Finding an English-speaking web designer in Amsterdam

If you run a business in Amsterdam in English, you have probably already hit this. You find a studio with good work, the site is in Dutch, the proposal comes back in Dutch, and the first call is conducted in careful, slightly effortful English on both sides. It can work. It often adds friction exactly where a project can least afford it.

Where the language gap actually costs you

It is almost never in the design. It shows up in three specific places.

1. The copy

Website copy written by a fluent non-native speaker reads almost right, and “almost right” is the worst possible register for a page whose job is to make someone trust you with money. The tell is usually rhythm rather than grammar — sentences that are technically correct and slightly off the beat.

The common workaround is worse: writing the site in Dutch and translating it. Translated marketing copy consistently underperforms copy written natively in the target language, because persuasion does not survive translation intact.

2. The brief

Most of a web project's value is decided in conversation — the offhand remark about which customers are worth the most, the aside about the competitor you keep losing to. Those details are exactly what stays unsaid when both sides are working in a second language. You get the website you asked for instead of the one you needed.

3. The search strategy

This is the expensive one. If your customers search in English and your site is optimised for Dutch keywords, you are invisible to the people you actually want. The reverse is equally true. Somebody has to make a deliberate decision here, and a studio that only works in one language will default to that language without discussing it.

Which language should your site be in?

Not a stylistic question — a commercial one. Some rough guidance:

• Your customers are Dutch consumers or local Dutch businesses: you need Dutch. English alone will cost you real volume, and this is worth being blunt about.
• Your customers are international companies, expats, or businesses across the EU: English is the working language and Dutch adds little.
• You sell to both: build both, properly, with hreflang tags so Google serves the right version. Not a translate widget — those are invisible to search engines and read badly to humans.
• You serve the Spanish-speaking market too: the same logic applies. A properly localised third version is far cheaper than most people expect.

What to check before you hire anyone

• Ask for the proposal in English. Not as a test — as a preview of every document you will receive for the next two months.
• Ask who writes the copy. If the answer is “you do”, add that to your own workload and timeline honestly.
• Ask which language the site will target in search, and why. A good answer references your customers. A bad answer references what they normally do.
• Ask to see an English-language site they have built. Read it aloud. You will know within a paragraph.
• Check who you will actually talk to. Fluent salesperson, non-fluent project team is a common and painful pattern.

The upside nobody mentions

Working in English in Amsterdam is also a search opportunity. The Dutch-language market for web design is crowded and priced to the floor — dozens of studios competing on “website laten maken”. The English-language market for the same city is a fraction of the competition, because most local studios simply do not compete there.

If your customers are the international half of this city, that asymmetry works in your favour, and it works in the favour of anyone who builds for them.

Kiyoro works in English and Spanish, writes copy natively in both, and is based here. If that is the gap you have been running into, tell us about the project.