My job is to show you to the world in the very best light.

Welcome! My name is Frank Herr. I'm a freelancer located in Toronto, Canada but working remotely for customers anywhere. I've been working in marketing and communications since 1985, and freelancing under the business name Best Light Communication since 1999.

I help small businesses and charitable organizations to communicate effectively. My services include website design, video production, content writing, and marketing consulting.

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"Non-techies" are welcome!

I do most of my work for small business owners, seniors, self-employed people, freelancers, consultants, and executive directors and managers of not-for-profit organizations.

Because I want to be helpful and like to explain things, my services are especially appreciated by people who aren't particularly technically-minded. Just as you don't need to know how to build a car to drive one, you certainly don't need to know how to create a website or a video to benefit from having one. You just need to be able to trust that your designer is acting in your best interests.

If you hire me, I will:

  • listen carefully to understand what you really want;
  • respond quickly to all of your emails and requests;
  • always explain what I'm doing for you and why; and
  • recommend the most effective and affordable ways to achieve your communication goals.

And I won't:

  • take advantage of your lack of technical knowledge to overcharge you;
  • pretend that something is more complicated or time-consuming than it really is; or
  • recommend anything that you don't really need.

My web design experience

I made my first website in 1996. You can actually still see an archived copy of it here. It's definitely not beautiful, but it was informative (and also surprisingly mobile-friendly, long before that was a thing)! It was incredibly exciting for our little non-profit organization to be able to suddenly reach a global audience with just some locally-created HTML.

Since then, for over 25 years now, I've designed and maintained websites for many companies and organizations. I've used a variety of web technologies over the years, and lately I've settled upon a specific set of favourite WordPress tools that let me build websites for my clients quickly and affordably.

My video experience

I started making videos with a digital camera back in 2002. This example was one of my first, shot with a low-resolution camcorder that recorded to miniDV tapes. Rudimentary by today's video gear standards, but we were thrilled. Suddenly, we could get our own top experts to train customers around the world with videos that we made ourselves.

Since then, I've shot and produced interview-style videos and how-to videos for quite a few companies and charities. As with web technologies, the video and audio gear that I've used has definitely evolved since I started. But the goal has always been the same: to use this great technology to communicate clearly and effectively. I still think it's amazing that small businesses and charities now have such easy access to such a powerful communication tool.

My writing experience

I've always been a writer and an explainer. I was the editor of my high school newspaper, and for many years after that, I taught and explained a fairly complex exercise system (tai chi) to thousands of people in person, on TV, and through books, manuals and articles.

In the past 35+ years, I’ve done extensive copywriting, copy editing, and technical writing for a wide variety of companies and organizations, on a wide variety of topics. I've written content for brochures, websites, video scripts, user manuals, corporate profiles, product sheets, news releases, case studies, newsletters, blog posts, standard operating procedures, ads, mission statements, company slogans, direct mail campaigns, and even a promotional children’s book. 

As anyone who does it for a living will tell you, writing isn't always easy, and it often requires multiple drafts and rounds of editing to get it right. But I still always find it incredibly satisfying to find the right words—to be able to explain or describe something clearly in writing.

 

Examples of my web, video, and writing work are available upon request, and you can also find out more about my work history and experience on my LinkedIn profile.

Some kind words from clients

Wonderful working experience with Frank

Frank and his team distinguishes with others by taking time to understand why and what we need for our website. As a result, he was able to identify, recommend, and resolve business issues very early in the development cycle. It has minimized ‘last minute’ surprises and enabled a smooth technical implementation. He always conducts interactions with us patiently and very professionally.

We look forward to work with his team again on future expansion of our website.

Aaron Cheng
CEO
Three O Project Solutions Inc.
Richmond Hill, Ontario

Professional Under Pressure!

Thank you so much for delivering a quality product on an abbreviated timeline. (We still haven’t recovered on our end) I know there are a lot of little tweaks we need to do. You were wonderful to work with through all of it.

Thanks so much for getting us through our crisis. Our April retreats opened on time and our 2019 Schedule is now public because of you. Our website was ancient and we were vulnerable given that we added a registration management plug-in January of 2017. All of our registrations come through the site. As a small non-profit retreat center, we don’t exist if people cant register to come on retreat. We knew we wanted to work with you based on recommendations and our initial interview.

When our site started crashing as we loaded next years retreats I was worried we would be out of business until you got the new site up. I explained our dilemma, you took the information in stride and made it happen, seamlessly! No one would be the wiser. I was blown away by your customer service under duress.

Sheila Garrick
Director
Southern Dharma Retreat Center
Hot Springs

You ‘get it’ and can articulate it

What business people want is to work with a marketing company to handle a bunch of things, and especially their key marketing pieces, to ensure that their marketing is achieving the best results possible. To do this is more than just delivering a few marketing pieces; it is in the degree to which you “get it” and can articulate it.

… you help us to get our message across in a way that speaks to what we do. The messaging is bang on. It reflects our brand in the way that we want it to, and better than we could do it ourselves. That’s hard to get because most marketing people just want to focus on making it look cool. In a business-to-business environment, that is much more important than slick marketing pieces with no substance.

Kirk Were
Managing Partner
Coyote Software Corporation
Burlington, ON

A delight to work with

It has been a delight to work with Frank and his team over the last few years. Frank played lead role in helping us vision and design our new website. This was no small task given the complexity of our site and the many different communication needs we had to meet. I was grateful for Frank’s quick responses to our queries and edits over the initial building phase. Since launching the site, Frank has been available to help with minor tweaks and even provides us short video tutorials when we find ourselves stuck and confused on managing the backend. I recommend Frank without reservations.

Evan Henritze
Director of Online Learning
Barre Center for Buddhist Studies
Barre, MA

Co-0peration

For us, working with Best Light was a joy. They came up with faster and better methods of reaching our goal, made invaluable creative suggestions AND were amenable to an excruciating schedule.

Brian O'Leary
Past President
Academy for Lifelong Learning U of T
Toronto, Canada

Contact me

Please use the form below to contact me if you would like some communication help for your small business or charity.

Rest assured that I won't send you any spam, or share your contact information with anyone.

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