What I work on
- New websites, from the structure to going live
- Moves from a site builder to a site of your own
- Replacing outdated installations without losing the old addresses, and with them the findability
- Online shops, new or connected to an existing system
- Sites in several languages
- Ongoing maintenance: updates, security, smaller changes
How I work
This is the part you cannot see from the outside — and the part that decides whether the site can still be touched three years from now.
Nobody ever tinkers with the live site.
Every change is made on a separate test site first. Only once it is right there does it go live. Visitors never see a half-finished page.
Every previous state can be brought back.
Everything lives in version control. If a change turns out to be wrong, the previous state is back in minutes — not in days.
Going live is a button press, not an all-nighter.
Deployment is automated. That sounds like an end in itself, but it is the reason nothing gets forgotten.
This is craft you cannot see from the outside — and the difference between a site you can still work on three years later and one nobody dares to touch.
- wordpress
- drupal
- gitlab
- weblication
- shopify
- woocommerce
What I work with
Which system is the right one depends on the project, not on a preference. Briefly, what I work with and what it is good for:
Drupal — my focus
I work with it every day, and have done for six years. Drupal pays off when a site is meant to grow: a lot of content, several languages, different editors with different permissions, data from other systems. It is the more demanding foundation — and the one that will still carry the site in ten years.
Weblication CMS
I have built websites for local government with it. Anyone from the public sector knows the system.
WordPress
A good choice for sites of modest size: quick to set up, cheap to start with, and plenty of people can handle it.
Online shops
I have worked with Shopify, Shopware and WooCommerce. Before that I spent years developing on the Intershop platform, in ISML and SCSS — so not only setting shops up, but working on one.
AI
I use it where it saves time: draft texts, image descriptions, research, reading through code. It does not write anything onto the web unseen. Whatever goes online, I have read.
Not only technology
A website rarely fails because of the technology. It fails because nobody finds what they are looking for, or because nobody finds the site at all.
Design
I do it myself — the site does not have to pass through three pairs of hands
Usability
is not an extra, it is the point: anyone who does not know where to click after ten seconds is gone
Findability
is decided while building, not afterwards: structure, page titles, loading time, clean addresses
Social media and search engines belong together.
What works on Instagram and what counts on Google are different things — but they feed each other once you know how
What drives the effort
“What does a website cost?” is the most common question — and the one with no off-the-shelf answer. What the effort depends on can be said all the same:
The scope
Five pages or fifty, that is the biggest lever. On top of that: whether content has to be carried over from an existing site — often more work than the building itself.
Several languages and shops
A second language does not only double the texts, it doubles the upkeep. And a shop is a project of its own: products, shipping, payment, taxes.
And what counts in the end
Whether someone brings texts and pictures along or they still have to be made. Experience helps above all with judging that early — before anyone starts building.
How a project runs
- Conversation — what the site has to do, for whom, by when
- Quote — at a fixed price instead of billing into the blue
- Draft — the site stands before it is public
- Going live — including legal texts, findability and handover
- After that — maintenance, see below
What maintenance means
Going live does not finish a website, it starts it. What maintenance means when I look after a site:
Updates
of the system and its extensions, so the site stays secure
Smaller changes
new opening hours, a replaced picture, an extra paragraph
Reachable by email.
An answer usually within two working days, faster when something is broken
What backs this up
Much of it was done for clients and is not shown publicly. What can be described without names:
- Websites for local government, built with Weblication
- Online shops in Shopify, Shopware and WooCommerce
- 15 years on the Intershop platform, developing in ISML and SCSS
- Drupal as my current focus, my daily tool for six years
openroadbike.de
My most recent project: the bike shop and workshop in Ebensfeld. Drupal 11 with a theme of its own and a kit of blocks the pages are assembled from.
Along with it a catalogue of the bikes with filters by type and brand, appointment booking for the workshop, and the OR ColorLab, where you can colour your own frame and save it as an image. Separate test and live environments, automated deployment.
More:
simeoni.de — this site. Drupal, a theme of its own, separate test and live environments, automated deployment. Along with course pages that carry dates and a booking form which counts the free places by itself.
cluberla.de — a fan project about the football club 1. FC Nürnberg: an oracle that answers in Franconian dialect. Behind it are an AI language model, match data from an open football interface, and a tipping duel that works without sign-up and without user accounts. The site draws the images for sharing itself.
staffelberg.de — the digital summit book on the Staffelberg hill. Only someone who is really up there may sign it with text and a photo: the site checks the location, in the browser and once more on the server. Plus one feature for fun, “Ask the mountain” — the mountain answers for itself, by AI, in Upper Franconian and with humour.
No site builder, no bought template — with all three, every decision is my own.