Hawd Design is not a startup. We are a senior, specialist team with a three-decade track record of delivering web design, SEO, and brand identity for clients in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and beyond — now serving UK, US, and global markets from our base in Sarajevo.
Hawd Design d.o.o. is a full-service web design, SEO, and graphic design agency headquartered in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, founded in 1994. The agency is led by Founder and CEO Hamza Mutevelić — who has spent over 30 years delivering digital projects for clients in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland — and Technical Lead Selmir Mujagić, who specialises in modern web architectures including Next.js, React, and headless CMS builds. Hawd Design serves clients in the UK, US, DACH region, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Arabic-speaking markets, communicating in English, German, Bosnian, and Arabic. The agency's positioning as an elite nearshore partner — combining Western European quality standards with a 30–40% cost advantage over comparable UK and US agencies — is built on 30 years of active DACH market delivery, not on marketing claims.
Most web agencies describe their founding as a story of passion. Ours is a story of experience.
Hawd Design was established in 1994 — not as a local BiH agency, but as an active participant in the DACH digital market at a time when that market was setting the standards that would define professional web development across Europe. The quality benchmarks we internalized over the following three decades — the German demand for technical precision, the Swiss insistence on documentation and process, the Austrian expectation of flawless project management — are not values we have adopted as marketing language. They are the actual standards under which we have operated for 30 years.
This history is relevant to your project because it resolves the single most legitimate concern about working with a nearshore agency: will the quality of work and the professionalism of the engagement match what you would expect from a senior agency in your own market?
For a team that has spent 30 years meeting DACH standards — the most demanding quality benchmark in European professional services — the answer is not aspirational. It is demonstrated.
Hamza Mutevelić founded Hawd Design in 1994 following a career that took him through the German and Austrian digital markets during the period when serious web development was first establishing its professional infrastructure in Western Europe. His client relationships span manufacturing firms, professional service providers, hospitality businesses, and B2B enterprises across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Hamza leads all client strategy engagements at Hawd Design: the initial discovery and briefing process, commercial proposals, and the senior project oversight that ensures delivery aligns with the brief — rather than diverging from it during execution, which is the most common failure mode in agency relationships.
His professional philosophy, formed over 30 years of client-facing delivery, can be summarised in a single sentence: a good agency tells clients what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.
That means challenging briefs that contain flawed assumptions. It means recommending a smaller, correctly scoped project over a larger, poorly scoped one. It means disclosing problems during discovery rather than after development has begun.
Selmir Mujagić leads all technical delivery at Hawd Design. His engineering expertise covers the modern web architecture stack that the agency deploys for client projects: Next.js and React for performance-critical applications and headless CMS builds, WordPress and Webflow for content-managed sites, Shopify and WooCommerce for e-commerce, and PHP/Laravel for custom backend applications.
His technical specialisation includes Core Web Vitals optimisation — diagnosing and resolving the specific performance bottlenecks (LCP, INP, CLS) that suppress organic rankings and increase bounce rates — and technical SEO infrastructure: hreflang implementation, structured data markup, crawlability and indexation architecture, and international SEO configurations for multilingual sites.
Selmir is the person in the agency who challenges technology choices before they are committed to. When a client requests a specific platform or framework, his first question is whether that choice is actually optimal for the project's performance requirements — not whether it is familiar or convenient. This is the engineering disposition that DACH clients recognised and valued, and that we bring to every engagement.
These are not values statements written for a marketing page. They are the operating principles that explain specific decisions we make on every project — including decisions that occasionally cost us a sale.
The most damaging thing a web agency can do to a client is execute a flawed brief without comment. It produces a technically competent deliverable that fails to achieve its commercial purpose — and then the agency collects its fee and moves on, while the client is left with an expensive, underperforming asset.
We do not do this. Every engagement begins with a structured Discovery phase designed to surface the assumptions in the brief that would produce poor outcomes if executed uncritically. Western clients, particularly in the UK and US, have consistently described this as the characteristic they value most about working with us.
The difference between an agency that delivers a website and an agency that delivers an outcome is accountability. We measure our work against the commercial objectives established in discovery — organic traffic growth, conversion rate improvements, qualified lead generation — and we report against those metrics, not against the volume of deliverables produced.
