A web developer based in Bratislava, working with clients anywhere

Why hire someone in Bratislava

Central European time overlaps with the whole of Europe and gives you a working morning with the UK and an afternoon with the US East Coast. Rates here sit well below Western European agencies while the work is done by a developer, not resold to one.

The practical difference is who you reach when something breaks. There is no ticket queue and no account manager relaying the question. You describe the problem to the person who wrote the thing.

Proof from a village outside Bratislava

A bike workshop in a village near Bratislava now gets found ahead of the large city shops. Average position 5.9, 3,125 impressions in the first month, and 76 percent of visits from a phone. On the main service phrase the average position is 2.8, on the village variant 1.6.

There was no advertising behind it. There were separate pages for individual services and villages, honest text, and a site that loads on a phone before the visitor gives up. The workshop doubled its revenue after launch and later reached three times the old figure.

The full ajbikes.sk story →

Where I can turn up in person

Bratislava and the surrounding area: Senec, Pezinok, Miloslavov, Dunajská Lužná, Šamorín, Ivanka pri Dunaji, Malinovo. Vienna is an hour away by car. Everywhere else works remotely and works just as well. Paving Planner runs in seven countries and I have never met most of those users face to face.

What clients usually come for

An internal tool that replaces a spreadsheet a business has outgrown. A custom website for a small operation that needs to be found locally. A booking system without a fee on every reservation. Taking over a site from a supplier who stopped answering.

Bratislava is the most expensive playing field in the country, but not on the phrase you need

The phrase for web design in Bratislava belongs to agencies who have poured money into it for years, and there is no point going after it. The good news is that your customer does not type it anyway.

Somebody whose boiler has just died is not looking for a supplier for Bratislava. They are looking for one in Ruzinov, in Senec, in their own district. Those phrases are searched less and contested far less, which is exactly why you can reach them without an advertising budget.

So a website for a Bratislava business is not built around the city. It is built around the district and the service. A smaller pie, but you get all of it.

What that means in practice

It means one general page is not the answer. A company doing three things across four districts has a reason for more than one page, but only where each page has something of its own to say.

Where it has nothing to say, the page does not get built. Ten clones with the district name swapped is exactly what Google penalises as doorway pages, and businesses lose them all at once rather than one by one.