Welcome to the new IamExpat website

At IamExpat, we believe that life abroad should be an enriching experience, not an overwhelming challenge. That’s why we are committed to empowering expats with the knowledge, resources and community they need to navigate every aspect of life in a new country.

Today, we are absolutely delighted to unveil a totally new look and feel to IamExpat.ch, a long-awaited update!

We’d like to introduce you to some of the new features of our new website, which provide an overall more pleasant and streamlined user experience. 

New look

We’ll start with the obvious: IamExpat.ch has a totally new look and feel. Out with the dark red and brown and in with a new pastel palette that feels fresh and modern. 

Our new logo says it all: same company, same mission, just a new look. We hope you like it! 

A major technological change

We won’t go into the nitty gritty details, but you might like to know that we’ve transitioned to new technologies that enable us to take our website performance to a new level! We’ve completely rewritten the backend of our site, switched to a new content management system, and updated all of our external tools with modern technological solutions. 

As one of our readers, you will notice quicker page loading speeds, and an all-round better user experience. 

Total content overhaul

Over the years, we’ve written a lot about all different aspects of life in Switzerland, resulting in hundreds and hundreds of in-depth pages on all kinds of different topics (fittingly, we call these pages our “topic pages”). 

While we’ve made an effort to update these pages with important changes each year, by 2024 we were acutely aware that some pages were already nearly five years old and needed a major overhaul to keep them relevant and - most importantly - useful to readers. 

Over the past year, we have performed a major audit of site content, reworking, updating and in places totally rewriting our topic pages. 

At the same time, we have tried to make the organisation of our website more logical according to the step-by-step process that most people go through when they move abroad. You will see that some sections of our websites have been renamed to make this clear.

Our topic pages are now also more transparent: you can see exactly who on our team they were written by, and when they were last updated, so you can feel confident that you are reading up-to-date and accurate information.

New website sections

As well as overhauling our old content, we’ve introduced some new website sections that we think make really useful additions to our site.

Our new IamExpat Guides focus on bringing together content from across our website that is relevant to internationals at different stages of their expat journey. For instance, the information that someone is looking for when they are just thinking about moving to Switzerland is very different compared to what someone who has lived here for five years is interested in. Our guides parcel up what you need to know, depending on your circumstances. 

We have also added a new series of landing pages that we call “Hubs”. This is where we provide useful information on a more general topic, such as buying a house, or looking for a job in Switzerland, and introduce a range of topic pages that go into more detail about various aspects of that topic. 

Improved user experience

IamExpat.ch is full of informative, useful content on a huge range of topics, and it’s important that our readers are able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. 

The new website design puts user experience front and centre and gets you to the information you are looking for as quickly as possible. This is possible via:

• Improved website navigation
• New, super powerful search function
• New landing page of all expat services
• New filter and sorting options on our expat business directories
• New landing page for our popular news content

Improved website navigation

Gone is our enormous black menu! In its place we have sleek, scrollable menus - colour coded according to the section of the website you’re in - that guide you through the website. A new menu bar at the top of each topic page helps you orient yourself within the website structure at any time, and click backwards or forwards onto relevant content. 

Inside our topic pages, we’ve added quick links, so you can jump directly to the section of the page that’s most relevant to your question, without having to scroll through. 

You can also bookmark your favourite content to be able to refer back to it at any time from your user profile. 

The IamExpat Job Board and IamExpat Housing now have their own unique areas within IamExpat.ch, with distinct menus. From the IamExpat Job Board menu, you can view jobs you have bookmarked and applied for, and make changes to your job alerts. The IamExpat Housing menu gives you quick access to your favourited properties, and lets you check your applications and property alerts. Navigate back to the main IamExpat.ch website at any time. 

Landing page for all expat services

Across our website, we have links to a huge number of expat-focused businesses and services, covering all kinds of different situations and needs. We’ve now collated these all together on one page, and grouped them thematically, so you can find at a glance exactly the service you’re looking for. 

So whether you need a tax advisor, a recommended energy supplier, an international school or a moving company, you’ll find someone who can help on our expat services page. 

Filter options on directories

Speaking of our business directories, we’ve also added some functionality to help our users get even more useful, targeted results when they are looking for an expat-friendly business. With our new filters, you can narrow down your search results according to not only your preferred location, but also the business’s specialism or area of focus, and the languages they operate in. 

That means you can look for an English-speaking employment lawyer in Emmen, or even a Portuguese-speaking plumber in Payerne - it’s all possible with our new directory filter categories!

Landing page for news & articles

Our news and articles are some of the most-read content on our site, thanks to our primary focus on stories that directly affect the international community in Switzerland, so we wanted to make them easier to find in the new website design. 

If you’re looking for a specific piece of news, or just want to browse all of our content from the last couple of weeks, you can find it in our new news & articles landing page. 

Explore and enjoy!

This brief overview is really just the tip of the iceberg of what we’ve been working on in the past months (and years!), but we hope you’ll experience and enjoy the fruits of our labours for many years to come, wherever your expat journey takes us.

And the overhaul doesn’t end here. We’re already working on a roadmap that includes exciting new features and improvements that will be unveiled in the coming months. 

Take some time to explore our new website, and head to our contact page if you have any questions or suggestions. We’d love to hear from you: what feature would you be really excited to see on our new website? If you like our new look, we’d love to hear your thoughts over on our social media channels, where we’ve summarised this post. 

Thanks for sticking with us for the past 15 years, and here’s to another exciting chapter in the IamExpat story.