At CryoDragon, our team understands that in order for a website to stand out, it not only has to represent your brand, but also contain stunning graphics, a user-friendly interface, and engaging content that is search engine optimized.
All of our websites are responsive, mobile-friendly and crafted in-house by our web and graphic design professionals to provide your site visitors with the best user experience possible.
We have three website design packages to choose from, all listed below. Each of these packages has ample room for further customization.
We provide a custom quote and proposal for every project because each one is unique, and each client looks for a different level of customization. At the end of the day, we charge $100/h + HST. Over time, we’ve grouped those levels into three packages, from simple websites to high-end custom developments, all based on the time it takes to build each one.
The ballpark prices below are a starting point for our discussion. Our three packages are built on the WordPress content management platform. Prefer something without WordPress? See our hand-coded Absolute package below, and we also build on Shopify and other platforms.
Custom Theme
Example cost of a 5-page site: $3,100 + HST
Premium Creative Build
Example cost of a 5-page site: $6,250 + HST
Signature Custom Website
Example cost of a 5-page site: $13,300 + HST
Hand-Coded HTML Website · −273.15°C
Designed from scratch and written line by line in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Faster, more secure and lower-maintenance than a CMS, with every update made for you. Requires a CryoDragon hosting plan.
Example cost of a 5-page site: $8,250 + HST
Some websites are simple, while others are not. The more features you add, the more complex a website gets, which means higher costs and greater server requirements for web hosting. For a feature-rich website, we recommend our Arctic or Cryo packages so we can integrate everything seamlessly into the code.
Features marked with a dollar sign usually cost extra on top of your package and are best suited to the Arctic and Cryo packages.
Our website design process is all about our clients. We work closely with you at every stage so we can collect your feedback, update you on our progress (with mockups and live demos), and collaborate on new and exciting ideas together. We take a very personal approach, starting with an extensive discovery phase to learn what you need and what you want to achieve online.
Phase 1 · Plan the skeleton
The first step to building a website isn’t figuring out what you want it to look like, it’s learning about your business, your goals, and what you want to achieve with your online presence.
Once we know what your goals are, we start planning out the structure or “skeleton” of your website. In other words, it’s a time for us to figure out which pages you want, and how they are connected to each other. We work with you to determine the flow of your website for the best user experience possible.
Phase 2 · Craft the skin
With an organized plan in mind, it is now time to design your website. This is all about the layout, appearance, or “skin” of the site, which makes it aesthetically pleasing to your visitors. We utilize the latest design trends and choose the best typography, colours, and content layouts to help draw attention to your page and allow users to easily navigate your site.
If you choose our Arctic or Cryo packages, we spend a lot more time on custom designs and mockups that are crafted in-house by our designers to suit your brand.
Phase 3 · Bring it to life
As soon as the layout and design of the website has been approved, our team at CryoDragon starts to fill out the design of each webpage by adding all the content, images, and features. Through this development phase, we add functionality to the website and work towards a final product that you can continuously monitor, provide feedback on, and approve prior to launch.
The development stage takes the longest amount of time because it is all about getting the website to work and function well. The more feedback we get on a regular basis, the easier it is for us to implement that feedback throughout the development process.
Phase 4 · Take flight
After getting approval to launch, the website is ready to go live! But, it’s not as easy as it sounds. It’s a critical time to double-check all the content, make sure it works on different browsers, and ensure the web servers are set up to successfully launch the site. After we have done this, we launch the website and run a final test and check on the live servers to make sure everything is running perfectly.
At CryoDragon, our team is always here to help, and our services do not end once a website has been launched. We provide training and documentation to those who want it, and we can help maintain, update, and promote your website through the years to come via our web hosting, web maintenance, SEO and digital marketing services. Your success is our success!
A website is usually the first place a customer meets your business. Before they call, book or buy, they look you up, and in a few seconds they decide whether you look trustworthy, whether you offer what they need and whether it’s easy to take the next step. Good website design and development is about getting all three right.
