Greenstrix
Brand and product site for an eco-friendly packaging exporter, structured around technical specification for an international B2B audience.
Visit siteServing Canada
EasyWork Solutions builds websites and web applications for Canadian businesses from Surat, India. Canada is the only market we work in where the language of your website is set by statute rather than by your marketing team, and where accessibility is provincial legislation with a compliance deadline that has already passed. Both facts change what a website project is before a single design decision gets made.
In short
Web development for Canadian businesses has to account for the Charter of the French Language, which requires commercial websites serving Quebec to be available in French with the French version at least as prominent, for AODA accessibility obligations in Ontario built on WCAG 2.0 Level AA, for Canadian Presence Requirements on a .ca domain, and for hosting in a Canadian region when privacy law or a client contract calls for it.
At a glance
- Time difference
- India is 9.5 hours ahead of Toronto, 12.5 ahead of Vancouver
- Language obligation
- The Charter of the French Language reaches commercial websites — a business serving Quebec needs a French version, and it cannot be treated as secondary to the English one
- Accessibility
- Ontario's AODA requires WCAG 2.0 Level AA on public websites of designated organisations, with the phased deadlines already behind us
- Domain
- A .ca registration is subject to CIRA's Canadian Presence Requirements — you have to qualify, not merely pay
- Privacy
- PIPEDA federally, Quebec's Law 25 for anyone with Quebec customers, and PIPA in Alberta and British Columbia
- Hosting
- ca-central-1 in Montreal or ca-west-1 in Calgary when residency matters, which for public-sector and health clients it usually does
- Overlap
- India is 9.5 hours ahead of Toronto — our afternoon is your morning, and West Coast work runs on a written decision log
French is a legal requirement, not a second phase
Most bilingual website projects we inherit were built English-first with French added later, and the structure shows it. The French pages sit at a different depth, they lag the English ones by a release or two, some of them fall back to English silently, and the language switch loses the user's place. That was an acceptable compromise when French was a courtesy. Under the Charter of the French Language it is not.
The Charter reaches commercial publications and, since the 2022 amendments, is explicit about websites and consumer-facing software offered to the Quebec public. The practical standard is that anything you publish commercially has to exist in French, and that the French cannot be harder to reach, less complete or less current than the English. A French page that is a stale translation of last quarter's English page is not a French page in any sense the Office québécois de la langue française would recognise.
So we build the two languages as peers from the first commit. One content model, both locales required before a page can publish, a URL structure where /fr and /en are siblings rather than parent and child, and a language toggle that keeps you on the same page instead of dumping you at the French homepage. It is barely more work than the English-first approach when you start that way, and it is a rebuild when you do not.
French text is longer, and your layout has to absorb it
French runs roughly fifteen to twenty-five percent longer than English for the same meaning, and the expansion is not evenly distributed. Short interface strings suffer worst: a button that says "Submit" becomes "Soumettre", "Learn more" becomes "En savoir plus", and a navigation label that fitted comfortably in English wraps to two lines or gets truncated with an ellipsis in French.
This is where an English-first design breaks visibly. Fixed-width buttons, single-line navigation bars sized to the English labels, cards on a grid with heights set by the English copy, and tables with columns tuned to English headers all fail. The failure is usually cosmetic rather than functional, which is exactly why it survives to production — nobody blocks a launch over a wrapped nav item, and then the French site looks like the afterthought it was.
We design against the longer string. Buttons and labels sized for French, navigation tested in both languages before the design is signed off, no text baked into images, and text truncation reserved for places where it genuinely cannot be avoided. We also check the French typography properly: Quebec follows the French convention of non-breaking spaces before certain punctuation, and quotation marks are guillemets, not the English pair. These are small things that a Quebec reader notices immediately.
AODA is a statute with dates that have already passed
Ontario's Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act sets out accessibility requirements in regulation, and the information and communications standard requires designated organisations to make their public websites and web content conform to WCAG 2.0 Level AA. The phase-in ran over years and the deadlines are behind us, and organisations above the employee threshold file accessibility compliance reports.
The reason this matters to a web project is that it converts accessibility from a quality argument into a scoping question with a defined answer. You do not have to persuade a client that focus indicators and form labels are worth doing; you have to confirm whether the organisation is designated, which threshold it falls under, and what it will be attesting to in its next report. That is a much shorter conversation.
