Featured · client work
Lunarlink Solutions, Toronto
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Calgary · web design
A Canadian studio building websites for Calgary small businesses. HVAC and trades through every cold snap, law firms downtown, clinics across the suburbs, restaurants from Inglewood to Kensington. Fixed fee, four to six weeks, free written audit first.
Toronto studio · serving Calgary & Alberta remotely
Calgary market
Calgary metro holds roughly one and a half million people across the city and its commuter towns: Airdrie, Cochrane, Okotoks, Chestermere, Strathmore. Alberta as a whole sits at four and a half million, with the majority of small-business activity concentrated in the Calgary-Edmonton corridor. The economy is still anchored downtown by oil and gas, but the gravity has been shifting for a decade into agriculture, logistics, tech (East Village, Quarry Park), and the home-services trades that keep a cold-climate city running.
Three local forces shape what works on a Calgary website more than anything else: hail, cold, and distance. Calgary is one of the most hail-prone metros in North America. The June 2020 storm caused roughly one and a half billion dollars in insured damage and reset how roofers in this market run their search and intake. The cold does the same thing to HVAC: November through March is emergency season, and the after-hours dispatch flow has to be on the home page, not the contact page. Distance does it to everyone else: the metro sprawls further per resident than Toronto or Vancouver, so commuter-town searches (Airdrie, Cochrane, Okotoks) are separate markets, not subsets of Calgary.
What does not work here is the same template that gets sold to a clinic in Mount Pleasant or a law firm in King West. Aesthetic-first builds with a hidden phone number and a slow hero animation lose to a plainer site that loads fast, names the suburbs in plain text, and has a storm or emergency page that has been live for six months. The audit names which of those gaps the current site has. The rebuild fixes the structure first.
The Calgary numbers
Where the work clusters
Calgary searches almost always include the neighbourhood or the commuter town. A clinic in Mission and a clinic in McKenzie Towne compete for different queries with different customers. Here is the rough map of who clusters where, and what that means for the site you build.
Downtown core & Beltline
Energy law, finance, professional services, and head offices along Stephen Avenue and through the Beltline. Sites here are judged on speed and credibility. A slow hero animation costs serious B2B leads.
Kensington & Hillhurst
Independent restaurants, family clinics, and small professional-services firms across Kensington Road. Visitors expect the site to match the neighbourhood. Generic templates read as out-of-place.
Inglewood & Ramsay
Design studios, hospitality, boutique retail, and independent service firms. The neighbourhood reads creative, and the site has to as well. Photography of the real space carries more weight here than anywhere else in the city.
17th Ave SW & Mission
Restaurants, bars, fitness studios, retail, and the clinic corridor up 4th Street. High mobile search share. Menus, booking flows, and Google Business Profile alignment do more work than any visual choice.
Marda Loop & Altadore
Family dental, medical, fitness, and independent retail serving an established residential base. Booking pages convert better than contact forms for the family-services verticals here.
Bridgeland & Renfrew
Independent restaurants, family clinics, and small professional services rebuilding on a younger residential base. Plain language and clear pricing on service pages outpaces brand-led copy.
Bowness & Montgomery
Trades, contracting, family services along the northwest river edge. Service-area copy here has to name Cochrane, Tuscany, Crowfoot, and the airport corridor or it disappears from search.
McKenzie Towne, Seton & the Deep South
Family medical, dental, fitness, and home services for the post-2005 suburban builds. Younger demographics. Mobile share runs higher than the city average.
Tuscany, Royal Oak & the Deep Northwest
Family clinics, dental, real estate, and home services along the Stoney Trail ring road. Service-area pages have to name Cochrane and the Trans-Canada corridor to catch the right searches.
Airdrie, Cochrane, Okotoks & Chestermere
Commuter towns with their own trades, dental, family medical, and restaurant economies. Each one is a separate search market. Combined Calgary-region pages rank for none of them. Five dedicated municipality pages do.
