Toast Media Inc. is a digital lifestyle magazine publisher based in Saskatchewan, operated by the same team that brought us the Refined Lifestyle Magazine circulated in Regina and Saskatoon. The company they hired to build their original website did an excellent job with the design concept. However, the company lacked expertise in web development and outsourced the job offshore to India or Pakistan. The result was a website that was buggy, cumbersome to use, and was nothing like the design they had planned or envisioned. So Project Pi to the rescue…
Web Design
After discovering too many issues with the original website, we recommended a complete rebuild using the already present materials. Even though it’d take more effort than keeping the existing site operational, it would have cost our client more money down the road. We kept the original look and feel of the design but made several improvements to maximize usability and search engine visibility. This is why it’s important to hire web designers that understand SEO; we’re surprised that many don’t.
Web Development
The difference between web design and development is that one focuses on the visual and usability, while the other on implementing functionalities required by business needs. There were several things that WordPress and Elementor could not handle right out of the box, so we developed custom code to handle them while keeping performance impact to a minimum. This is another service that many web design companies are unable to do, especially low-budget ones.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is essential to our client’s success; this is why we made sure that the website structure is optimized, but our client’s staff is trained in SEO. For a website to rank well, you need both the site structure and content to be optimized, which we do best.
End Result
The result of this project is a much more efficient website in more ways than one. Our client’s staff only has to spend a small portion of their time to publish materials and make things function. User experience is also much better due to the site loading much quicker and being truly mobile-friendly. Most importantly, we were able to implement the new site quickly and made it affordable for our clients who just spent a lot of money on the first site they had to scrap.
