Web Design Agencies near you

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are published by the World Wide Web Consortium and organise their requirements under four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Success criteria sit at three levels, A, AA and AAA. WCAG 2.0 was published in 2008, WCAG 2.1 in 2018, and WCAG 2.2 was published on 5 October 2023 with an update on 12 December 2024. Later versions do not deprecate earlier ones, and WCAG 2.2 has also been approved as an International Organization for Standardization standard, ISO/IEC 40500:2025. Level AA is the level almost every law and policy points at, and it is the level LokalMatch builds its own pages to, under WCAG 2.2.

In Ontario the requirement is law. Under the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation made under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, designated public sector organisations and businesses or non-profits with fifty or more employees must make their public websites and the web content they posted after 1 January 2012 meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA, a requirement that has been in force since 1 January 2021. Two criteria are excluded: live captions and pre-recorded audio descriptions. Section 14 of the regulation also describes limited situations where the requirement may not apply after best efforts have been made. The obligation falls on the organisation that controls the website, whether directly or through a contract, which means hiring an agency does not move the duty onto the agency.

Federally regulated organisations are covered by a separate statute. The Accessible Canada Act aims at a Canada without barriers on or before 1 January 2040, and the areas it addresses include information and communication technologies and the design and delivery of programs and services. It applies to federal government institutions, Crown corporations, the Canadian Forces and organisations operating works, undertakings or businesses within federal legislative authority, such as broadcasters, telecommunications carriers and federally regulated transportation. If your business sits in one of those sectors, accessibility is not a preference you can leave out of scope, and the version and level you must meet should be settled in writing before the build starts.

Copyright in the design and the code follows the same rule as any other commissioned creative work. The Copyright Act makes the author the first owner, with the narrow exception of works made by an employee in the course of employment, and no assignment is valid unless it is in writing signed by the owner of the right. An agency is a supplier, so absent a signed assignment the agency keeps copyright in what it built for you and you hold whatever licence the contract implies, which may be far less than you assumed.

Separately from copyright, insist that the accounts are registered in the business's name from the start: the domain, the hosting, the content management system, the analytics and any third-party service the site depends on. The most common and most painful failure in this trade is a domain registered to the agency's account, which turns an ordinary change of supplier into a negotiation. Ask for administrator credentials to be held by the business, with the agency added as a user.

Handover should also include the things that make the site maintainable by somebody else: the source code in a repository you control, the editable design files, a list of every third-party component, theme or plugin with its licence terms, and documentation of how to deploy a change. Where the agency has built on its own proprietary platform, understand before you commit what happens if you leave, whether the site can be exported in a usable form and what the licence costs to continue. A site you cannot move is a site whose price can be reset at renewal.

Redesigning what exists is usually the cheaper and less risky route when the underlying platform is current and supported, the content is reasonably organised and the problems are visual, structural or about how hard the site is to edit. A redesign can also be staged, template by template, so the site keeps working throughout and the spend is spread out.

A rebuild earns its cost when the foundation is the problem: an unsupported platform that no longer receives security updates, a theme so heavily modified it cannot be updated, accessibility failures baked into the markup, or a structure that makes the site slow no matter what is done to the design. Rebuilding is also the honest answer when nobody can safely change the site without breaking something. Either way, treat the existing addresses as an asset: map every current page to its replacement and put redirects in place at launch, or the visibility the old site earned is lost along with the design nobody liked.