In the early 2000s, Joel Gathercole spent a lot of time explaining to business owners why they needed a website.
He had been online long before them. He ran his own BBS in the 1990s — hosting a dial-up community on his own hardware — so by the time the commercial web arrived, being able to reach people through a screen was not a novelty to him, it was just how things worked. He started building sites for businesses, learning the whole stack because there was no other way: the hosting, the DNS, the markup, the database, the email, the thing that broke on Friday night.
Twenty years later, he watches Canadian small businesses lose customers to the exact same failures.
Sites that take six seconds to load on a phone. Contact forms that silently send nothing — the most common and most expensive bug on the small business web, because the owner has no idea it is happening and simply concludes marketing does not work. Businesses invisible in local search because nobody ever filled in the basics. Sites that look adequate and quietly do nothing, which is worse than no site at all.
Meanwhile the market has gotten more expensive rather than better. Agencies charge four figures a month for a template. Site builders lock the business into a platform where they never own the code, cannot move the content, and pay forever. Neither arrangement was designed with a nine-person Canadian company in mind.
Maple Website is the corrective, built on that full-stack history. Real hosting, real Canadian infrastructure, fast pages, contact pipelines that are actually tested end to end, and search visibility handled as engineering rather than as an upsell. Sites are built for how people search now — including AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, which increasingly decide whether a local business gets mentioned at all. Structured data, clear direct answers, a coherent entity graph. Joel has spent a career being early to shifts like this; this one is simply the current version.
The credibility behind it is not just web work. Joel founded Netrique Inc. (VoIP, 2002-2006) and VieDigi Inc. (touch-screen tablet prototype, 2004-2006, 2004 archive), ran the CafeVox internet cafe, and served 20 years at TriageLogic ending as Director of IT. He has been the small business owner whose phone needs to ring, and the enterprise architect responsible for systems that cannot go down.
Maple Website is part of the MapleWorkSuite ecosystem from Joel & Nanz Inc., built in New Brunswick — by someone who was doing this before most of the competition existed.