Other provinces are moving in the same direction — Manitoba, Nova Scotia and British Columbia have their own accessibility legislation at various stages, and the Accessible Canada Act covers federally regulated organisations such as banks, telecoms and interprovincial transport. So we build to WCAG regardless of province, decide contrast, focus order, heading structure, labels and keyboard operability during design where they cost nothing, and stay away from accessibility overlay widgets, which do not fix the markup underneath and have not protected anyone from a complaint.
A .ca domain has eligibility rules, and hosting has residency ones
CIRA applies Canadian Presence Requirements to .ca registrations: the registrant has to fall into one of the defined qualifying categories, such as a Canadian citizen, permanent resident, a corporation incorporated federally or provincially, or the owner of a Canadian trade mark applied to that name. It is not a domain you can simply buy from abroad, and we check the registrant record at the start of every Canadian project rather than in launch week. It is surprisingly common for the registrant to be a former employee or a consultant nobody has spoken to in five years.
Hosting location is a separate question and it is answered by privacy obligations rather than by preference. Quebec's Law 25 requires an assessment before personal information is communicated outside the province, which in practice makes a Canadian region the path of least resistance for any application holding Quebec customer data. Public-sector clients in British Columbia and Nova Scotia work under statutory constraints on where personal information can be stored. Provincial health privacy legislation adds its own layer for anyone touching patient records.
We treat this as an architecture decision made in week one with the client's legal adviser, not a hosting preference expressed at deployment. ca-central-1 in Montreal and ca-west-1 in Calgary are both available, latency to the major population centres is good from Montreal, and the practical cost of choosing a Canadian region up front is far lower than the cost of migrating an application that has already accumulated production data.
Six time zones, and how the working day actually lines up
Canada spans six time zones, including Newfoundland's half-hour offset, which means "Canadian business hours" is not a single window. India is nine and a half hours ahead of Toronto and twelve and a half ahead of Vancouver. Those two numbers describe genuinely different working relationships and we do not pretend otherwise.
For Eastern clients — Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal — the overlap is real and we hold it. Our afternoon is your morning, so a question you send at nine reaches a team that is still working, and a call at nine-thirty Eastern is entirely normal for us. Most of the coordination cost of offshore development disappears when there is a reliable daily window where both sides are awake.
For Pacific clients the overlap is thin, and the honest answer is that the project runs on writing rather than on meetings. Specifications detailed enough to work from without a clarifying call, a decision log that records what was decided and why, a staging URL you can look at whenever you want, and one scheduled call a week at an hour that is early for you and late for us. It works well, but it works because the written discipline is real, not because we found a clever scheduling trick.
Budgeting
What drives the cost
We do not publish a price list, because a number given before understanding the work is a guess someone pays for later. These are the factors that actually move the figure in this market.
Two languages as peers
Building French and English as equal locales from the start costs modestly more than English-only. Retrofitting French into an English-first codebase is closer to a rebuild, and that is the version most Charter-driven projects arrive as.
Translation quality
Machine-translated French reads as machine-translated to a Quebec audience, and Canadian French is not the French of France. Professional translation or review is a real line item and it is visible in the result.
Accessibility at design time
Contrast, focus order, heading structure and keyboard operability are close to free as design constraints and expensive as remediation once an AODA compliance report is due.
Canadian hosting
A Canadian region costs more than the cheapest option available and is what makes a Law 25 assessment or a public-sector procurement question answerable.
Content readiness in both languages
French copy is the dependency that delays Canadian launches most often, because it is usually commissioned after the English is final rather than alongside it.
Evidence
Work we have actually shipped
Little Star Nursery
Multi-branch education site built for a bilingual, activity-based programme — content architecture designed to keep multiple campuses and languages consistent.
Visit siteK Designs Studio
Portfolio site for a luxury interior design practice, a visually demanding brief delivered without giving up performance or keyboard usability.
Visit siteProcess
How the project runs
Establish the language obligation first
Whether the business serves Quebec, what the Charter therefore requires, and which content is in scope — settled before information architecture, because it determines the content model.
Verify .ca eligibility and registrant control
CIRA presence category, registrant record and renewal contact confirmed in week one rather than discovered during launch.
Design for the longer language
Layouts, buttons and navigation sized for French, with both locales reviewed before the design is signed off and no text baked into images.
Set accessibility as a constraint
WCAG 2.0 Level AA decisions taken during design — contrast, focus order, heading structure, labels, keyboard operability — so an AODA report has a defensible answer.
Choose the hosting region with your adviser
Canadian region selected in architecture where Law 25, provincial public-sector rules or health privacy legislation apply, not at deployment.
Hand over everything
Source code, design files, translation memory, hosting and domain credentials, and a walkthrough for whoever maintains it after us.
