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Shaz Media.
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About

We did not start with websites.

Shaz Media grew out of music and photography, and every step since has been a client asking for the next thing. Fifteen years later that path is the reason a brand, a website, a campaign and the software behind them can come from one place instead of four.

How the work grew

Nothing here was a business plan. Each stage came from a client with a problem the last stage could not solve.

  1. A camera and a pair of speakers

    It started with music and photography. How a track is arranged and how a photograph is framed turn out to be the same lesson twice: what you leave out matters more than what you put in. That is still how a page gets laid out here, and it is why our work tends to look calmer than the brief suggested.

  2. Then somebody asked for a logo

    The photography led to a request for a mark, and then another. A logo has to survive being shrunk, printed badly, and seen for a quarter of a second on a passing van. Making them teaches you quickly that a brand is a set of decisions, not a picture.

  3. Clients with a logo needed somewhere to put it

    So the work moved to websites, built the hard way, which is the only way to find out what a browser really does. That is why nothing here is a bought template with the colours changed — and why, years later, we still read the code we ship.

  4. A site nobody visits is a poster in a locked room

    Building the thing was never the whole job. Search, ads, email and content came next, and then online stores — a different discipline again, because now the site has to take money, count stock, and not lose an order on a Saturday night.

  5. Now: the systems a business runs on

    Today the work runs to custom software — client portals, dashboards, invoicing, the parts nobody sees but everybody depends on. Enterprise-scale problems, handled by the same people who used to letter a logo by hand. Wider toolkit, same standards.

What has not changed

The tools moved on a long way. These did not, and they are the reason clients stay.

You own everything

The code, the brand, the domain and every account are in your name. Leaving is always possible, which is the only honest way to ask you to stay.

A price agreed before work starts

Scope, timeline and a fixed figure, settled up front. No hourly meter, and no invoice that arrives larger than the conversation.

One team, idea to launch

The person who designs it is the person who builds it. Nothing is handed to a stranger halfway through and explained twice.

We answer our own email

There is no ticket queue and no account manager relaying messages. You write to us and we write back, usually within one business day.

2011 The year the first client paid us
Five Disciplines under one roof: brand, web, commerce, marketing, software
Worldwide Wherever your business is, and whatever the time zone.
Giving back

Helping Our Peoples Community Projects

We sponsor HOPCP, whose Gift of Hope programme reaches families in our community without a waiting list. Every invoice we send carries the option to add a gift, and we pass on every cent of it.

hopcp.ca

Tell us the problem.

Scope, timeline and a fixed price before anything starts. Four fields, one business day.

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