Internet

The internet isn’t one thing; it’s a layer cake. In September 1969, ARPANET connected its first computer at UCLA, and by the end of the year there were four nodes (UCLA, SRI, UC Santa Barbara, and Utah). In March 1972, Ray Tomlinson wrote the first program for sending and reading email. On January 1, 1983, ARPANET switched to TCP/IP, the set of protocols the internet still runs on today (Internet Society).

On top of the network sits the web. In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee at CERN wrote the proposal “Information Management: A Proposal,” in November 1990 the first server and the first page went live, and on April 30, 1993, CERN declared that anyone could use the web without fees (W3C). That one decision is why the open web took over the world. Then came Google (1998) and the iPhone (2007): each layer added another billion people.

Czechia got connected early. On February 13, 1992, at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University (ČVUT) in Dejvice, Prague, academics announced that the internet was available in Czechoslovakia. The team was led by Jan Gruntorád, who later founded CESNET, the operator of the Czech academic network, and who is now a member of the Internet Hall of Fame (CzechCrunch). The leased data line to Linz, Austria, cost about CZK 170,000 a month (CNN Prima News), and only academia had access. Seznam.cz, the Czech search portal, has been around since 1996.

Today, according to the ITU, about 6 billion people use the internet, three quarters of the world; 2.2 billion people remain offline, 96% of them in low- and middle-income countries. In high-income countries, 94% of people are online; in low-income countries, 23% (ITU, Facts and Figures 2025).

According to the Czech Statistical Office, ČSÚ (data for 2025, published November 11, 2025), 90% of households are connected to the internet and 88% of people over 16 use it, about 7.7 million people. 86% of people have a smartphone, and 68% have shopped online (ČSÚ). Age makes the difference: almost all households with children are connected (99.6% in 2024), senior households 60%; you can’t reach an older audience with a website alone.

The second number that changes the craft: mobile. According to DataReportal, more than 63% of requests to websites worldwide came from mobile phones in December 2024 (Digital 2025). “Mobile first” isn’t a choice: open your website on a phone first. A form you can’t fill in with your thumb is a form nobody fills in.

Addresses: at the end of 2025, 1,515,860 .cz domains were registered, up 2% year on year, according to the .cz registry (CZ.NIC). That’s roughly one domain for every seven inhabitants. Since March 2025, the wholesale price has been CZK 160 a year excluding VAT; at a registrar you’ll typically pay CZK 200 to 300: the cheapest item in your stack and the only one you must never let expire.

Split your channels into owned (website, domain, email list) and rented (social media profiles, YouTube, your business profile on Google); paid and earned we know from the PESO model. On rented land, the landlord can change your reach, algorithm, format, and price at any time. On your own land, the rules and the data stay yours. Everything in your digital strategy ultimately leads to your website: it’s the one place you fully control.

Traffic flows to your website from everywhere: paid ads (PPC), social media posts, search engines (SEO), email links, QR codes, even offline campaigns. That’s why a website must work first and only then look pretty: clear navigation, fast loading, works on a phone, no broken links. The test: can a stranger tell within ten seconds what you offer and what they should do?

Your digital communication strategy rests on six questions in a row: Target (what I want to achieve, measurably), Audience (who I’m talking to), Message (what I’m saying), Channel (how I deliver it), Form (what it looks like), and Result (did I meet the goal?). Example with Judo Heroes Camp: the goal is to fill all 65 places; the audience is parents of judokas aged roughly 9 to 15 from clubs all over Czechia; the message is “A week of judo you keep coming back to”; the channel could be Instagram, email to past participants, and QR codes in clubs; the form is a landing page with registration; the result is registrations against capacity.

KISS (keep it simple, stupid; the Trends chapter covers it as a trend) applies to architecture too: instead of one giant website, go for several small ones, each for one thing. A static page doesn’t break and costs pennies; add a database only where people register or pay.

Platforms form a scale from clicking to code: builders (Carrd, Framer, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow) with templates and hosting included; content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, with the content in a database; and custom code (Next.js, Astro) on Vercel or your own server (VPS). The further right you go, the more freedom and the more responsibility.