If a website we build fails to improve organic rankings within the expected timeframe, we investigate the cause. We do not attribute every underperformance to algorithm updates and continue invoicing.
At most agencies, the senior person sells the project and junior people execute it. This is the model that produces the account manager escalation chains, the miscommunication loops, and the "I'll check with the team" responses that frustrate Western clients who expect direct access to the people making decisions.
At Hawd Design, the people who assess your brief are the people who design and build your project. You have direct contact with Hamza on strategy and with Selmir on technical decisions. There is no coordinator layer between you and the people doing the work.
We publish our prices. We disclose project risks during discovery, not during development. We document scope changes in writing before executing them. We report problems when they occur, not when they can no longer be concealed.
These are not exceptional standards. They are the minimum requirements for a professional agency relationship. We raise them explicitly because the offshore agency market has normalised their absence.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a typical nearshore location. It is not a country known in Western markets for its technology sector. That obscurity is, in part, what makes it the right choice for clients who have been burned by more prominently marketed offshore alternatives.
The software development community in Sarajevo is small, senior, and predominantly composed of engineers who have built their careers working on projects for German, Austrian, Swiss, and increasingly UK and US clients. The quality standards they have internalized are DACH standards — among the most demanding in Europe. The English proficiency is genuine and professional-grade, not conversational.
Ministry of Programming, one of BiH's most internationally recognised technology firms, commands $50–99/hr rates by positioning as a product engineering firm rather than a code delivery shop — because the quality of the BiH talent pool supports that positioning. Hawd Design has been part of this ecosystem since before it had a name. We are not a startup riding the Bosnia nearshore wave. We were here when the wave was forming.
GMT+1/GMT+2. Full overlap with UK business hours. Substantial afternoon overlap with US East Coast hours. A bug reported at 2 PM London time is in triage that afternoon.
English, German, Bosnian, and Arabic — at professional, client-facing level. Not conversational English delivered through translation software.
Three decades of active DACH market delivery produces cultural fluency that a team without that history cannot replicate. We understand what German clients mean when they say "Qualität" and what Swiss clients expect when they say "Verlässlichkeit."
Our operational costs are significantly lower than those of agencies in London, New York, or Zurich. We pass that advantage to clients as a 30–40% price differential on equivalent scope and quality.
Feedback from clients in the UK, Germany, and Switzerland — our three primary markets.
What we valued most was that Hamza told us on the first call that our initial brief had three fundamental problems. No agency had ever done that before. Every other agency just priced the brief and hoped we wouldn't notice until after the contract was signed. Hawd Design saved us from building the wrong thing entirely.
Selmir's technical work is genuinely at the level of the best engineers I have worked with in Berlin and Vienna. The Core Web Vitals improvement he achieved in the first four weeks of our SEO engagement was more than our previous agency had managed in eight months.
We needed an agency that could deliver in English and German simultaneously, across multiple markets, and understand the regulatory context for both. Hawd Design was the only agency we evaluated that had genuinely done this — not just claimed to.
A structured, transparent engagement model from first contact to post-launch support. No surprises, no scope creep handled without documentation.
A 30-minute call or video session to understand your project, your objectives, and your budget. We are honest about fit: if your project is not the right match for our capabilities or price point, we say so and point you toward a better option.
A structured discovery process producing a written project brief that you review and approve. This brief is the commercial and technical foundation for the project — it specifies scope, deliverables, timelines, payment terms, and change request procedures.
Executed in accordance with the agreed brief, with regular staged deliverables and structured review cycles. Direct access to the delivery team throughout — not mediated by account management layers.
Full codebase and asset handover upon completion. 90-day post-launch bug-fix warranty. Ongoing maintenance available on retainer. You own everything — domain, code, content.
All client communication is available in English, German, Bosnian, and Arabic. You choose the language; we adapt. Response to all queries within 4 business hours during GMT+1/GMT+2 working hours.
We are selective about the engagements we take on — not because we are elitist, but because our process works best when we are solving genuine problems for clients who are committed to getting things right. If that describes your project, we would like to hear about it.
Free 30-minute consultation · Response within 4 business hours
English, German, Arabic · +387 60 353 02 21
Tell us about your project and your objectives. We will respond within 4 business hours with an honest assessment and a proposed next step.