We Build Websites That Work. Here Is Why.
Elevate Web Design started with a simple idea: small businesses deserve great websites at fair prices. Not $25,000 agency invoices. Not $99-a-month template clones. Real custom builds, shipped quickly, with SEO in the foundations rather than as an upsell later.
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What is Elevate Web Design?
Elevate Web Design is a Toronto-based custom web design studio founded by Jacob Brown, a Computer Science graduate of Queen's University. The studio builds custom-coded websites for small businesses across Canada and the United States, with pricing starting at CA$599 and typical delivery in 3 to 10 business days. Every plan includes hosting on Cloudflare, SSL, daily backups, security patches, and monthly minor content updates from CA$69 per month. Elevate has shipped 20+ small business websites and holds 5.0 stars across 29 verified Google reviews, with clients across salons, restaurants, contractors, law firms, dental practices, and creative studios. The studio is based in Toronto, Ontario, and serves clients remotely across Canadian and US markets with an in-person option for Toronto and GTA clients.
Hi, I'm Jacob Brown.
Jacob Brown is a Toronto web designer and Computer Science graduate of Queen's University who founded Elevate Web Design to build custom small-business websites at fair prices. I started building sites in high school, first for friends, then for my parents' friends, then for small businesses around East York who heard I could "do that internet stuff." By the time I got to Queen's to study Computer Science, I already had a small client roster paying real invoices.
What I noticed early on: the small business owners I was working with had been quoted $12,000, $18,000, even $25,000 by agencies for sites that should have cost a quarter of that. They were terrified of the web because every quote felt like a punishment for not understanding it. I started Elevate Web Design to fix that.
Today the studio serves 20+ businesses across North America: salons, contractors, restaurants, lawyers, nonprofits, galleries. The pricing is on the website. The timeline is on the website. The features are on the website. No discovery calls to "find out the price." No surprises on the invoice.
- 1st place design. Hack The Skies hackathon
- Queen's University, Computer Science
- 3+ years building production websites for paying clients
- 20+ launches · 5.0★ across 29 Google reviews
The web design industry is broken for small businesses.
If you are a small business owner trying to get online, you have two options today, and both are bad.
Option one: hire an agency. They will charge you $12,000 to $30,000, take three to six months, route every email through an account manager, and deliver a site you cannot edit without paying them again. You will sit through "discovery workshops" that exist mostly to justify the bill. Half the agency budget goes to the downtown office and the sales team that pitched you.
Option two: do it yourself. Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy. You will spend 40 hours of your own time wrestling with a page builder, the result will look like every other Squarespace site, it will load slowly, it will not rank on Google, and you will pay $30/month forever for the privilege of hosting it on their platform.
Elevate is the third option. Custom code. Fair prices. Real timelines. Owned by you. SEO and hosting included. Built by a developer who answers their own emails.
Our process, start to launch in 3–10 business days.
No mystery. No discovery phase that costs $2,000. Here is exactly what happens.
Free homepage design call
Book a free Google Meet. Within 48 hours we show you a custom homepage design built for your business. It is an icebreaker, not a finished promise, so we can meet face to face and you can see our skills. No payment, no obligation. If it is not the right fit, you owe nothing.
Proposal, payment, and site plan
Immediately after the call we send a proposal plus an invoice for the first payment. Once paid, we collect any content and assets you want us to use, then create a site plan with page structure, SEO plan, competitor comparison when applicable, and rough word counts and goals for each page.
Build and review
We build the full site on a staging URL you can review. You get unlimited revisions. Most edits happen the same day.
Launch and rank
We go live, set up Google Search Console, Analytics, schema markup, and optimize your Google Business Profile. Most clients start seeing impressions within 7 to 14 days.
Ongoing support
Hosting, SSL, backups, security patches, and content edits are included in your monthly plan. The monthly fee starts the moment the site is published. Major updates such as new pages are subject to a fee of $100/hour. We also talk through ongoing support plans like SEO and social media retainers.
What we stand for.
Speed
Sites live in 3–10 business days. We do not believe in 3-month timelines for a small business website. Most agencies stretch projects to justify five-figure invoices, we do not.
Transparency
Our pricing is on the website. No discovery calls just to find out a number. No hidden fees. No contracts that lock you in for a year.
Results
Pretty is not the goal. Layout, CTAs, and meta tags all get tuned for one outcome, turning visitors into the kind of leads you can put on the calendar.
Partnership
We do not disappear after launch. Every plan includes ongoing hosting, maintenance, monitoring, and support, for as long as you stay with us.
How we are different from a typical agency.
By the numbers.
Some of the businesses we've helped.
About Elevate. FAQ.
Want to work with us?
Get a free homepage design, we respond within 2 hours.