I have been the person paying for this.

Why that matters more than the technical part

Most people who build websites came to it through code. I came to it through running businesses — e-commerce and SaaS companies in Ukraine, as a co-founder and operations lead, then as a product manager for other people's platforms. I have signed off web budgets, been handed things that did not work, and had the conversation where the agency explains why the thing you asked for is out of scope.

Two decades of running businesses, then years building the web platforms for them. The order is unusual and it changes what you get: I am much more likely to tell you that the site is not your problem than to sell you a rebuild.

It also means I know what a bad version of this feels like from your chair. Most of how I work is a reaction to that — fixed prices instead of open-ended hours, handover as a deliverable rather than a favour, and telling you when the honest answer is "you do not need me for this".

What I do now

Two things, and they feed each other. I run the web platform for Confederation College in Thunder Bay — a public-sector estate of several thousand pages under a statutory accessibility obligation, with content owners across dozens of departments. And I take on a small number of client projects: rebuilds, accessibility work, search, and paid acquisition with the measurement built underneath it.

Running that estate is where the accessibility practice comes from — a statutory obligation across thousands of pages teaches you things a one-off audit never will. The client work is where the commercial judgment stays sharp. Neither would be as useful on its own.

Everything is done by me — the person who scopes your project is the person building it, and nothing gets lost in a handoff that never happens.

What I think, in case it is not your view

Worth checking early, because these shape what I will recommend:

• A website is a business-change project, not a deliverable. A new site only pays off if something about how the organization operates changes with it. If nothing can change, I will build you a good site and say so plainly.
• You cannot simply buy the ready-to-buy customers. Everyone bids for those, so you compete with everyone on price. The work that compounds catches people earlier.
• Internal ownership beats outsourcing. Somebody inside who cares gets wiser every cycle; an outside team starts from zero each engagement and leaves with what it learned.
• If a decision is not written down, it did not happen. Six months on, nobody remembers why a URL was structured that way or which option was rejected and for what reason — and the person who suffers is whoever inherits the site. I run projects on a format I published for exactly that, which is why handover here is a document rather than a conversation you have to remember.
• The best content is produced with you, not for you. Your people know the subject. My job is structure and making it usable, not inventing expertise I do not have.

The practical details

• Based in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, working across Ontario, Canada, and — because of where I am from — Ukraine.
• English and Ukrainian.
• Fixed price for projects, monthly for ongoing work. Ranges are published on every service page rather than held back for a call.
• Your accounts, your repository, your domain — always, from day one.
• Master's in engineering, then two decades in product, e-commerce and the web.
• Full career history on LinkedIn.