Everything you need to be found, chosen, and hired online.

Brand Nav is a full-service web studio for local businesses in the Greater Toronto Area. Everything below is delivered in-house by the same team, bundled into one flat $2,000 build, with no per-service surcharge and no revolving cast of subcontractors. Whether you need a first website, a full rebrand, an ecommerce storefront, or a technical SEO overhaul, the scope, price, and timeline are the same predictable arrangement.

UX Design and user research

User experience design is the invisible layer that decides whether a visitor calls you or bounces to a competitor. Every Brand Nav project starts with a compact but rigorous UX phase — a review of your industry's search intent, an audit of the top three local competitors on Google, a hierarchy of the calls-to-action your business actually monetises, and a decision on which mobile interaction pattern (sticky call button, floating quote form, prominent booking widget) fits your customer's buying journey. We do not run six-week design-thinking workshops. We do the research that changes real outcomes and skip the ceremony.

Web design — custom, conversion-first, mobile-native

The web design market in Toronto has trained business owners to expect one of two things — an eye-catching agency site that took six months and $18,000 to ship, or a Squarespace template that everyone in their industry is also using. Brand Nav sits in between. Real custom design, tailored to your brand, your industry, and your neighbourhood, engineered for a phone in your customer's hand and delivered in under a week.

We work in a design language borrowed from the best of consumer product companies — generous whitespace, restrained colour, high-contrast typography, and thoughtful photography. The goal is not to look clever. The goal is that a visitor knows in three seconds what you do, who you serve, and how to hire you. Custom illustration, motion, and interactive elements are used sparingly and only when they serve the conversion path.

Web development — fast, semantic, and built to rank

The engineering underneath a Brand Nav site is where a lot of our unfair advantage lives. Server-side rendering means the first paint of the page — the headline, the hero image, the phone number — is visible to a visitor before their browser has even finished parsing our JavaScript. Semantic HTML means Google's crawlers understand the structure of the page without ambiguity. A minimal JS payload means Core Web Vitals stay in the green even on an older Android on cellular. And an edge-hosted CDN means the site loads in under two seconds from anywhere in Canada.

We build without page builders. No Elementor, no Divi, no WPBakery. Those tools produce sites that visually look correct but ship 800 kilobytes of JavaScript and rank poorly on mobile Core Web Vitals. Our builds ship the code the browser actually needs and nothing else.

WordPress development and maintenance

For clients who need to own and edit their content in a familiar CMS, we build custom WordPress themes on a lean, block-based foundation. No bloated page-builders, no theme sprawl, no 40-plugin dependency graph waiting to break at the next security patch. Just clean, semantic themes with the blocks you actually use.

WordPress maintenance is a separate, hands-off deliverable. We handle core updates, plugin updates, security patches, off-site backups, and uptime monitoring. If something breaks, we fix it before you notice. If you are currently paying an agency $150 to $300 a month just for maintenance, our flat $2,000 build probably costs less than what you are already spending on caretaking.

SEO — technical, on-page, and local

Every Brand Nav website ships SEO-ready because the alternative is expensive later. Retrofitting a poorly-built site to rank in local search is often more work than rebuilding it. On day one your site has valid LocalBusiness schema, canonical URLs, an XML sitemap, a robots.txt tuned for indexation, meta tags on every page, Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata for social sharing, FAQPage structured data where relevant, and BreadcrumbList schema on deep routes.

Local SEO — the specific discipline of ranking in Google's map pack for neighbourhood-level queries — is where most Toronto business owners see the biggest payoff. It's a mix of on-site signals (structured data, geographic content, internal linking to city pages) and off-site signals (Google Business Profile optimisation, NAP consistency across directories, review generation). We handle the on-site half in every plan and audit the off-site half on the Pro and Expert tiers.

CRO — conversion rate optimisation

The cheapest form of growth is not more traffic — it is more conversions from the traffic you already have. Doubling the conversion rate on your quote form is functionally the same as doubling your ad spend, except it costs nothing per month. Brand Nav CRO work involves reviewing your analytics for drop-off patterns, rewriting weak calls-to-action, testing form field counts (three-field forms almost always beat seven-field forms), adding trust signals like reviews and certifications above the fold, and simplifying the path from landing on the site to submitting an enquiry.

AI Search — GEO and AEO for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) and answer engine optimisation (AEO) are the newer disciplines that decide whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and other LLM-driven search products cite your business as a source. Being cited in an AI answer is not the same as ranking on a Google results page — it requires clean structured data, canonical facts about your business (services, service area, hours, pricing bands, credentials), and long-form content that reads well when quoted out of context.

We build every Brand Nav site with the crawlable factual foundations that AI search engines actually reward — a well-formed About page, an unambiguous services list, a location schema that says which cities you serve, and content that answers specific customer questions in full sentences rather than in bulleted keyword-stuffed lists.

Ecommerce — fast storefronts that check out on mobile

For product businesses with a catalogue under a few hundred SKUs, we build fast mobile-first storefronts with a one-page checkout, Product schema for rich results, trust badges baked into the product page, and a compressed image pipeline that keeps LCP under 2.5 seconds even on a 40-image category page. For larger catalogues we integrate with Shopify or a comparable commerce backend and layer our design and performance work on top.

Brand identity, logo, and graphic design

A website inherits its credibility from the brand behind it. If your logo was made in Microsoft Paint, your colour palette is inconsistent between your invoice and your business card, and your fonts change every second page, no amount of great web design will fix the underlying trust problem. Brand Nav offers full brand identity work — positioning, voice, colour system, typography system, logo, and supporting graphic design for print, social, and marketing — as part of the same annual arrangement.

Accessibility compliance — WCAG 2.2 AA

Accessibility is no longer optional in Canada. The Accessible Canada Act and provincial equivalents (AODA in Ontario) apply to a growing range of private businesses, and even when they don't apply formally, the reputational and legal risk of an inaccessible site is meaningful. Every Brand Nav build ships with WCAG 2.2 AA foundations — semantic landmarks, keyboard-navigable interactive elements, sufficient colour contrast, meaningful alt text on informational imagery, ARIA attributes only where semantic HTML falls short, and focus states you can actually see.

For existing sites, we run full audits — an automated pass with axe-core, followed by a manual pass with a screen reader — and produce a remediation plan you can implement or hand back to us to execute.

Website speed optimisation — sub-2.5s LCP, green Core Web Vitals

Speed is a ranking factor, a conversion factor, and a customer respect factor. Google has been mobile-first in its ranking model since 2019 — your desktop performance doesn't affect your rank; only your mobile numbers do. Our target for every build is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) under 0.1. We hit those numbers by deferring non-critical JavaScript, serving responsive image formats, using system fonts where possible, preloading only the fonts and images that appear in the first viewport, and cutting the tag manager sprawl that most agency sites accumulate over time.

How we deliver every service

The delivery model is deliberately identical across every service line. You onboard on a short kickoff call. We collect your brand assets, service list, and photography. We produce the site, storefront, brand system, or SEO deliverable in two to six working days. You approve. It ships. From that point forward, all minor changes — content edits, image swaps, price updates, seasonal campaigns — are handled by email at no additional cost for your first year, then covered by the optional $199/year care plan.

If you want to explore how any of these services would apply to your specific business — a plumbing company in Etobicoke, a family clinic in Mississauga, a Brampton restaurant, a boutique in Bloor West Village — request a free consult and we will scope it in plain English before any invoice is issued.