Before you choose
Questions worth asking any vendor
These apply to us as much as to anyone else bidding for your work.
- Ask whether French will be built as a peer locale or added afterwards. The second answer is the one that becomes a rebuild when the Charter obligation is taken seriously.
- Ask who is translating, and whether they write Canadian French. A Quebec reader identifies France French and machine translation immediately, and it costs you credibility rather than compliance.
- Confirm who the registrant of your .ca actually is. CIRA's presence requirements mean it may be held by someone who no longer works for you.
- Ask whether accessibility is a design constraint or an end-of-project audit, and whether the organisation is designated under AODA. Those two answers determine the real scope.
- Ask where the application will be hosted and who decided. If Quebec personal information is involved, that decision has a legal component and should involve your adviser.
What you get on every project
- A written scope with fixed milestones before any development starts — no open-ended hourly billing.
- A staging URL you can check at any time, so progress is visible rather than reported.
- One named point of contact, not a ticket queue.
- Invoicing in CAD, under Easywork Solutions Private Limited.
- Full source code, design files and hosting credentials transferred to you on final payment.
FAQ
Common questions
Do we legally need a French version of our website?
If you offer goods or services to the public in Quebec, effectively yes. The Charter of the French Language reaches commercial publications and, since the 2022 amendments, is explicit about websites and consumer-facing software. The French version has to be at least as accessible and as complete as the English one, so a stale translation sitting a level deeper in the site is not a compliant answer. Your legal adviser should confirm the scope for your specific business; we build to what they set.
Can we just use machine translation for the French?
You can, and Quebec readers will know. Canadian French differs from the French of France in vocabulary that matters commercially — courriel rather than email, magasiner rather than faire du shopping — and machine output tends toward the European register. Beyond the credibility cost, the Charter's concern is with quality and equivalence of the French content, not merely its existence. We generally recommend professional translation with a Quebec reviewer.
Why does French break our design?
Because it runs roughly fifteen to twenty-five percent longer than English, and the expansion hits short interface strings hardest. Buttons, navigation labels and table headers sized to English copy wrap or truncate in French. It is a design constraint rather than a bug, which is why we size for the longer language during design instead of discovering it during translation.
Does AODA apply to us?
It depends on whether your organisation is designated under the regulation and which employee threshold it falls under. Where it applies, the information and communications standard requires public websites and web content to conform to WCAG 2.0 Level AA, and organisations above the threshold file accessibility compliance reports. The phase-in deadlines have passed. We build to WCAG regardless of province, so the answer to a compliance question is the same either way.
Can we register a .ca domain from outside Canada?
Only through a qualifying Canadian presence. CIRA's Canadian Presence Requirements list the categories — Canadian citizen, permanent resident, a federally or provincially incorporated company, the owner of a Canadian trade mark applied to that name, among others. For an overseas business entering Canada, the entity generally has to exist before the domain can be secured.
Do we have to host in Canada?
Not universally, but often. Quebec's Law 25 requires an assessment before personal information is communicated outside the province, public-sector bodies in some provinces work under statutory storage constraints, and provincial health privacy legislation adds requirements for patient data. Where any of those apply, a Canadian region is the straightforward answer, and choosing it in architecture is far cheaper than migrating later.
How does the time difference work for a Vancouver client?
Honestly, it is thin — twelve and a half hours — and we do not dress it up. Pacific projects run on written specifications, a decision log, a staging URL you can check whenever you like, and one scheduled call a week at an hour that is early for you and late for us. Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal clients get a genuine daily overlap instead, because our afternoon is your morning.
How people search for this in Canada
A meaningful share of search in this market happens in a language other than English. These are the terms people actually use — we work with your translator for customer-facing copy rather than relying on machine translation.
Canadian French
- conception de site web
- développement web
- agence web Montréal
- création de site internet
- refonte de site web
- site web bilingue
- programmeur web
- soumission site web
- prix site web
- site web adaptatif
- hébergement de site web
- entretien de site web
- site web conforme loi 96
- accessibilité web
- vitesse de chargement
- site web pour PME
Read next
- Web development service
- Software development for Canada
- UI/UX design for Canada
- SEO services for Canada
- Core Web Vitals in 2026
- Headless CMS vs traditional CMS
Web Development in other markets
Other services for Canada
- Mobile App Development
- E-Commerce Development
- Custom Software Development
- AI & Automation
- UI/UX Design
- Digital Marketing
- Cloud & Hosting
- SEO & AI Search Optimization
Last reviewed 2026-08-06 by the EasyWork Solutions team.