A site built to be messaged
Someone in a foreign country needs a document notarised and doesn't know where to start. The site has one job: turn that moment into a message, in the app they already have open.
What this was
and what I did on it
- Client
- NotaDocs — notarial help for Ukrainians in Germany
- Audience
- Ukrainians in Germany needing a power of attorney, a consent form or an inheritance document — usually in a hurry and under stress
- My role
- UX, interface, front-end, SEO, conversion, GDPR, analytics, deploy — one person
- Scope
- Homepage, service pages written for specific queries, contact paths through messengers, documents in two languages
- Built with
- Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript — no builder, no framework, no build step
- Live
- notadocs.de ↗
A person abroad, stuck
with no idea what the first step is
Someone needs a document notarised: a power of attorney, a consent, an inheritance paper. They are in a country whose bureaucratic language they don't speak, the deadline is close, and getting it wrong costs weeks.
Nobody in that state reads a long page or fills in a six-field form. So the site had to do one thing flawlessly: collapse the distance between “arrived” and “messaged” — and be found at the exact moment the question is typed into Google.
Five calls that shaped it
and what each one cost
-
01
Contact in one tap, in the app they already use
The audience lives in messengers, so messengers are the primary contact — not a form. A floating button keeps that one action within reach on every screen and every scroll position.
Trade-off. It moves the conversation off the site, where none of it is measurable beyond the click. Conversion mattered more than analytics tidiness, so the measurement stops at the handoff and that is accepted. -
02
A page per question, not one page for everything
Each service gets its own page written in the words people actually type — “power of attorney from Germany”, not “our services”. Those pages also give paid traffic a precise place to land.
Trade-off. It multiplies the copy and the structure to maintain, and the return arrives only after indexing. A single page would have shipped sooner and caught nothing from search. -
03
Say the price and the process before being asked
Prices and the sequence of steps sit up front. In a stressed, unfamiliar situation, the unknown is what stops people — not the amount.
Trade-off. Publishing prices removes the room to quote case by case. In this niche the certainty is worth more than the flexibility. -
04
GDPR as part of the product, not a footer
A privacy policy and an opt-in cookie banner, with nothing tracked before consent — for an audience that is already wary of handing over documents.
Trade-off. The same cost as elsewhere: less data at the top of the funnel. Here it doubles as a trust signal, which this audience needs more than most. -
05
Documents in two languages
Materials in both languages the audience actually reads, so nobody is left translating a legal term at the worst moment.
Trade-off. Twice the content to write and keep correct — and legal wording cannot simply be machine-translated, so it costs review time on every change.
One job, done properly
visible in the result
Numbers I can stand behind
Lighthouse 12, mobile profile, measured on 2 August 2026. The conversion figure is the client's own reporting, not something I can verify from the outside — it is here labelled as such rather than presented as measurement. Performance today carries roughly 330 kB of third-party tags added after handover (Clarity, Tag Manager, hosted fonts).