Web design agency in Geneva, working in English

What you are actually buying when you hire a web designer in Geneva

Geneva has a wide spread of web providers, from large communication agencies with account managers and production teams, to independents working alone, to resellers who assemble template sites. The output can look similar in a portfolio. What differs is who does the work, how much of the budget goes into design and code rather than coordination, and what you are left holding when the engagement ends.

Fritz is the independent end of that spread, run deliberately. One person designs the brand, draws the interface, builds the site and answers the emails. There is no account layer between the brief and the person executing it, which removes a translation step that tends to be where intent gets lost. It also sets a natural ceiling on volume, which is covered honestly further down this page.

For an English-speaking buyer the practical questions are usually these: is the price fair for this market, will the whole process happen in a working language you are fluent in, will the finished site also work for a local French-speaking audience, and can the work be taken elsewhere if the company moves or changes provider. Those four questions structure the rest of this page.

The French version of this page, at /fr/creation-site-web-geneve, serves the same intent for a local buyer. There is no need to read both.

Published prices for the three engagements

Providers in Switzerland usually quote on request. You describe the project, the studio scopes it, and a written offer arrives a few days later. That convention is thorough, and nothing is wrong with it, but it is slow when you are comparing several providers and it gives you nothing to calibrate against before the documents land. Publishing prices removes that step. How pricing is normally built here, what hourly rates imply about a total, and what maintenance tends to cost afterwards are set out on the website cost page rather than repeated here.

Three engagements carry a published fixed price. One payment, agreed before work starts, not an estimate that drifts. If a project genuinely falls outside one of these shapes, that is said before anything begins rather than absorbed into a variation later.

What each engagement includes, deliverable by deliverable, is set out on the brand and web page. This page is about how the work runs in Geneva and in English rather than a second copy of the offer.

Identity and website are frequently taken together, because a site designed around an identity that does not yet exist tends to get rebuilt once the identity arrives. Taken as one piece, the logo, the palette, the typography and the interface are decided in the same conversation. Taken separately they are still designed to fit, but the sequencing matters: identity first, site second.

Against ranges observed on the Swiss market, where a brochure site commonly sits between CHF 1'500 and CHF 4'000, these prices sit inside the observed ranges near the bottom, with e-commerce the one item below its observed floor. That is stated plainly rather than dressed up, because a buyer new to Switzerland deserves to know where these figures sit against the observed ranges. The explanation is arithmetic, not generosity: no offices, no sales function, no project management layer, and a preference for working continuously at a stated price rather than negotiating every job.

How the work runs, from first message to launch

A brochure site typically moves through four stages, and the same shape holds for e-commerce with more weight in the middle.

1. Discovery, usually one conversation

What the business does, who it sells to, which languages the audience reads, what the site has to accomplish, and which pages actually need to exist. This is where the language architecture is decided, and it is short on purpose. Long discovery phases are not required to answer these questions when the person asking them is also the person building the result.

2. Design, settled on the pages that matter

The visual direction is proposed on the pages that carry the most weight, normally the home page and one interior template, before it is applied everywhere. Settling direction on two pages rather than fifteen means a change of mind is cheap in week one instead of expensive in week three. Feedback in plain language works better than annotated screenshots: saying that something feels too formal is more useful than proposing a specific fix.

3. Build, into a site you can edit

The design becomes a working site with a content management system you can operate yourself, without a developer standing behind you. Pages are built mobile-first, forms are wired up and tested, analytics are installed, and the technical foundations that search engines rely on, including page titles, structured headings, clean URLs and a sitemap, are put in place while the site is being built rather than added afterwards.

4. Review, launch and the week after

A review round on real content, a walkthrough of the CMS so you can make changes without asking, then deployment to your own hosting account with the domain pointed correctly. The days immediately after launch are when the small things surface, so they are part of the engagement rather than the start of a billing relationship.

What extends a timeline, almost always, is text that has not been written yet, product photography that does not exist, or a review round waiting on someone who is travelling. What does not extend it is asking for changes. Revisions are part of the process, and it is better to say a direction is wrong early than to accept it politely and regret it at launch. E-commerce sits at the longer end because products, variants, stock, shipping rules, tax handling, payment provider onboarding and the automatic emails a customer receives all have to be correct before anyone can buy anything. Much of those six to eight weeks goes into making the unglamorous parts behave.

Working in English, building for a French-speaking market

Switzerland has four national languages and English functions as a working language across a great deal of business here, particularly in Geneva with its large international community. That produces a specific and very common situation: the founder, the team and the internal documents run in English, while a meaningful share of the customers, suppliers or local partners read French.

The whole engagement can run in English. Briefing, design reviews, written copy, the CMS interface you edit afterwards, the documentation, the emails. Nothing has to be translated back and forth on your side. The same work runs equally well in French if that suits you better, but for an English-first company there is no reason to work in a second language simply because the studio is local.

