The situation
Alongside the team work, my own practice ran from 2016 to 2025: websites for smaller businesses and sole traders. Trávníkář Západ, Apartmány Volf, Sancho Panza, Praha zkouřená, E-tapír and others.
These aren’t the jobs anyone writes case studies about, with charts. But they taught me more than anything else about how people actually deal with websites.
What makes it different
With a large brand, the brief arrives from a marketing department, the assets arrive from an agency, and approval takes three rounds. With a local business, the owner arrives and says what they need — and usually has no way of phrasing it in terms you can hand to development.
So half the work is translation. “I need people to find me” means one thing for a gardener in western Bohemia and something else for accommodation targeting foreign guests. The first needs local SEO and a phone number at the top; the second needs a language version and an unambiguous booking step.
The other half is judging what the client can maintain themselves. A site that can’t be updated after handover without a developer isn’t finished — it’s a deferred cost. Hence WordPress and Elementor: not the most elegant tools, but a business owner can change their own price list without having to call me.
What it involves beyond code
Project management, client communication, budget estimation and ongoing maintenance. On small jobs there is nobody else to cover those roles — the supplier is one person.
In hindsight it is the most useful experience I have. It taught me to talk to people who have no reason to understand what I do.