Web Development Zurich.

At DLM Digital a developed website starts at CHF 3'000, a single landing page at CHF 2'500 and a multi-page business website at CHF 5'000. Real applications sit in a different order of magnitude. An MVP — the first working version of a web application — runs CHF 15'000 to 25'000, and a full SaaS platform or B2B portal CHF 40'000 to 80'000 and up. The range is not driven by how many pages you need. It is driven by the logic underneath: user roles, interfaces to systems you already run, the data model and real-time features. On top of that come hosting and domain costs of roughly CHF 100 to 500 per year. If you want a first figure for your own project, our project calculator gives you an honest ballpark in a few minutes.

Web design answers how a website looks and feels: layout, typography, colour, imagery, the way people move through it. Web development answers how it works: the code that turns the design into something a browser can run, the data structure behind it, the interfaces to other systems, the load time and the maintainability over years. On small projects the two collapse into one job, and we deliver both. As soon as logic enters the picture — a login, roles, calculations, a shop, a connection to your ERP — the weight shifts sharply towards development. The design is finished in days; the build takes weeks. A practical rule: if your project is mainly a convincing presentation of your company, you need web design, and we have a separate page for that at Web Design Zurich. If your website has to do something that does not exist off the shelf, you need web development.

We build with Next.js and React on the front end, in TypeScript throughout, and style with Tailwind CSS. On the back end we work with Node.js and PostgreSQL. That is deliberately a narrow, modern stack rather than a bit of everything: we want to be able to maintain every line we ship three years from now. Next.js gives us server-side rendering and static site generation out of the box, which is the decisive point for SEO — Google and AI systems receive finished HTML instead of an empty page that JavaScript has to fill in first. TypeScript catches a substantial share of errors while we write them, not once they reach your customers. This website runs on exactly that stack, so you can check the result live rather than take our word for it.

A website goes live in two weeks. That is the normal case for a company site when content and approvals arrive promptly. More involved projects follow different timelines: an MVP of a web application ships in six to twelve weeks, and a complete platform with back-end logic, user roles and integrations takes three to six months. We work in agile two-week sprints, so after each sprint you see working features rather than a status report. The biggest time sink in web projects is rarely the engineering — it is waiting for content and decisions. If you want to keep the pace, we agree before kick-off who signs things off on your side and where the copy comes from.

Yes, and it happens regularly — usually when the original agency has become unreachable or the project has stalled technically. We start by reviewing the code, the dependencies and the hosting setup, then tell you honestly whether extending or rebuilding is the better commercial decision. That answer does not automatically favour a rebuild: a clean codebase with maintained dependencies is something we happily continue, even though we did not write it. What does argue for a rebuild is outdated dependencies with open security holes, a tangle of plugins where nobody can change one thing without breaking another, or an architecture that simply cannot support the feature you want. Not having access to the old code is no obstacle, as long as you control the domain and the hosting — we sort out the rest.

Every website we build includes one month of support after launch. After that the effort depends heavily on what you are running. The fixed running costs are modest: hosting and domain come to roughly CHF 100 to 500 per year. The rest is dependency care and security updates — and this is where the stack pays for itself. A custom Next.js application has no plugin licences, no plugin conflicts and a far smaller attack surface than a WordPress install with twenty extensions. We bill maintenance by actual effort rather than through a flat package you would never use up, and we set out in the quote what recurs. If you want to handle content yourself, we set things up so that you never need us for it.

The difference lies in where the HTML is produced. A purely client-side JavaScript application hands the browser what is effectively an empty page and assembles the content afterwards in the browser. Search engines can process that these days, but they do it late and unreliably — and many AI crawlers render no JavaScript at all, so they see nothing. Next.js renders the page on the server or generates it at build time, which means every crawler receives finished HTML in the very first response. Add the performance effect, which feeds straight into the Core Web Vitals: our benchmark is 100/100 PageSpeed. Together those two points are why we do not sell SEO as an afterthought but treat it as a property of the architecture.