Web Development Company in Vancouver

Page count is the smallest part of a Vancouver web budget: a focused marketing site (10 to 25 pages, custom design, Next.js or Astro, headless CMS, accessibility under the Accessible British Columbia Act and WCAG 2.2 AA, Core Web Vitals budget), a larger marketing platform with programmatic SEO, interactive product tours, multi-locale (English plus French where Official Languages Act applies, sometimes Punjabi and Mandarin for BC market reach), and CRM integration, or D2C commerce on Shopify Plus, Hydrogen, or custom-headless with AR room-placement and membership.

We pick based on catalogue complexity, brand expression, and team. Shopify Plus when the catalogue fits Shopify’s data model, the merchandising team needs Shopify’s admin tooling, and time-to-launch matters more than rendering control; we extend with custom apps, Shopify Functions, and a Next.js or Hydrogen storefront when the marketing site deserves more than Liquid. Custom-headless (Next.js with Medusa, BigCommerce, commercetools, or Saleor) when brand-driven layouts, AR or video-heavy PDPs, complex membership tiering, or unusual catalogue rules outweigh Shopify’s velocity, or when the team already runs a custom backend. Both stacks ship with Interac, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Stripe Canadian acquirer setup, PIPA-compliant analytics, and accessibility under the Accessible British Columbia Act in scope.

BC’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) governs private sector handling of personal information of British Columbians and is enforced by the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of BC, which is among the most active provincial regulators in Canada. We run a PIPA review on every web build covering analytics, marketing automation, chat, video embeds, and form submissions, gate non-essential SDKs behind a granular consent banner, and write a privacy policy that maps to PIPA and federal PIPEDA. Public sector and health authority sites add a FOIPPA review, mandate in-Canada residency in many circumstances, and default to Azure Canada West Vancouver. The consent banner is not a vendor template; it is wired to the actual data flows in the build and reviewed by your privacy officer before launch.

The Accessible British Columbia Act (2021) and its regulations set a multi-year ramp toward accessibility standards across BC public sector and many private organisations, with the General Standards and Information and Communications Standard relevant to web. We default builds to WCAG 2.2 AA, validate with axe-core and pa11y in CI, run manual checks with NVDA, VoiceOver, and JAWS, test keyboard-only navigation and reduced-motion preferences, and ship an accessibility statement that maps to the Act’s standards. For BC public sector clients we deliver a formal accessibility audit and a remediation plan. Accessibility is part of design review and component-library tickets, not a pre-launch sweep, because retrofitting ARIA roles and contrast late is more expensive than designing for them up front.

Yes. BC’s Digital Standards, run by the BC Government Digital Experience team, set service design, accessibility, content, security, and operations expectations widely seen as the most progressive provincial digital standards in Canada, alongside Ontario Digital Service. Our public sector engagements design against the Standards from kickoff: plain-language content, user research with British Columbians, accessibility certification, open-source choices where viable, FOIPPA-aligned residency on Azure Canada West Vancouver, and operations that meet BC OCIO security review. We integrate BCeID and BC Services Card for identity, document the privacy posture against FOIPPA, and deliver source code and runbooks the ministry team can maintain in-house rather than locking them into a vendor.

We enforce performance in CI with Lighthouse, web-vitals, and bundle-size budgets gated on every PR. The pattern: server components and streaming for first paint, image CDNs (Cloudflare Images, Imgix, Shopify CDN) with AVIF and WebP, font subsetting and self-hosting, route-based code splitting, and prefetch on hover and viewport for PDP and product listing pages. Third-party scripts (analytics, chat, attribution) load behind consent and through partytown or a server-side proxy where viable. We ship to LCP under 2.0s on 4G, INP under 200ms, and CLS under 0.05 on the templates that drive traffic, not just the home page. For Shopify clients we tune the theme or move to Hydrogen when the theme can no longer hit budget.

Yes. BC has Canada’s largest South Asian and Chinese diaspora populations outside Toronto, and Metro Vancouver retail, healthcare, and public sector clients regularly need Punjabi, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, and Mandarin alongside English, with French where the federal Official Languages Act applies. We build localisation on Next.js i18n routing or Astro i18n, with CMS-driven content (Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok) so translators work in a real editorial environment rather than spreadsheets, and we wire hreflang correctly so Google does not collapse locales. For BC government and health authority sites we also support Indigenous language content where the client provides translations, with proper Unicode and font support.

A focused marketing site ships in eight to fourteen weeks from kickoff to launch, including design, build, accessibility certification, BC PIPA review, and Core Web Vitals tuning. A larger marketing platform with programmatic SEO, multi-locale, and CRM integration runs twelve to twenty weeks. D2C commerce on Shopify Plus typically lands at twelve to twenty weeks; custom-headless commerce on Next.js with AR and membership runs twenty to thirty-six weeks. BC public sector portals with BCeID or BC Services Card integration, FOIPPA documentation, BC OCIO security review, and formal accessibility certification add eight to sixteen weeks on top of the equivalent private sector timeline. We share a weekly Loom and a Linear or Jira board so timeline drift is visible early, not at the launch retrospective.