Web design in Ghent, for businesses that work in English

Ghent is Dutch-speaking, and most of its 32,656 VAT-registered businesses sell in Dutch first. Your search terms follow your customers: a local types "webdesign gent", an expat types "web design ghent", a client from Brussels may type in French. Each language therefore needs its own copy and its own search terms, not a translation of one master text.

• Choose English first ifyour clients are international companies, researchers, expats or buyers outside Belgium, and Dutch-speaking clients are a minority you serve in English anyway.
• Choose Dutch first, with English pages ifyou sell to people who live in Ghent and its districts, and English helps the newcomers among them find you.
• Add French ifyou work for clients in Brussels or Wallonia. A French page that only repeats the Dutch one does little; write it for what those clients search. A restaurant website for weekend visitors is the classic case for three languages.
• Add a fourth language only ifa real group of your customers reads it. FK Boekhouding runs its site in Dutch, French, English and Turkish because its clients do.

How we set up languages, search terms and hreflang is on multilingual website development.

Belgium is strict about who stands behind a website, and inspectors check it. Even if you sell nothing online, your site has to show your company name and legal form, the address of your registered office, an email address, your enterprise number from the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (CBE) and, if you are VAT-registered, your VAT number, which is BE followed by that enterprise number. A regulated profession adds its professional title and a reference to its rules. Selling at a distance to consumers adds a phone number, and cookies that are not strictly needed only load after consent. The details are on company number on your website; if you sell to consumers, the European Accessibility Act has applied to online shops since 28 June 2025.

Amounts exclude 21 percent Belgian VAT. Belgian web agencies listed on Clutch mostly charge 50 to 99 dollars an hour; how that compares with other markets is in web developer hourly rates.

Our website cost calculator shows in a minute where your own site lands, and website cost per year lists everything that comes after the launch. Flanders has no general grant for building an ordinary business site in 2026, though a few towns help new shops with theirs; what does exist is in website grants in Belgium.

Meetings, proposals, the test link and every message run in English if you prefer. The copy for each language is written by someone who writes that language, not machine-translated and left. Invoices are Belgian: a Belgian company pays 21 percent VAT; a company in another EU country with a valid VAT number is invoiced without Belgian VAT under the reverse charge and declares it at home. You own your domain, your hosting account and your Google Search Console from the first day, so nothing ties you to us if you move on. Still weighing a freelancer against an agency, or doing it yourself? Read freelancer or agency and build your website yourself or hire. Replacing an existing site? Every old address gets a redirect to its new page; how that works is in moving a website to a new host.

Google first shows a map of businesses for local searches, then the websites. The map runs on your Google Business Profile, the websites on your pages, which is why an accountant's website or a contractor's website gets a page per service. What counts: those pages in each language, the same address everywhere, and projects that say where they took place. Ghent's districts, from Gentbrugge and Ledeberg to Drongen and Zwijnaarde, are what locals type; use them where you did real work. Our approach is on local SEO and on the page of our SEO agency in Ghent. If your current site does not show up at all, the website not showing on Google check finds the cause.

The city centre inside the R40 ring road has been a low-emission zone since 2020, with car-free areas since 2017. If clients drive to you, say on your site where they park or which tram they take. How long the build itself takes is in how long it takes to build a website.