The decision that matters is language architecture, and it belongs before design rather than after it. Broadly there are three shapes. English only, when the audience is international and the local market is not a sales channel. English primary with French added, which is the common case for a company selling into Geneva and the surrounding Romandy. Or genuinely bilingual, where both versions carry equal weight and equal maintenance.

Each shape has consequences for navigation, URL structure, how search engines are told which version corresponds to which, and how much writing you are committing to maintain indefinitely. Retrofitting a second language onto a site built as monolingual is the expensive version of this decision, which is why it is taken at the start. The technical mechanics of running a bilingual Swiss site are covered in depth in the French guides rather than duplicated here. What is needed at this stage is the decision, not the implementation.

One caution worth stating: a second language is not free after launch. Every product added, every page edited, every announcement written exists twice. If nobody internally will maintain the French version, an honest English-only site is better than a French version that goes stale.

What you own when the project ends

At handover you receive the design source files and the site code. Not exported images of a logo, but the editable files the logo was built in. Not screenshots of a layout, but the working design file. Not a login to a platform that owns your site, but the code that runs it.

This matters more than it sounds, and it matters most to people whose situation may change. If the company relocates, restructures, hires in-house or eventually moves to a larger agency, the next person picks up a complete set of assets and continues. Nothing has to be rebuilt because the original files sat in someone else's drive.

Accounts follow the same principle. Domain, hosting and CMS are registered in your name, with you as owner and administrator. Setup and deployment are handled for you, but the keys are yours from day one. Ending the relationship should cost nothing except the relationship.

For a business that may change country or provider within a few years, this is worth checking explicitly with any studio, not only this one. The question is short: on the last day, what exactly is handed over, and in which file formats.

Three projects, and what each one needed

Il Duca is an artisan gelateria in Lausanne, and the work was brand identity: the mark, the palette, the typography and the applications the shop actually uses. A food business is read from the street before anyone tastes anything, so the identity had to hold up printed small on packaging, applied to a signature and a card, and legible from across a road. That constraint shapes everything upstream of it, including how much detail a mark can carry.

SoYou Cosmetics is a natural cosmetics company in Geneva, and the work was e-commerce. Product ranges, ingredient information that customers genuinely stop to read, checkout, and a back office the owner can run day to day without calling anyone. It is the clearest example of the e-commerce engagement, built in Geneva for a Geneva business, and it is a useful reference point if your catalogue is a manageable size rather than a warehouse.

Eden Terranova is an agricultural investment company, and the work was a website built around a desert-to-oasis world. The brief sat closer to storytelling than to selling: a serious proposition presented to a serious audience, where the design had to carry a large idea without decoration for its own sake. Projects of that kind are mostly restraint, deciding what to leave out so the argument stays visible.

LeVallon, in gastronomy, was film rather than a site. It is listed here only to be accurate about what has been made. Four projects is a small portfolio and it is presented as such rather than padded. The full set, with images, is on the work page.

What a one-person studio can and cannot take on

Being direct about the limits is more useful than claiming there are none. This structure suits brand identities, brochure and marketing sites, e-commerce for a manageable catalogue, and long relationships where continuity with one person is worth something. In those cases the model is an advantage: fewer handoffs, faster decisions, one person who still remembers why something was built the way it was two years later.

It is the wrong choice in several situations. A large web application with its own product team and a continuous release cycle needs engineers, not a design studio. A project requiring several languages beyond French and English, with ongoing translation management, needs a partner set up for that. A campaign demanding simultaneous production across film, print and media buying at scale needs a production company. And anything with a genuinely immovable deadline inside the next two weeks is a risk, because capacity is finite and honest scheduling beats an optimistic yes.

There is also a capacity limit worth saying out loud: a small number of projects run at once, on purpose. If the calendar is full, you are told the next available start date rather than squeezed in badly. That is a real constraint of the model, and it is the price of the attention that comes with it.

For work that sits at the identity end rather than the website end, or for companies outside Geneva across German and Italian-speaking Switzerland, the branding page covers that ground.

How a project starts

The prices above are published so the budget question is settled before anyone spends a meeting on it. The person who replies to your first message is the person who will design and build the project, and the reply comes within 24 hours. A quote costs nothing and commits you to nothing.

A useful first message says what the business does, whether you need identity, a site or both, which languages your audience reads, and roughly when you would like to launch. If a site already exists, the address is enough for a considered answer. If it does not, that is entirely normal and there is nothing to prepare beforehand.

From there the sequence is short: a conversation, a written confirmation of scope and price, and a start date. Everything runs in English if that is your working language, and in French if it is not.

Frequently asked questions

French version of this page →what each engagement includes →what a website costs in Switzerland →branding across Switzerland →selected work →start a project →