Web design in Basel.

Basel is the only Swiss economic region where a single industry shapes the entire digital environment. Basel-Stadt is a small canton with an economy that punches far above its size. Its profile is dominated by life sciences — Roche and Novartis are headquartered here, and a dense layer of suppliers, laboratories, contract manufacturers and specialist consultancies has grown around them. Alongside that sits the ordinary local economy: trades, practices, hospitality and retail serving a city that also draws commuters from Baselland, Alsace and southern Baden. For a website that means two audiences with very different expectations, and it is the reason English matters more here than in most Swiss cities

For a web presence that has three very concrete consequences. First, your readership is unusually technical. Somebody researching on behalf of a supplier, a testing laboratory, a logistics operator at the Rhine port or a law firm with pharma mandates is looking for specifications, certificates and named contacts, not mood photography. Second, a considerable share of that readership does not work in German, because the Basel research and supply structures run in English. Third, the buying process is long and runs through several stages, so the site does not have to sell immediately. It has to stay credible for months.

That is exactly why the recipes that are right for a local trade in the Zurich region do not work in Basel. A page built on emotion, proximity and a quick phone call lands nowhere in a purchasing process that runs through supplier qualification. The reverse is equally true: the Basel trades — craftspeople, restaurants, practices, retail in Kleinbasel and the neighbourhoods — need precisely the opposite. We settle this point in the first conversation, before anything is designed, because it decides the entire structure of the site.

One practical consequence is worth naming early. Which of the two worlds you belong to also determines who has to be available during the project. A technical B2B presence needs your specialists in weeks one and two. A trades site mostly needs one decision-maker and good photographs.

Adding a second language afterwards usually costs more than planning it in from the beginning — and not because of the translation, but because of the structure. A site designed in one language tends to carry text baked into images, menu items at a fixed width, and URLs with no language path. All of that has to be broken open when the second language arrives. If it is clear from day one that German and English stand side by side as equals, you get two clean language trees with their own addresses, their own page titles and their own descriptions.

The technically decisive part is the language markup. Every page has to point at its counterpart in the other language, and it has to do so in both directions. Where the return reference is missing, search engines discard the whole declaration. What sits behind that is explained in our glossary entry on hreflang. In retrofitted sites we see the same failure again and again: the English version exists but is treated as a duplicate of the German one, because the signals are incomplete. The work was then done for nothing.

Part of the Basel position in the tri-border area is that searches from neighbouring Germany and from Alsace are real. That does not automatically mean you need a French version. It means the decision should be a conscious one: which languages will you serve with full editorial commitment, and which not at all? A half-maintained third language does more harm than good, because outdated content in a foreign language rarely gets noticed internally and is still found externally.

There is a middle path that works surprisingly well: the main site in German, plus a deliberately small but fully maintained English layer holding what actually matters — services, contact, specifications, legal details. That is more honest than a complete translation nobody updates, and considerably cheaper to keep alive.

Technical depth almost never fails on a website because of the content. It fails because of the order. The typical mistake: a service is introduced across three paragraphs of context before anyone states what it actually is. Somebody quickly checking whether a supplier is worth a conversation has long since closed the tab. Our rule is therefore simple — every page answers its core question completely in the first two sentences, and everything after that goes deeper.

• One page per service. Combined pages listing five offerings rank for none of them and finish answering no single question.
• Specifications as their own layer. Data sheets, standards, certificates and test reports belong in visible links, not woven into running text.
• Named contacts. Function, photograph, direct line. In a multi-stage procurement process that is frequently the real conversion point.
• Evidence instead of adjectives. "Leading", "innovative" and "bespoke" appear on every second competitor page and carry no information.
• Show how current it is. A date on technical content builds more trust in an engineering field than any design element.

There is a second-order effect worth naming. Once pages are ordered this way, they become far easier to quote — by search engines and by the AI assistants people increasingly ask first. A page that answers its question in the opening two sentences can be lifted out and cited on its own. A page that spends three paragraphs introducing itself cannot.