Industries we ship for in Calgary
Different industry? Full list here.
The Calgary playbook
A storm-damage page that goes live the morning after a hailstorm ranks for nothing that week. The page belongs at a stable URL year-round with a clear inspection flow, an honest response window, and a phone number that picks up. The same logic applies to HVAC after-hours pages through the cold months and plumbing emergency flows in February. Google rewards the URL that has been live for six months, not the one that appeared yesterday. Calgary is the Canadian city where this matters most because the spikes are the largest.
A homeowner in Airdrie typing roofer into Google does not see results for Calgary unless the Calgary site has an Airdrie page. The metro is geographically spread (Airdrie sits twenty-five minutes north, Okotoks thirty-five minutes south, Cochrane twenty minutes west) and each commuter town searches as its own market. Plain-text service-area pages for Airdrie, Cochrane, Okotoks, Chestermere, and Strathmore outrank one combined Calgary page every time. This is the single biggest local-SEO miss we see on Calgary rebuilds.
Compliance that touches the build
Alberta is one of three provinces with its own private-sector privacy statute alongside the federal PIPEDA. Any Alberta business collecting personal information online (contact forms, intake forms, booking systems, analytics) falls under PIPA. The site needs a real privacy policy in plain language, a clear consent path on every form, and a documented way to honour access and deletion requests.
If the site collects email addresses, the opt-in language has to be explicit. Pre-checked newsletter boxes are not allowed. Every commercial email needs a working unsubscribe link and a real Canadian business address in the footer. Alberta does not yet have a provincial accessibility statute (unlike BC and Ontario), but we build to WCAG 2.0 AA on every project anyway.
What we do
We design the whole visual system for a small business. Logo, website, brochures, invoices. One studio handling it all, so the look stays the same from the homepage to the invoice.
Logo, type, color, and the small details that make everything look intentional. Built to hold across web, print, and signage.
Sites that load fast, read clearly, and turn visitors into calls or bookings. The phone and the form get treated as the point of the page.
Brochures, one-pagers, flyers, decks, trade-show signage. The handouts that have to match the site and the storefront.
Invoices, letterheads, proposals, contracts, estimate sheets. The everyday paper that shapes how a business looks.
What we keep seeing in Calgary
Most Calgary small-business sites lose the call for one of four reasons. The first is the oilpatch-era agency build from 2012 to 2017, often expensive at the time, now slow and hiding the phone number behind a contact form. The second is the Squarespace template that every dental clinic in Marda Loop and every restaurant on 17th Ave uses, recoloured with a logo. The third is the storm-damage or emergency-HVAC page that only goes live after the storm or the cold snap, which is too late for Google to rank it. The fourth is the suburb problem: a combined Calgary-region page that names no commuter town clearly and ranks in none of them.
The audit names all four when they are present. The rebuild fixes the structure first, not the look. Phone above the fold on every page. A storm or emergency page at a stable URL, live year-round. Plain-text service-area pages for each commuter town you actually cover. Forms that send, with a backup destination if the primary inbox is down. Page speed under two seconds. Real photos of the work and the team. The design comes after the structure works, never before.
Calgary questions
Don’t see yours? Ask us directly.
Not in Calgary? We work Canada-wide. Tell us where you are on the contact page and the audit comes back the same way.
Under the hood
The mechanics that decide whether a site earns calls or just sits there.
01Top of the map
‘Roofer near me’ wins your next customer. We build to rank in the local map pack.
78%of local-service searches happen on a phone.
02On the phone first
Most find you on a phone. The whole site has to feel right at arm’s length.
03Loads before they leave
Half of mobile visitors leave a slow site before it loads.
Page speed scoremobile
98/100
04Yours to keep
No retainers, no system you can’t log into. When we’re done, you have everything.
From the journal
May 26, 2026
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Does a Toronto small business actually need a Toronto branding agency, or will a Vancouver shop do? Here is when proximity matters and when it does not.
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