A small, deliberate studio. Founded 1996. Thirtieth year in business.

What we work on

Principles

Write the source down.

Every claim on this site, in every report we send a client, in every email we send a journalist, carries a named source and a date. We keep a public corrections log. We retract pieces that turn out to be wrong. We notice when our own opinions do not have a citation behind them, and we treat that as a problem to fix.

Ship the smallest thing that works.

The cheapest fast website is the one with the least code in it. The most reliable software is the software that does one thing. We default to plain HTML, plain CSS, server-rendered pages, and a database when we need one. We add complexity when the business needs it, not because the engineer is bored.

The shortlist

What we do not do

Newsletter popups.
Chat widgets.
Stock photography.
AI-generated imagery.
Cookie banners we do not legally need.
Testimonial carousels.
"Trusted by" logo walls.
Gated PDFs in exchange for an email address.
Retainers that produce a PDF of keywords nobody ranks for.
Promises about AI Overview citation.

The test for any pattern we are considering is whether we would find it on a site we trust. If not, we do not ship it.

Founder

Kevin Hansen

Kevin Hansen founded Candid Creative in 1996 and has run it ever since. Thirty years on, he still writes the code, writes the articles, runs the audits, sends the invoices, and answers the email. The clients are mostly people who build things — trades, general contractors, small manufacturers, the kind of operations that have a yard or a shop floor and a website that has not been touched since 2019. The work is custom web development for small and mid-sized businesses — the kind of project where the engineer also does the SEO, the schema, the analytics, and the migration, because there is no one else.

He lives in Waterloo Region. He is comfortable saying so on the internet — partly because it is the only honest way to position a local-services business, partly because the editorial standards on this site only work if a real person's name is attached to them.

Engagements are deliberately small in number. We would rather take five clients a year and serve them well for a decade than thirty a year and disappoint most of them.

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About · 30th year in business

Editorial standards →

Kitchener–Waterloo
Est. 1996

Candid Creative