None of this is specific to Basel, but it pays off there more than elsewhere. Our general approach to building sites is described on our national web design page.

You see a designed draft before you have to decide on us, not afterwards. The sequence is built deliberately so that the distance between Zollikon and Basel does not matter:

• A first video conversation, 45 minutes. We settle audience, language scope, existing content and the rough range. Both sides then know whether this fits.
• A free design concept within 48 hours. A first designed draft of your home page, with no obligation. How that works is explained on free design.
• Structure and content. We fix the page tree and mark which copy comes from you and which we write. On bilingual projects that happens for both languages at the same time.
• Built on a modern stack. We build with Next.js and TypeScript, delivered statically, with no page-builder dependency. The code is yours when we finish.
• A preview instead of a presentation. A preview URL runs from day one. You see progress whenever you want, rather than waiting for a meeting.
• Launch and handover. Domain, credentials, editing instructions. After that you decide whether you maintain the site yourself or commission us.

Realistically that means two to four weeks for a focused single-language presence and six to ten weeks for a bilingual corporate site, in both cases counted from the moment the content exists. That qualification is not a formality. Internal approvals are by far the most common cause of delay, not the development.

The range runs from CHF 3,000 to CHF 25,000, and the second language moves the figure more than any design decision. At the lower end sits a focused presence with a handful of pages, one clear contact route and clean engineering. At the upper end sits a bilingual corporate site with an editing system, service and team areas, downloads and a connection to existing systems.

What drives the price, in this order: the number of genuinely distinct pages, the second language, an editing system for your team, interfaces to a CRM or inventory system, and image production. What does not drive the price, although people often assume it does: the design itself. A more elaborate layout costs a few extra hours. A second language costs across the entire lifetime of the site. Our project calculator gives you a first self-assessment in two minutes.

Separate from that come running costs, which quotes love to leave out: domain and hosting, any licences, and above all maintenance. A website is not a one-off piece of work. Dependencies age, browsers change, content goes out of date. Budget an annual amount for upkeep and ask every agency about it explicitly before you sign. Anyone who does not show that line in the offer is not removing the cost, only moving it.

We have no client project in Basel to show you, and we do not pretend otherwise. Our references sit in the Zurich region: the website for Leo Ristorante in Globus, the full digital presence for the Nolte Küchen showroom in Zurich, the Basilica bar in Zurich West, the online shop and brand presence for JUCAN tailored suits including its Shopify store, the Racher stationery business, Edelweiss Räumungen and Rohrsanova. All of them are documented under our work, with the starting position, the approach and the result.

What that tells you about a Basel project is limited, and you should factor that in. It evidences craft: that we build sites which load fast, get found and produce enquiries. It does not evidence that we know the Basel market from our own client experience. If an agency does name Basel cases at this point, ask for the URL and check for yourself whether the site is still live and who looks after it today. In this industry that is a surprisingly effective question.

What we offer instead: before you commission anything, you see a designed draft for your own company. That is better evidence than any third-party case study, because it concerns your content, your audience and your competitive setting — and because you pay nothing for it.

There are four situations in which we would advise against working with us, and we would rather say so in the first conversation than in the third month.

• French is your main language. If content is produced and maintained in French continuously, the engagement belongs in the Romandie. We can build the structure, but we cannot run the newsroom.
• You need somebody in the room every week. With many internal stakeholders, workshop formats and corporate governance, physical presence is part of the service. We cannot deliver that from Zollikon — and there are good agencies in Basel that can.
• Your budget is under CHF 3,000. Then a properly set-up Google Business Profile plus a simple template site is the more sensible investment. We will not build you half of something.
• You are rolling out a group template. When design, structure and system are set by a parent company, that is an implementation job rather than a design job — and the existing group supplier is usually more efficient at it.

A fifth case is not about the region but about the task. If what you actually need is not a website but an application — a portal, a calculation tool, a customer area — that is a different undertaking with a different approach. We describe it under web app development. Commissioning an application as if it were a website usually costs a full project cycle.