Web design in Bern.

Bern has an economic structure that produces an unusually high number of organisations with a long website history. Alongside the federal administration, state-linked companies such as SBB, Post and Swisscom shape the location. Add to that trade associations and non-governmental organisations, healthcare and education, and a broad base of local trades. The trade association KMU Stadt Bern counts around 900 members carrying more than 4,000 jobs and 800 apprenticeships; its umbrella body Berner KMU, with roughly 20,000 members, is the largest business organisation in the canton.

Almost all of these organisations have had a website for years. The problem is rarely that something is missing. It is that too much is there. What we typically find is navigation that follows the internal organisation chart rather than what visitors came to do, a document archive that grew unchecked, three generations of design sitting side by side, and a technical base nobody wants to update any more. Laying a new home page over that solves none of it.

For you that means the first step is not design. It is an honest survey of what exists. Which pages are opened at all? Which documents are still valid? Which content answers a question anyone is actually asking? In almost every relaunch we run, less than half the existing material survives — and that is a success, not a loss.

It also changes who has to be in the room. A relaunch of this kind is a content decision before it is a design decision, so the people who own the content have to be available in weeks one and two. If they are not, the project stalls at exactly the point where it is cheapest to move quickly.

Public bodies in Switzerland already have to offer their digital services accessibly. For private providers that duty is expected to apply from 1 January 2027 under the current draft revision of the Disability Discrimination Act. The parliamentary debate runs through 2026. The scope widens considerably and covers, for the first time, private providers of publicly accessible commercial or cultural services. Details and transition periods can still shift in the process. Anyone selling you a finished rulebook today is selling a guess.

The technical benchmark, by contrast, is already clear: the WCAG 2.2 guideline at level AA, extended in Switzerland by the eCH-0059 standard. If you sell into the EU market, the European Accessibility Act has covered you since June 2025 — in Bern that mostly affects online retail, transport and financial services. What sits behind the requirements and how they play out in practice is explained in our glossary entry on digital accessibility.

In practice it comes down to this: sufficient colour contrast, full keyboard operability, meaningful alternative text, a correct heading hierarchy, labelled form fields, and error messages that are not signalled by colour alone. Most of that is barely extra effort in a new build. It is simply clean work. It only gets expensive when someone tries to operate it into a finished site afterwards. That is why we treat it as part of the build rather than as an add-on line.

One caution about tooling. Automated checkers catch a useful share of the technical failures and none of the interesting ones. Whether a form can actually be completed with a screen reader, whether the reading order makes sense, whether a document is usable at all — that needs a person. We say which of the two you are getting.

The canton of Bern is bilingual. German is the main language; in the Bernese Jura and in Biel/Bienne, French is an official language too. For an organisation with a public mandate or a cantonwide membership, a French version is therefore not a flourish but a baseline requirement. For a trades business in the city of Bern whose customers come from the agglomeration, it is usually unnecessary.

So the decision should hang on a single question: is there somebody who will maintain the French content permanently? If yes, we build two full language trees with their own addresses, correct markup for de-CH and fr-CH, and separate page titles. If no, a single-language site done well beats a French version that shows outdated information after eighteen months — and is still found.

One middle path works surprisingly well: the main site in German, plus a deliberately small but fully maintained French layer holding what really counts for francophone users — services, contact, opening hours, legal details. That is more honest than a complete translation nobody updates, and considerably cheaper.

Whichever route you take, the two versions have to reference each other correctly in the markup. Without that return reference, search engines treat the second version as a duplicate and the entire effort evaporates. It is a small technical detail with an outsized effect, and it is the one most often missed.

The biggest difference between an old presence and a working one is not how it looks. It is what the pages are ordered by. Brochure thinking orders by sender: about us, organisation, departments, documents. Websites have to order by intent: what does someone want to do, know or check? Five things we rebuild in practically every Bern relaunch:

• Dissolve the document archive. A PDF is a file, not content. Anything used regularly belongs on the web as a real page — searchable, linkable, readable on a phone.
• Navigate by intent, not by structure. Nobody searches for "Services Division". People search for "become a member", "pay my fee", "book an appointment".
• Answer before context. Every page answers its core question in the first two sentences. The background follows afterwards, not before.
• A real search. Past fifty pages, site search is not a nicety. It is the most-used entry point on the site.
• Editing with limits. Your team should be able to change content but not the layout. Otherwise the presence falls apart within a year.

There is a second-order effect worth naming. Once pages are ordered by intent, the site becomes 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.

The most dangerous moment in a relaunch is going live, and the largest avoidable damage comes from missing redirects. When an existing address leads nowhere after the rebuild, the page loses not only its position but every external link that has pointed at it over the years. For associations and organisations with a long history, that is often the single most valuable asset they own.

Our sequence instead: a complete list of every existing address, matched against the new structure, with a permanent redirect from each old address to its closest equivalent. Pages with no successor get a decision rather than an oversight. What a permanent redirect is technically, and why the distinction from a temporary one matters, is covered in our glossary entry on the 301 redirect. After launch we watch indexing and error reports for four to six weeks.

In parallel we measure the technical quality of the new site against the Core Web Vitals — load time, interaction delay and layout stability. Those three figures are not just a ranking factor. They are the best available proxy for whether a site feels right on an average mobile phone. We supply them before and after the rebuild, so the improvement is evidenced rather than asserted.

The step-by-step version of this sequence, including the checks that belong in the fortnight before launch, is written up in our guide to the website relaunch checklist.

The range runs from CHF 3,000 to CHF 25,000, and in a relaunch it is the volume of legacy material that decides where inside that range you land. A trades business with twelve pages sits at the lower end. An association with a grown structure, a members' area, a document archive and a second language sits at the top. The review of the existing material is a separate line item, which we price separately because otherwise it spreads invisibly across the whole project. Our project calculator gives a first self-assessment in two minutes.

Working across distance calls for transparency. We are not in Bern and we do not pretend to be. What we offer instead is a project status you can look at whenever you like: a preview URL from the first working day, a written record of open points and who owns them, and video sessions at the three or four moments where something is genuinely decided. In organisations with several stakeholders that is often more practical than an in-person meeting half the people miss.

What we can evidence is our craft, through projects in the Zurich region — the digital presence for the Nolte Küchen showroom in Zurich, the website for Leo Ristorante, and the site with its own online calculator for Rohrsanova. All of them are documented under our work. We have no Bern client project to show, and we do not invent one.

Not every unsatisfying website needs rebuilding. In four cases we advise against it:

• The problem is the content, not the technology. If the existing site loads fast, works on a phone and can be maintained, but nobody has written anything for three years, a new design solves precisely nothing. Editorial work is the right investment there.
• An organisational change is pending. If you merge, rename or reorder your services within six months, you build twice. Waiting is the cheaper decision.
• Nobody owns the content. A website with no named editorial responsibility starts ageing on the day it launches. Before anything is built, it should be settled who maintains it and with how much time.
• The budget is below CHF 3,000. Then it makes more sense to repair the existing site where it hurts — load time, mobile rendering, the contact route — than to start a rebuild that runs out halfway through.

And one structural note. If your organisation runs a formal tender with mandatory attendance, a framework agreement and a multi-stage award procedure, we are too small for it. That is not modesty, it is a capacity question — and it is fairer to write it here than to submit a bid that helps nobody. And if your real question turns out to be visibility rather than design, ongoing search work is the cheaper first step: local SEO starts at CHF 300 a month and full-service SEO at CHF 800, both of which leave the existing site standing.