The Speed Train

Most website work is sold as a solution before anyone has proved what the problem is.

A redesign can improve how a website looks. It cannot compensate for poor hosting, weak search demand, unclear messaging or a confusing path to enquiry.

That is why our consultations begin with diagnosis.

We look at the website as a whole, identify what is limiting it and establish the right order of work. Sometimes the answer is speed optimization. Sometimes it is SEO, structure or messaging. Sometimes the smartest decision is leaving something alone.

Good advice should help you spend less carelessly and invest more confidently.

Comment “AUDIT” and we’ll send you our 10-point Website Second Opinion checklist.

Sometimes the most expensive thing you can do to your website is keep guessing.

A new plugin. Another redesign. More advertising sent to a page that still is not doing its job.

Not every problem needs more work. Sometimes it needs a better diagnosis.

Our consultations give business owners an honest second opinion before they spend again. We look at the website, speed, SEO and the systems behind it, then help you separate what needs attention now from what can wait.

Comment “CLARITY” and we’ll DM you five questions to help you see where your website may be getting stuck.

The hour has come. 💛

For a while now, we’ve been quietly working on something completely different from anything we’ve built before.

It started, appropriately enough, with a conversation.

We kept talking about how strange it is that we can live in a city surrounded by millions of people and still rarely have the opportunity to meet someone completely new and simply talk. No networking agenda. No profile to study beforehand. No swiping through photographs. Just curiosity and an hour of your time.

Somewhere along the way, that conversation became Onehourone

We didn’t want to announce it while it was still just an idea. We wanted to see whether real people would actually sign up, show up and give an hour to a stranger.

Last Sunday, they did.

Our first pairings took place online, the conversations happened, and afterwards the feedback started coming in. Positive, thoughtful, and perhaps most importantly, enough to make us think: there might really be something here.

So now we’re finally sharing it.

The pilot is underway and we’re going to learn as we go. We’ve written the full story of how OneHourOne started, what we’re trying to do and why we decided to build it.

Read the full story at onehourone.com and follow the experiment at Onehourone.

Westmount Magazine received grant funding to modernize its digital publishing platform.

The challenge was to rebuild the website without losing the publication readers already knew.

The website relied on a discontinued WordPress theme. Updates had become risky, features were breaking and even simple changes were becoming difficult.

The client did not want to start over.

The familiar design, editorial workflow and years of published content all needed to remain intact.

We rebuilt the website in Elementor Pro using custom templates, CSS and conditional functionality.

The frontend remained familiar while the entire foundation changed.

Thousands of existing articles already contained important settings from the old theme.

We identified and reused that data instead of asking the client to reconfigure years of content manually.

We created a custom Westmount Post Settings panel that restored five essential editorial controls:

Featured Posts, Category Slider, Disable Sidebar, Full Width Featured Image and Gallery Posts.

Sponsored and advertorial content sometimes needs a different layout.

Editors can now remove the sidebar from an individual article and automatically give the story more room.

Gallery stories were also restored using the publication’s existing image data and display settings.

Editors can continue creating visual stories without learning a completely new workflow.

The result is a website that still feels like Westmount Magazine to its readers, but gives the editorial team far more flexibility behind the scenes.

If your organization has received digital funding or is planning a major website modernization, talk to The Speed Train.

MontrealBusiness GrantFunding

That face when the kids are finally back at school and you remember what a quiet morning feels like. 😅

After a wonderfully busy summer, Dilaira Dubash and I finally sat down over coffee to plan the day without squeezing strategy between camps, outings, meals and everything else.

With just a few months left in the year, we have plenty we want to accomplish at The Speed Train. More mornings like this, clearer priorities and some exciting plans we are ready to get moving on 💛

Even The Speed Train needs a slow day. 💛

Running a business teaches you how to keep moving, but Labour Day is a good reminder that knowing when to stop matters too.

The work will still be there tomorrow. For now, we are slowing down and enjoying the people we are building it all for.

Happy Labour Day from The Speed Train.

I met with a pizzeria owner in Kensington Market and noticed that every website order was being sent directly to Uber Eats.

My suggestion was simple: keep Uber Eats for delivery, but let customers place pickup orders directly through the restaurant’s own website.

That gives the business a direct relationship with its customers, valuable sales insights and the ability to create better promotions with customer consent.

Delivery platforms are useful, but your business should also be building something it owns.

Your orders. Your customers. Your data.