According to W3Techs (October 14, 2026), WordPress runs on 40.0% of all websites, which is 58.5% of the CMS market. And 31.6% of websites have no CMS at all: they’re static pages or custom applications. WordPress isn’t “the right one,” just the most common: its strength is plugins, its weakness is maintenance.

What it costs: Carrd Pro Standard is $19 a year for 10 sites with a custom domain and forms (pricing); Framer Basic is $10 a month billed yearly (more without an annual commitment) with a custom domain, Pro $30 (pricing). WordPress is free; you pay for hosting and updates. Next.js is free; you pay for the server and a developer or AI. The real cost of a website isn’t the license but the hours of maintenance per year.

The first decision: static or dynamic. A static website is ready-made HTML files: there’s nothing to hack, nothing crashes, and a CDN distributes it for cents. A dynamic website assembles each page from a database: necessary when people register or pay, or when content is created daily. Most clubs and small brands need static pages plus one form.

When you type an address, say jecminek.co, up to six things happen. 1) The browser asks DNS (the domain name system) for the IP address: an A/AAAA record gives it, a CNAME points elsewhere, MX says where mail goes, TXT carries verification. 2) The request reaches the server on port 443. 3) A reverse proxy (Caddy, nginx) terminates HTTPS and passes the request to the application. 4) The application reads from the database. 5) The response travels back. 6) A CDN (content delivery network: Cloudflare, CloudFront) keeps a copy close to the user, so the server doesn’t even wake up.

Domain: the registrar (Wedos, Forpsi, Namecheap, Cloudflare) is only the intermediary; the holder is whoever is listed in the CZ.NIC registry. Three rules: the domain in the organization’s name, not the agency’s; access stored in a password manager; automatic renewal. Someone else will buy a club’s expired domain within an hour, and the website and emails are gone.

Hosting comes in three tiers: shared hosting (hundreds of crowns a month, one-click WordPress), a VPS (virtual private server, for example a Hetzner CAX21 with 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM for around €10 a month), and the cloud (Vercel, AWS), where you pay for usage. HTTPS is a given: according to W3Techs, 90.3% of websites use it as the default protocol, and Let’s Encrypt issues about 10 million certificates a day for free; Caddy or Cloudflare renew them on their own.

An underrated layer: email from your own domain. For mail from info@yourclub.cz not to end up in spam, you need three DNS records: SPF (who may send on behalf of the domain), DKIM (a signature on the message), and DMARC (what to do when they don’t match). Since February 1, 2024, Google has required all three from anyone who sends more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail, plus one-click unsubscribe and spam complaints below 0.3% (sender guidelines); without SPF and DKIM, filters penalize small senders too.

The Czech e-commerce market is mature and well measured. According to APEK, the Czech e-commerce association, and the price comparison site Heureka, Czechs spent CZK 206 billion in domestic online stores in 2025, up 6% year on year, with an average order of about CZK 1,900; online accounts for around 15% of all retail (MediaGuru). According to APEK, there are about 50,000 online stores (49,700 at the end of 2024, according to the Czech News Agency ČTK). COVID lifted the market by 26% in a single year, followed by two years of decline (down 12% in 2022, APEK), and since 2024 growth of about 5 to 6% a year.

Platforms: Shoptet is the Czech number one and lists more than 48,000 stores on its website; the Free plan costs nothing for up to 10 products, and Basic is CZK 440 a month excluding VAT for up to 100 products (pricing). Shopify charges CZK 670 a month for Basic in Czechia (CZK 499 billed yearly) and takes 1.9% + CZK 6.50 from an online card payment (pricing). WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, free, but hosting, updates, and security are on you.

Marketplaces: Alza Marketplace, Heureka, Kaufland.cz, Allegro, Amazon (for Czechs via .de), with pressure from below by Temu and Shein. The upside: the customer is already there and trusts the marketplace. The downside: commissions, the marketplace sets the rules, the customer data isn’t yours, and the competition is one click away. The approach: marketplaces for volume, your own store for margin and the relationship; get customers from the marketplace onto your own newsletter.

