Kuyavian-Pomeranian
Web development — Toruń
Websites for Toruń hotels, food producers and institutions — fast, multilingual, editable. Fixed price, a date in the contract.
The local market
Toruń earns its living in a completely different way from Bydgoszcz. The UNESCO-listed old town is the engine of the local economy — hotels, guesthouses, restaurants, tour guides and souvenir shops all live off it, with peaks set by long weekends, the summer holidays and Christmas. The second pillar is food production, gingerbread above all; the third is Nicolaus Copernicus University with its institutes, conferences and research projects. It is also where the regional government sits.
For a property in the old town the real competitor is not another website — it is the booking portal. The guest will find you there anyway; the job of your site is to take that booking directly, without the commission. Which means: faster and more concrete than the portal, working on a phone in the middle of the market square, showing the current price and opening hours, and editable by you mid-season. English is the minimum; German makes sense wherever you genuinely see guests from across the western border — that is a question of your traffic mix, not a rule.
A food producer runs two paths on one site: wholesale for distributors, and retail that can multiply several times over before Christmas — neither can obscure the other, and the site has to survive that peak. A university project or a public institution plays by different rules again: WCAG 2.1 AA digital accessibility and a published accessibility statement are a legal duty, and a well-planned information architecture matters more than a striking animation.
How I work
I work remotely — we run the project over video calls and a live preview link. I come to Toruń for the kickoff and the handover; it is under an hour away, so meeting in person is no trouble at all.
See how it works in practice
A state higher education institution offering practical and technical degree programs.
Public Vocational University in GrudziądzCommon questions
Almost all our bookings come through a portal. Is our own website still worth it?
It is, but not as a way to find the guest — as a way to win back the commission. The portal works like a search engine: once a guest has narrowed it down to two or three properties, they start looking them up by name. If your site is slower and less specific than the portal, they go back to the portal. If it has the current price, real photos and a simple form, they book with you and the commission stays with you.
I change prices and opening hours several times a season. Do I have to email a developer each time?
No. Everything that changes — prices, hours, availability, events, the gallery — lives in a CMS you edit yourself, from your phone, in two minutes. We go back to the code only when you add a new feature. Small copy edits never have to be commissioned from anyone.
We are commissioning a site for a research project or a university unit. Do you build to WCAG?
Yes. For public-sector bodies, WCAG 2.1 AA and a published accessibility statement are a legal duty in Poland, not a nice-to-have. I build to that standard from the start — contrast, keyboard navigation, alt text, correct heading semantics, captions on video. Bolting accessibility on at the end of a project is always more work than doing it right the first time.
We sell wholesale to distributors and retail over the Christmas season. Do we need two websites?
One site with two paths. Wholesale gets its own section — a price list behind a login or an enquiry form, and no decoration, because a distributor wants terms, not brand storytelling. Retail gets the shop and the selling copy. Splitting this across two domains halves your SEO strength and doubles your maintenance.