Edmonton’s AI-first web agency
Your organization needs
A website that works
as hard as your team does.
We design, build, and support strategic WordPress websites that turn complex needs into clear paths forward. From custom functionality to reliable Canadian hosting, we take responsibility for keeping your website secure, effective, and ready to perform.
No lock-in contracts
No setup fees
Everything bundled
Retainers from $1,500/mo
★★★★★
5.0
26 Google reviews
James Murgatroyd
Founder · 20+ years · You work with him directly
20 yrs
Building websites that behave
280+
Alberta organizations since 2005
99.9%
Uptime across everything we host
1
Human at the top of the org chart
Trusted by 280+ Alberta businesses and international organizations since 2005
Alberta Cancer Foundation
Curling Alberta
CASA Mental Health
Essex Lease
FRIAA
Centre for Family Literacy
Simply Supper
Alberta SPCA
Two ways this goes wrong
Two kinds of websites end up on my desk.
The one that looks fine. And the one that fell apart without anyone breaking it. Neither of them needs a rebrand — they need someone to take responsibility.
Exhibit A
The one that looks fine
Traffic that hasn’t moved in three years. Nobody notices, because nobody is looking — and the site is technically fine, so there’s nothing obvious to fix. This is the most common condition we’re called about, and the hardest to sell internally.
Exhibit B
The one that grew until it fell apart
247 pages, of which eleven get visited. Every one was justified when it was written. Together they mean nobody — human or machine — can tell what the organization actually does. Cutting is harder than adding, so it never happens.
Neither of them needs a rebrand.
Both need someone to take responsibility for making the website work — the structure, the search, the speed, and the path from visitor to action. That’s the job. It’s the only job we do.
— James Murgatroyd, moderately cold coffee in hand
The five-minute self-check
Do you actually need a new website?
Usually not. Most “we need a new site” problems are findability, speed, structure, and conversion-path problems — and those are fixable without starting over. Five questions to find out which one you’ve actually got.
Can your team add a new page without calling someone?
Repair, not replace. If the answer is no, that’s usually a missing design system and undocumented templates, not a broken platform. Building a component library on your existing site and recording a walkthrough solves it in weeks. A rebuild that doesn’t explicitly fix this reproduces it on day one — plenty do.
Does your content model match what you actually do?
Repair, usually. If you run programs, events, and members but the site only knows about “pages” and “posts”, editors end up duplicating everything by hand. Often that’s fixable in place by adding proper content types. It becomes a rebuild case only when the existing model actively fights the correction.
Is the navigation describing your organization, or its history?
Repair — and the cheapest high-impact work there is. Menus that grew by accretion are an information architecture problem, and IA is content work: decide what the site is for, cut back to it, redirect the rest. Days of thinking, not months of building.
Can a developer safely change the site without fear?
This one is a genuine rebuild case. Abandoned themes, plugins that haven’t updated in years, custom code nobody documented, no staging environment. When every change carries risk, optimization becomes more expensive than replacement because each fix has to be re-tested from scratch. This is the one question that justifies a full rebuild on its own.
Is the real complaint “it looks dated”?
Neither, yet — get the evidence first. Sometimes true and worth acting on. But “dated” is frequently what we say when we mean “I can’t tell whether it’s working.” Look at the analytics first: if the pages that matter are converting, a redesign is a preference purchase and should be budgeted as one.
Scoring, honestly: noes across the first three mean optimization — you’d be paying rebuild prices for repair work. A yes on the fourth means rebuild, almost regardless of the others. A yes on the last one alone means gather evidence before spending anything. Mostly noes? Keep your site. Take this list to whoever maintains it and fix the specific things — you don’t need an agency to tell you that.
Three ways we help.
Every engagement starts with strategy. Where it goes next depends on what your website isn’t doing yet.
01 — Grow
SEO & AI Visibility
Get found in Google. Get cited by ChatGPT. And get numbers you can forward to your boss every month — because “trust me, it’s working” isn’t a report.
Retainers from $1,500/mo
02 — Run
Hosting & Support
Canadian servers, monitored around the clock, updates and backups handled — and when something breaks at 4 pm on a Friday, you talk to a person who already knows your site.
Plans from $125/mo
03 — Build & improve
Web Design & Optimization
Because you don’t always need a full redesign. Often the site just needs putting back in order: a design system your team can build with, and a content structure your audience can navigate.
Scoped after discovery
+164%
Organic click-through lift — Essex Lease, year one
6×
#1 rankings earned for WC Marker in nine months
4×
Increase in AI search referrals over the same period
5.0★
Average Google rating across 26 verified reviews
Proof, not promises
Proof, not promises.
Featured — Strategy, SEO & CRM
Essex Lease Financial
Their website wasn’t doing its job: the message wasn’t landing, the structure wasn’t helping users, and leads were scarce. We rebuilt it strategy-first — UX, content, SEO, and a CRM to automate the follow-up.
+20%
Engagement
2×
Session length
+164%
Organic CTR
Six core terms to #1 in nine months.
WC Marker · Specialty retail
Products people search for by brand, model, and country. Over the same nine months, their referrals from AI answer engines went up fourfold — the number that actually mattered.