Design is how your website looks and feels: the layout, colours, typography, images and the way information is organized. Development is how it works: the code, the content management system, the forms, the speed and the security. Many companies are strong in one and weak in the other. At CryoDragon, the same small team does both, so the design you approve is exactly what gets built.
Every website we design and develop is responsive, which means it adapts to phones, tablets, laptops and large monitors. It’s built with clean, standards-based code, structured for search engines from day one, and designed with accessibility in mind so it meets Ontario’s AODA requirements. You also get a content management system that lets you update text, images and blog posts yourself, or you can leave the updates to us.
Our three website packages describe how much customization goes into your site. They’re based on our typical build times, and every project is quoted at the same transparent hourly rate, so you only pay for the work your website actually needs.
Frozen websites start from a well-built premium theme that we customize with your branding, content and images. It’s the fastest and most affordable way to a professional website, and a great fit for new businesses, sole proprietors and simple informational sites.
Arctic websites are built on a flexible framework, so we can create a custom layout for every page without coding everything from scratch. Most of our clients choose Arctic because it balances a unique design with a reasonable budget.
Cryo websites start with wireframes and mockups designed just for you, then we build custom templates to match. Cryo is ideal for established organizations, complex sites with many page types, and projects that need custom features or integrations.
Prefer something even leaner and more secure? Our static HTML websites are hand-coded with no content management system at all. Not sure which option fits? Our free estimate form recommends a package and gives you a ballpark price in about five minutes.
A beautiful website isn’t much use if nobody can find it. Every site we build includes the on-page SEO foundations that help Google understand your business: descriptive page titles and meta descriptions, a logical heading structure, clean URLs, image alt text, an XML sitemap, schema markup and fast-loading, properly sized images. We also connect Google Search Console and Google Analytics so you can see how people find you.
Accessibility is built in, not bolted on. We design with sufficient colour contrast, keyboard navigation, clear focus indicators, descriptive links and properly labelled forms, and we test with screen readers. Accessible websites are easier for everyone to use, and in Ontario, many organizations are required to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA under the AODA. Learn more about our AODA website accessibility services.
Speed matters too. Slow pages frustrate visitors and can hold back your search rankings. We optimize images, keep code lean, avoid unnecessary plugins and host websites on fast, secure servers with free SSL. When your new website launches, it’s ready to welcome visitors and ready for ongoing SEO if you want to grow further.
Many of our projects are redesigns. Your current website may look dated, be hard to update, run slowly or simply not reflect who you are anymore. A redesign is a chance to fix all of that, but it has to be done carefully so you don’t lose the search rankings and traffic you’ve already earned.
Before we change anything, we review your current site’s content, analytics and search performance. We keep the pages that work, improve the ones that don’t, and map every old page address to its new home with permanent 301 redirects. Your content is moved across, your forms are reconnected and your new site is tested on a private staging server before it goes live.
We regularly move websites from older WordPress themes, page builders, Wix, Squarespace and hand-built HTML. Whatever you have now, we’ll recommend the best path forward and explain the trade-offs clearly.
Every website is either static or dynamic, and the difference decides how it’s built, how fast it loads, how you update it and how much care it needs. We build both, and we’ll always recommend the one that fits how you work.
Pages are finished files, written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Nothing is assembled when someone visits, so pages load almost instantly and there’s very little to hack. Updates are made by us. Best for websites whose content changes every few weeks. See our Absolute package.
A content management system (CMS) builds each page from a database when it’s requested. That makes it easy for your team to log in and edit pages, publish blog posts, run an online store or offer member logins, but the software needs regular updates and maintenance.
For dynamic websites, WordPress is our CMS of choice. It’s open source, so you’re never locked in; it’s easy for non-technical people to use; it has the largest ecosystem of tools; and it handles stores, memberships, bookings and multilingual sites. Learn more about our WordPress development.