What an online store needs to handle: payments (card, bank payment buttons, Apple Pay), shipping (Zásilkovna, PPL, parcel pickup points), invoices, inventory, order status emails, returns, comparison sites. Integrations or APIs handle all of it, not custom code. And a club that sells twenty hoodies a year doesn’t need an online store: a form and a QR payment are enough.

Whatever an online store runs on, the same rules apply to it, and the Czech Trade Inspection Authority (ČOI) enforces them. Since January 6, 2023, the Consumer Protection Act has required every discount notice to include the lowest price in the previous 30 days at which the store offered and sold the product; the only exception is goods that spoil quickly. So the discount is calculated from that price, not from a price someone raised a week before the sale. A store that publishes reviews must say whether and how it checks that they come from people who actually bought or used the product. Fake reviews, reviews ordered from someone else, and distorting reviews, for example by showing only the positive ones, are always a misleading practice. ČOI checks a lot: in 2025 it carried out 1,432 inspections of discounts, found violations in 734 of them, and 380 fines totaling CZK 38.7 million became final in connection with them. It also warns about labels that get around the rule, such as “SUPER price,” “app price,” or “manufacturer’s recommended price.” In reviews, it found violations in 46 of 49 targeted inspections, and most often the store didn’t say how it checks its reviews.

Since December 13, 2024, the EU’s General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) has applied across the Union. A product offer on a website must clearly state the manufacturer with a postal and email address, for a manufacturer outside the EU also the responsible person in the EU, plus a picture, the type, and other product identifiers, and warnings in a language customers easily understand. A marketplace must let sellers fill in these details and must take down an offer of a dangerous product no later than two working days after an order from the authorities. Under the Digital Services Act (DSA), fully in force since February 17, 2024, a marketplace must know a seller before it lets them sell: name, address, phone, email, ID document, payment account, and business register entry. With each offer, it then shows customers who is selling, and with every ad, who placed it and why you’re seeing it. Marketplaces that are small or micro enterprises are exempt from these DSA duties. Czech law also requires a marketplace to say whether the seller is a business or a private person, to whom consumer rights don’t apply, and how it ranks offers. The European Commission oversees the largest platforms: Temu was fined €200 million in May 2026 because, according to the Commission, it didn’t properly assess how often people in the EU run into illegal products on it, such as chargers that failed basic safety tests.

Since June 28, 2025, the Czech Act on Accessibility Requirements for Certain Products and Services has applied, the Czech version of the European Accessibility Act. It also covers online stores that sell to consumers: under the act, the website and app must be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust, including sign-in and payment, and the store must describe how it meets these requirements in its terms and conditions or a similar document. Micro enterprises are exempt, meaning companies with fewer than 10 employees and annual turnover or a balance sheet total of no more than €2 million. A harmonized European standard for the act is still missing, so in March 2026 the Ministry of Industry and Trade published guidance documents, and for online stores it recommends the international WCAG 2.2 guidelines at level AA. In practice, this means you can get through the whole purchase, from search to payment, with a keyboard alone, product photos have text descriptions, variants aren’t told apart by color only, and sign-in doesn’t ask you to copy text from an image. ČOI supervises, and the fine can reach CZK 10 million. Cookie consent and visitor measurement are covered in the analytics section.

An API (application programming interface) is an agreed way for two programs to exchange data. The waiter metaphor: you don’t tell the cook how to cook; you place an order and get your food. Most web APIs are REST: a request to an address over HTTPS, data in JSON format, and instead of a password a key (token) that can be revoked at any time. The opposite direction is a webhook: the service calls you when something happens (a payment went through, a form was submitted). Today even AI can read API documentation; you need to know what you want to connect.

A catalog of services you just plug in. Payments: Stripe charges 1.5% + CZK 6.50 per payment with a European card (pricing); on its Easy plan, the Czech provider Comgate charges 1% + CZK 0 for consumer cards issued in the EU (according to Comgate, typically 95% of card payment volume) and 2% for business and non-European cards, with no fixed part; the monthly fee of CZK 100 is waived above CZK 100,000 in payments a month (Easy pricing 2026). Email: Resend sends 3,000 messages a month for free (pricing); a company that lives in Microsoft 365 sends through Microsoft Graph from its own mailbox. Forms: Tally, free with unlimited responses (pricing). Maps: the Mapy.cz API or Google Maps. Login, calendar, SMS, AI: all through APIs with a free tier; you pay once you grow.

