Web Design in Montreal

Montreal is not one market. It is 19 boroughs across 364 square kilometres, and a business on Wellington in Verdun has almost nothing in common with a supplier in the Saint-Laurent industrial sector. Any agency that pitches you “a Montreal website” without asking which part of Montreal you sell to is guessing.

EngiNerds Digital is based in Vaudreuil-Dorion, about 40 kilometres west of downtown. We are not a downtown agency, and we do not carry downtown overhead. We come to you.

One island, 25 commercial districts

The City of Montreal had 1,762,949 residents at the 2021 census. The wider island agglomeration, which includes Westmount, Mont-Royal, Cote Saint-Luc and the West Island cities, had 2,004,265 people across 498 square kilometres.

Commercially, the city organises itself street by street. Montreal has more than 25 sociétés de développement commercial, the merchant associations that run the commercial arteries: Ville-Marie, Le Plateau-Mont-Royal, Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, Outremont, Lachine, Saint-Léonard, Ahuntsic-Cartierville and more. If your shop is on one of those streets, your competition is the four other businesses on the same block, not a company in another borough.

That is a local SEO problem with a very small radius. It is also the kind of problem a small agency can actually solve, because it does not take a large budget. It takes a correct Google Business Profile, pages that name the street and the neighbourhood, and a site that loads quickly on a phone.

The language reality, in numbers

This is the part that matters most in Montreal, and the census numbers are blunt.

At the 2021 census, 818,225 Montrealers reported French as a mother tongue and 225,920 reported English. But 576,500 reported a single non-official language, and another 120,610 reported more than one mother tongue.

Round it off and roughly 46% of the city grew up in French, about 13% in English, and close to a third grew up speaking neither.

Two things follow from that. French is not optional here, and it is not a formality either. And English is not a safe default, because for a very large share of your customers English is a second language too, which means plain, clear writing beats clever writing every time.

We build both language versions as real pages: separate URLs, separate page titles and meta descriptions, proper hreflang so search engines serve the right one, and French written as French rather than run through a translation widget.

Quebec’s Charter of the French Language sets rules for commercial publications, and websites can fall under them. The Charter was amended by Bill 96 and those amendments have been in force since June 1, 2022. Where a site exists in more than one language, the French has to be at least equivalent to the other version.

We are not lawyers, we do not speak for the OQLF, and we will not tell you that you are in breach of anything. What we will do, at no charge, is go through your site and give you a plain list of what exists only in English: pages, forms, downloadable PDFs, automatic confirmation emails, the parts that get forgotten. For a legal opinion, talk to a lawyer who handles language law.

What we build

Business websites. Small and mid-sized sites built to load fast on a phone, structured so you can update them yourself. WordPress most of the time, because any developer can pick it up later and you are not locked into us.

Bilingual builds. Both languages properly separated and properly indexed, with real French copy.

Local SEO. Google Business Profile setup and cleanup, on-page work, and the unglamorous accuracy pass that makes your name, address, hours and phone number match everywhere they appear. In both languages, because “dentiste Rosemont” and “dentist Rosemont” are two different searches.

E-commerce. WooCommerce, including catalogues with real complexity. We have built stores for battery and auto-parts retailers with large product catalogues and fitment data, so a restaurant menu with modifiers or a boutique with variants is straightforward.

Maintenance. Updates, backups, uptime monitoring, and a person who answers when something breaks.

Mobile apps. Only when a website genuinely cannot solve the problem. We will tell you when it can.

Working with us

You get one point of contact who knows your project. No ticket queue, no hand-off to a junior halfway through. We quote a fixed price after one conversation, and the price does not move unless you change the scope.

We have been building websites since 2016, mostly for small owner-run businesses. If you want references, ask and we will put you in touch with past clients directly.

Frequently asked questions

You are in Vaudreuil-Dorion, not Montreal. Does that matter? Only in your favour. We are about 40 minutes from most of the island and we will come to you for the first meeting. What you are not paying for is a downtown office.

Which parts of Montreal do you work in? All of the island. In practice most of our work is on the west side and along the 40, because that is the direction we travel, but we take projects anywhere on the island.

Should my site be French-first or English-first? It depends on your customers, not on a rule. A shop on Mont-Royal and a B2B supplier in Saint-Laurent get different answers. We will tell you what we would do and why, and you decide.

Can you fix the site we have instead of rebuilding it? Often, yes. Send us the URL. If it is WordPress and the structure is sound, fixing is usually cheaper and faster. If it was built on something abandoned, we will say so rather than quietly rebuild it.

Do you do the French writing, or do we supply it? We can write it. That is much of the point. Supplying English and hoping a plugin covers the rest is how sites end up with French that reads badly to the people you were trying to reach.

Get in touch

Tell us where in Montreal you are and what the website has to do. You get a written quote at a fixed price and a realistic timeline.

EngiNerds Digital Agency, Vaudreuil-Dorion +1 (354) 999-9997 · hello@enginerdsdigital.com

We also work across Vaudreuil-Soulanges and the West Island. See all the areas we serve.