Rankings: Google Search Console · Referrals: GA4
164% more organic click-through in year one.
Essex Lease · Equipment finance
Discovery concluded rebuild rather than repair: a streamlined journey, a content structure that could describe what they offer, and CRM integration so enquiries stopped being re-keyed by hand.
Click-through: Google Search Console, year one post-launch
11,083 visitors in a single day, no downtime.
Lemonade Stand Day · Stollery
A city-wide fundraiser — hundreds of kids, one website, a whole city arriving at once. Event day brought a five-fold surge, with donations flowing through it the entire time.
Traffic: GA4 · Uptime: monitoring log
What Edmonton businesses say.
The named process
How the work works.
Twenty years of projects, distilled into three steps with names. This is how one accountable expert delivers like an agency — and how a room full of opinions becomes a decision.
01
Discovery — the 4P Clarity Framework
Strategy before pixels. Every voice heard.
A structured workshop, not a kickoff call, built on four questions: who’s it for, what problem does it solve, what are we promising, and what should people do next. The board member, the program lead and the marketing manager all get heard — and what comes out is a written brief everyone can stand behind, before a dollar goes to design.
02
Strategic Design & Development
Content before design. Design before code.
The content outline is written and approved before anyone designs a page around it — the message drives the design, never the reverse. The 20-Second Gut Test gets your whole committee to a design direction without weeks of debate. Then we build it properly: WordPress your team can manage, with structure that search engines and AI actually understand.
03
Launch, Optimize & Grow
Launch is the starting line, not the finish.
This is where most agencies wave goodbye — and where we clock in. The agents start monitoring, the optimization starts compounding: search, AI visibility, speed, conversion paths. And every month, you get numbers you can forward to your boss.
The org chart — and yes, there’s a real one
Dozens of specialized AI agents monitor rankings, uptime, security and AI visibility around the clock. At the top of the chart sits exactly one human: James — missions, strategy and final approval.
An honest filter
Are we a fit?
We’d rather tell you now than three meetings in.
Probably, if you’re…
- An established Alberta organization whose website has a real job: donations, memberships, registrations, leads
- A lean team that wants a long-term partner who takes responsibility, not a vendor who takes orders
- A committee or board that needs a guide to a decision everyone can stand behind
- Sitting on a site that “looks fine” but can’t prove it’s working — or one that grew until it fell apart
Probably not, if you need…
- Your first website on the smallest possible budget
- A standalone software product or SaaS platform
- A site launched by Friday
- Occasional graphics or someone to run your socials
No hard feelings — we’ll point you to someone great.
The person
The person you meet is the person who does the work.
I’m James — British-born, Edmonton-based since 1986, and building websites since the days when we were all arguing about Flash. I do the strategy, the design, and the development. You get one person who understands the whole picture — not three departments who don’t talk to each other.
I live here, my clients are here, and I’ve been watching this market for over twenty years. When I’m not doing this, I’m on the board of the Advertising Club of Edmonton, mentoring the next lot of creatives, and losing arguments to a rescue puppy named London.
20 years · since 2005
280+ clients · 360+ websites
Board Member · Ad Club Edmonton
Certified, awarded, and occasionally handed a badge
Certified Digital Business Consultant
Agency Mavericks
Certified Data Privacy Agency Partner
Termageddon
Top Web Design Company — Non-Profit, Alberta
Clutch
Best in Edmonton — Web Design
Best in Edmonton
Top Web Design Services in Edmonton
Clever Canadian
Digital Agency Blueprint — Delivery
Certified
Straight answers
You’re probably wondering…
Answered here so you don’t have to book a call to find out whether this is worth a call.
What does a website actually cost?
Optimization from $4,500, most builds $8,000–$30,000, discovery $1,500 and credited against whatever follows. You’ll see local agencies quote builds from $5,000 — that’s typically a template with your logo applied, which is a real product for a real budget, just a different one.
Is SEO dead now that AI answers everything?
No — the scoreboard changed. Ranking still drives traffic, but a growing share of research now ends inside an answer the person never clicks out of. So there are two jobs: rank in Google, and be the source that gets quoted. We do both and report both.
Why does hosting cost more than $10 a month?
Because this isn’t only hosting. Budget hosting sells server space — updates, backups, monitoring, security and fixes remain your problem. If you only want server space, buy server space; it’s cheaper, and it’s a legitimate choice for a site nobody depends on.
Isn’t one person a risk?
Yes, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What makes it manageable is that you own everything: your domain, your hosting account, standard WordPress with no proprietary lock-in, and documentation good enough for someone else to pick up. The risk is real; being trapped by it isn’t.
Will you tell me if I don’t need you?
Yes, and it happens. If your problem is conversion rather than traffic, or the site is structurally broken, spending on rankings first wastes money. Discovery establishes which problem you actually have before anyone signs anything — and it concludes “don’t rebuild” more often than not.
Do you require a long-term contract?
No. Month to month, 30 days notice, full export provided if you leave. A relationship that survives on switching costs isn’t worth having.
Start with a conversation.
Fifteen minutes with the person who’d do the work. If we’re not the right fit you’ll hear it on the first call rather than the fourth.