Databases: SQLite is a single file on disk, zero administration, ideal for one server. PostgreSQL is a database server for concurrent writes from multiple instances, with backups via pg_dump. Hosted options (Supabase, Neon, Turso) give you a database without a server. Start with SQLite and switch when you have to; most websites never have to. Never go without a daily backup off the server and a tested restore.

Risks: the service raises its prices or shuts down, the free tier limit surprises you at your first event, and GDPR: where the data is stored and whether you have a data processing agreement (DPA). Keys belong in a .env file outside the repository, never in the code or in a chat with AI.

Measure four things: visits, sources (where people came from), pages (what they read), and conversions (sign-up, payment, email click). Everything else is vanity metrics. According to W3Techs (October 14, 2026), Google Analytics runs on 47.2% of all websites, Meta Pixel on 8.5%, Hotjar 1.7%, Matomo 1.4%, Plausible 0.2%, Umami under 0.1%. And 42.7% of websites have no measurement tool at all.

GA4 is free and powerful, but complex; and it identifies users through cookies. In Czechia, an opt-in regime has applied since January 1, 2022: an amendment to the Electronic Communications Act (Act No. 127/2005 Coll.) requires the visitor’s prior active consent, with an exception only for strictly necessary cookies (Právní prostor). If someone doesn’t click “I agree” on the banner, GA4 doesn’t see them as an individual. Since March 2024, Google has required Consent Mode v2 for remarketing and personalization in the EEA; in the advanced setup, the website sends anonymous signals even without consent, and GA4 fills in part of the behavior with a model (common, but legally disputed). The Czech data protection authority (ÚOOÚ) checks the banners.

Umami, Plausible, and Matomo take a different path: they don’t store cookies or personal data, so the consent banner goes away and you see every visit. Umami is open source: free on your own server; in the cloud, the Hobby plan gives you 100,000 events a month for free, and Pro costs $20 a month (pricing). The downside: fewer details and no connection to Google Ads; for performance campaigns, GA4 remains the standard, see Advertising.

Google Search Console is free and shows which queries your website appeared for, how many people clicked, at what position, what Google indexed, and where it reports errors. Umami plus Search Console cover most of a small website’s needs; add GA4 once you start buying ads.

A search engine does three things: it crawls the web, indexes pages, and ranks them for a query. SEO (search engine optimization) rests on three pillars: technical (speed, mobile, indexing, HTTPS, sitemap, robots.txt), content (the page answers the query and has a title, an H1, and structured data), and authority (links, mentions, brand). Czechia: according to StatCounter, in September 2026 Google had 78.7%, Seznam 15.1%, and Bing 4.7%. Seznam is stronger on desktop and among older people, exactly the parents and grandparents searching for “judo for kids Prague 6.”

Google measures the technical basics as Core Web Vitals, at the 75th percentile of visits: LCP (largest contentful paint) under 2.5 s, INP (interaction to next paint) under 200 ms, CLS (cumulative layout shift) under 0.1 (web.dev). You can measure them for free in PageSpeed Insights. The usual culprits: large images (convert them to WebP with Squoosh), third-party scripts, and fonts.

And then came AI. In March 2025, Pew Research tracked 900 American adults and 68,879 searches: an AI summary appeared for 18% of queries. With one, people clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits; without one, in 15%. They clicked a source inside the summary in 1% of visits, and 26% of visits ended without any click (16% without a summary). Google disputes the methodology; other studies confirm the direction. Traffic from generic queries is falling; traffic for a brand and a specific event holds.

The answer is GEO (generative engine optimization): be the source that AI cites. Models prefer clear facts, numbers, dates, authors, and structured data (schema.org). The llms.txt file is a new convention for telling models what matters; no guarantee, but free.

Digital marketing means using the tools you already have: registration goes from Google Forms into a spreadsheet and from there to a confirmation email, tasks live in Trello, texts in Docs, and the publishing calendar is tied to the tournament calendar.

