All About Berlin Built in
I have built a website called All About Berlin to help immigrants navigate German bureaucracy. Maintaining this website is my full time job.
A useful website
Moving to Germany was scary. I had to get a job, find a flat, choose health insurance, apply for residence permit and register my address all alone, in a language I did not understand. The outrageously slow and opaque German bureaucracy made it harder than it should be.
I wrote down what I learned to make it easier for other immigrants. I figured that with a good map, their journey would be half as difficult as mine.
I research and write all the content myself, with the help of a dozen trusted experts. I spend most of my days updating and amending existing guides to make them more useful. In that sense, this website is not a blog but a digital garden.
A pleasant website
All About Berlin is my answer to the hastily written SEO spam that pervades the web. It proves that a website can be successful without annoying the everliving crap out of its readers.
It has no ads, no paywalls, no dark patterns, no newsletter pop-up, no coercive cookie notice, no call to action, no comments, no promoted content, and no share buttons. It gives straight, honest answers for free. That’s it.
The website is funded by affiliate links. That presents its own ethical challenges. All I have is a very straightforward advertising policy that I never deviate from.
Built from scratch
By now, All About Berlin is truly built from scratch. It’s my own research, my own writing, my own photos, my own illustrations and my own design. The website is built from scratch with a static site generator I created.
This design is deliberately simple and straightforward. I wanted the content to be the main focus. Both the design and the writing style are inspired by the NHS website.