Building websites is the core service we offer, so most questions we get are about our Kitchener-Waterloo website design services. Here are the most frequent ones to help you understand how we operate.
At CryoDragon, we really do specialize in custom website and graphic design. Since we can develop websites on almost any platform, we are capable of developing custom web solutions for a multitude of applications.
A WordPress theme applies a design and style to your entire site (global design settings). A theme is made up of numerous templates that govern the layout and structure of different types of pages (localized design settings).
Template-based websites (Frozen package): pre-built themes and templates are rigid, so we charge for the time it takes to understand the theme’s configuration and customize it to where you want it to be. It’s our lowest-priced package and great for a simple site with a short turnaround.
Completely custom WordPress theme (Cryo package): we sketch wireframes and design mockups for approval, then create your own templates from scratch so they can be re-used easily down the road. This opens the door to endless possibilities and easy integration of third-party or custom apps. It’s our highest-priced package.
Custom-themed websites from a framework (Arctic package): the best of both worlds. We start from a premium theme framework that gives us a fairly blank slate, and build a fully custom design using custom-coded or pre-built elements. You get any layout you want at a lower cost than Cryo.
We are very transparent with our prices and do not have any “hidden costs”. For the majority of our website design and graphic design services, we charge an hourly rate of $100/h + HST because every project is unique. Our packages are simply our typical build times, so the more customization involved, the more time (and investment) a website takes.
The three packages presented on this page do not include E-Commerce. An online store requires additional work related to E-Commerce platform integration and setup, storefront design, shopping cart and checkout options, payment gateways and client logins. These are add-ons to the base price of the website. Take a look at our E-Commerce website services for details.
This is a very common question! We don’t just build WordPress websites. We are capable of so much more, from custom PHP frameworks to custom designs on other popular platforms like Drupal and Shopify, as well as hand-coded HTML, CSS and JavaScript websites that need no CMS at all.
However, the vast majority of our clients request or end up getting a WordPress website, so we do specialize in custom WordPress websites and customization of WordPress plugins.
Absolutely! During the design and development phase of the project, CryoDragon Inc. owns the copyright to all design components. When the website is launched and the final payment received, the ownership and copyright of the website are passed on to you.
Yes, we do! We offer two options: host with us, or host elsewhere. We’ll work with whichever is best for you. We offer competitive prices for our premium hosting services, and those who host with us receive incentives on maintenance packages, as premium web hosting is included in all of our maintenance packages along with SSL certificates for https://. All of our hosting is upgradable, so you always get the best prices we have to offer.
You know your business better than anyone, so it is always recommended that you provide as much information as possible about your business, what you do, and what you want to achieve.
For our initial consultation, it helps to know what kind of website you are looking for, which features you’d like, and roughly how many pages you want. That lets us determine the site structure and start planning a layout. As the project progresses, we’ll ask for your content, then organize and integrate it so it is easy for visitors to navigate.
Yes, we can! See our content writing services. Writing is charged at our hourly rate of $100/h + HST. For all website design projects, we already include basic checks for spelling and grammar so that you have an extra layer of protection when it comes time to post content on the website.
You will have a lot of input, especially on custom sites. For every website we build, we set up a demo site on our staging servers that you can monitor and give feedback on whenever we update it. The number of revision rounds depends on your package, with the custom design packages allowing for more.
Yes. Every website we build is responsive and mobile-friendly, includes on-page SEO fundamentals (with more advanced SEO in the Arctic and Cryo packages), and follows accessibility best practices. If your organization needs to meet Ontario’s AODA requirements, we can design or convert your website to meet WCAG standards. Learn more about our AODA accessible website services.
Most small business websites take a few weeks to a few months, depending on the package, the number of pages and how quickly content and feedback come together. Template-based Frozen sites are fastest; fully custom Cryo sites take longest. We give you a timeline with your proposal.
Design is the look, layout and user experience. Development is the code and functionality that make it work. We do both in-house, so nothing gets lost between a designer and a separate developer. Our article on website design vs. development explains more.