Content has a life cycle: brief, production, publishing, recycling, archive. One interview with a coach becomes an article for the website, three quotes for social media, a podcast episode, a short video, a paragraph in the newsletter, and a year later a “one year ago” reminder. The second through fifth outputs cost a fraction of the first. More on formats in the Social Media and Streaming chapters.

Automation: a typical example is a media plan that someone keeps in a .docx file, and a script pours it into a database (see From practice below); webhooks and APIs are covered in the section on services. Zapier, Make, or n8n connect services without code (Trends), and an AI agent writes a script when a tool isn’t enough. Automate what you do the same way three times a week.

Fewer tools is more. For day-to-day work, an office suite (Google Workspace or Microsoft 365), Trello, and one AI agent are enough; use specialized tools (Photopea, QRCode Monkey) for a single task. Notes in Apple Notes or Google Keep open in a second and search finds everything, which is why you actually write them.

Let’s start with a bad email. Subject: “Info.” Text: “Hi, not sure if we’ll make it, apparently Petr hasn’t sent anything yet. I’m on vacation next week. Let me know.” It has five mistakes: it doesn’t say how urgent the matter is; it mentions something unclear but asks for nothing; it announces a vacation but doesn’t say what should happen before then; it throws a colleague under the bus; and it ends vaguely, so nobody knows who will do what.

The rewrite: subject “Camp photos: choose by Friday 12:00”; text “Hi, here’s a link to 40 photos from the camp. I need you to choose ten for the website by Friday 12:00. I’m on vacation from Monday; after that, Petr will handle the selection.” Three sentences: why, what and by when, who next. The rules: minimal formatting (no colors, one font), short sentences readable on a phone, a clear call to action in the body of the email, not in an attachment. One question = one email; ask three questions and you’ll get an answer to one.

With newsletters, the numbers decide. MailerLite analyzed 3.6 million campaigns from 2025 and found an average open rate of 43.46%, a click rate of 2.09%, a click-to-open rate of 6.81%, and an unsubscribe rate of 0.22% (benchmarks). Opens are inflated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection, so look at clicks: out of a thousand people, twenty-one click. Even so, people from email are the most valuable visitors to a landing page; the numbers are in the next section. Tools: Beehiiv, MailerLite, Mailchimp, and the Czech Ecomail.

Deliverability is technique, not luck: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and one-click unsubscribe (see the section on infrastructure). Send from your own domain, never from gmail.com for an organization, and before a send-out, test delivery to both Gmail and Seznam.

The QR code (quick response) was invented in 1994 by Masahiro Hara at the Japanese company Denso Wave for tracking parts; it holds roughly 7,000 digits and has error correction, so a camera can read it even when it’s damaged or has a logo in the middle (Denso Wave). Uses: poster → registration, business card → contact (vCard), invoice → QR payment. Rules: a short link on your own domain with a UTM parameter (a tag in the address, e.g. ?utm_source=poster, that tells analytics where a person came from) and a test on both iPhone and Android before printing. QRCode Monkey creates a code with a logo for free.

Digital business cards: Linktree or bio.link put all your links on one page; Blinq or Popl send your contact (vCard) straight over QR or NFC. Smarter is your own domain redirected to a service (say yourname.cz → bio.link/yourname): the address is yours, and you can swap the service without reprinting. Smartest is your own website.

A landing page is a page with one goal and no distractions: no navigation, one message, one form. That’s why it converts better than a regular website, is easy to measure, and works well as a destination for PPC and social media. Across 41,000 pages, 464 million unique visitors, and 57 million conversions, Unbounce measured a median conversion rate of 6.6% across industries; from email traffic it was 19.3%, the highest of all sources (Conversion Benchmark Report). Unbounce itself adds that 6.6% isn’t a target, just a baseline.

A/B test: two versions that differ in a single thing, and enough visits that the difference isn’t chance; a hundred tells you nothing, a thousand does. Carrd has ready-made templates in the Landing category; it costs $19 a year, and a Tally form costs nothing. You can put together a design for a club event in an hour.