AVI is also a nonprofit, which means one site serving a board, a funder, a volunteer and a client who all want different things from the same three clicks. That tension — not the donate button — is the actual difficulty. More on nonprofit websites.
- 03
Arts and music
Saskatoon Jazz Orchestra, Strata Festival of New Music, Saskatoon Youth Orchestra, Coal Creek Festival. All prairie, none Island. The calendar is always the main event. More on arts and music.
- 04
Travel and tourism
Saskatooning, ExploreSSEP, Valley Zipline, The Ridge on Amisk. Valley Zipline is our only BC tourism build and it’s in the Kootenays, not out here. More on travel and tourism.
- 05
Professional services
OptimaHR, Your Voice Consulting, ResearchFDI. Nothing on the Island yet. More on professional services.
The one client, on the record
LP — AVI Health & Community Services★★★★★I worked with Bryn on a website redesign for a non-profit client. He was a total delight to work with from start to finish. He was extremely friendly and pleasant to work with, always clear and consistent on timelines, and produced a beautiful, well-designed, accessible, usable site that we’re absolutely thrilled with, at a competitive price. I would recommend him wholeheartedly.
Four reasons an Island organization calls the prairies
Not proximity, obviously. Usually one of these.
- 01
The site can’t be updated by the people who need to
Staff turn over, hours change, a program ends. If updating any of that requires a developer, it stops happening and the site starts lying.
- 02
Accessibility was treated as a checkbox
For an organization whose visitors include people in crisis, “accessible” isn’t a compliance line — it’s whether somebody finds help. It has to be in the build, not bolted on.
- 03
Multiple locations, one confused visitor
Four offices, four sets of hours and services, and a person who needs the one nearest them right now. It’s a structure problem and it’s solvable.
- 04
Nobody’s minding it
Launched, handed over, forgotten. Ongoing care is the part we treat as the actual job rather than the upsell.
Questions we actually get asked
The Island version. The first one is the fair one.
You’re how far away?
About 1,600 kilometres and a ferry. We’re not going to soften that. Our Island work is done remotely and has been for years, and the organization we built for here has four offices we’ve never stood in.
Have you built anything in Victoria?
One: AVI Health & Community Services, head office on Johnson Street plus Nanaimo, Courtenay and Campbell River. One client, and it’s the kind of build we’d want to be judged on.
Shouldn’t we hire locally?
Quite possibly — we’ve written down why above instead of hiding it. If you want someone in the room, Victoria has good people. If you want one person who builds it and then keeps it right for years, that’s the thing we do.
Can our staff maintain it themselves?
Yes, and for an organization your size that’s the whole point. You get a backend built around your actual content — programs, locations, hours, people — so changing something is filling in the thing you want changed. The layout isn’t yours to break.
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 the organization does and who has to be able to use the site. We’ll come back with a written scope covering the build and the years after it. 306.292.7660 — an hour or two ahead of you, depending on the season.