about us

About Websites.ca

When we started in 1999, our idea was to build a website directory of every business website in Canada. People would be able to search by word, category, or location, and it would be free to use and free to add a business. We would also create a website building software that would allow people who didn’t know anything about programming to set up and update their own website.

Now, 20 years later we’ve built more than 1,000 websites in Winnipeg and across Manitoba in over 100 cities, towns, and communities and in every industry imaginable.

Our directory of Canadian business websites has gone through a lot of changes, is bigger and better than ever, gets over 2.5 million pageviews per year, is totally free to use, and you can still add your business for free if it isn’t in there yet: https://websites.ca/signup

Our website service has changed a bit too. We found that most businesses are too busy to update their website themselves and would rather have us just take care of the updates for them. Now they just call or email with changes and we take care of their updates for them – usually within a day or two. We also take care of their domain names, email, hosting, and SEO.

In 2011, we switched to the WordPress platform for building and managing websites for our customers. More than 30% of all websites are built with WordPress now so there is a huge development community helping us make our customers’ websites better and better. As of 2018 we’ve built more than 1,000 WordPress websites!

We’ve recently gone a step further and have built our own Managed WordPress Hosting platform and service. Now we can host our own websites and offer WordPress hosting services to other companies, freelancers, developers, and individuals who are looking for hosting that is fine-tuned for WordPress, optimized for lightning fast page-load speed, with 24/7 security monitoring and automatic nightly backups, and enabled for easy WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates.

From our home office in Wolseley in 2000, to a real office in Osborne Village in 2001, and with our head office still in the Exchange District in Winnipeg since 2004, we’ve now expanded our team from Winnipeg to in and around Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Kelowna, and Halifax and we’re ready to continue growing. Not a customer yet? You can switch to Websites.ca for free!

Looking forward to another 20 years,

John Hart
Co-Founder
Websites.ca

Our Winnipeg Web Design Team

Ryan Desmarais

Sales

Ryan Desmarais lives in Winnipeg with his wife. Ryan loves that he works with different types of businesses from different industries all across the country. Customers ask for Ryan because he’s been with Websites.ca for over 15 years. Ryan enjoys playing rec hockey, softball, and soccer and fixes/builds computers in his spare time.

Stephanie Haderer

Operations

Operations, Onboarding and Support Specialist, Stephanie is a University of Manitoba graduate living in Winnipeg. Second to Super Meat Boy, nothing satisfies her more than troubleshooting or sorting out a DNS mess.

Larissa Greening

Support

Larissa lives in Winnipeg and is training to be your support desk superstar. She is a true people-person with many years in customer service. Offline she enjoys fishing, creative arts, and decorating any interior space she can get her hands on!

Paul Renault

Design

Paul works in Winnipeg. He is a fine arts graduate and web design expert with 18 years experience. When he’s not building websites he’s out at the dog park or spinning a favorite jazz record.

Sarah Velasco

Onboarding

Sarah has a degree in Business Administration from the University of Winnipeg and is training to be your Onboarding Specialist. She works the friendly skies as a Flight Attendant when she isn’t solving DNS problems. During her spare time, she enjoys blogging about fashion, beauty and lifestyle topics on her blog paperdollsarah.com

See our Canada-wide Team