Konstantin Romanov
Lead Senior Engineer and Web Architect. I have been building web systems since 2001, which is 25 years, for clients and agencies in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, the UAE, the United Kingdom, Canada and Bulgaria. Today I run IFKEES LTD and take on a limited number of projects at a time.
Twenty-five years, mostly under somebody else\'s name
I started building websites in 2001, when layout meant a table and a fast site meant one that arrived before the visitor left. That period taught me a habit I never lost. Every kilobyte is a decision, and somebody on a slow connection pays for it. The engineering degree came later, and the discipline is the same, only the stack changed.
For most of the years since, I worked as the technical partner behind agencies rather than under my own name. Agencies in several countries brought me in when a project was too complex, too slow or too far gone for their own team. It is not glamorous work, and it is where the real learning is. You inherit somebody else\'s architecture, somebody else\'s deadline, and you make it run.
It is also why there are no client logos on this site. Those projects were delivered inside somebody else\'s contract and NDA. I can describe what the problem was, what I built and what changed as a result, and I do that in the case studies, but I will not attach a name to it. If a supplier shows you past clients\' logos without their permission, you have learned something about how they will treat yours.
IFKEES LTD is where that work now happens directly, with no agency in the middle. The same engineering, one layer fewer, and you speak to the person doing it.
Where the experience actually comes from
Six kinds of system, each of which taught me something the others did not.
E-commerce at scale
Variant catalogues, stock and ERP synchronisation, cross-border tax and currency, and checkout flows measured by conversion rather than by the number of features shipped.
Banking and finance interfaces
Customer-facing calculators and configurators where a decimal point in the wrong place is a legal problem, built to survive both a compliance review and a usability test.
Logistics and warehouse systems
Dispatch dashboards, picking route optimisation and terminal interfaces designed for someone wearing gloves in a cold hangar, not for a design portfolio.
Energy and industrial portals
Data-heavy internal portals, where the hard part is making a large and untidy dataset legible to a person who has thirty seconds to decide.
Real estate and booking platforms
Searchable listings with map filtering, availability logic, seasonal pricing and enquiry routing that connects a serious buyer to you within seconds.
Performance and rescue work
Taking over stalled projects, untangling somebody else's architecture, and returning slow sites to green Core Web Vitals without a rewrite where none is needed.
How I work and what I decline to do
These are not marketing sentences. They are the rules I run projects by, and you are welcome to hold me to them.
The price is agreed before the start
A fixed figure for a written scope. If I get the estimate wrong, that is my problem, not something you discover on an invoice. It also means I have to understand the project properly before quoting, which is the point.
You own everything, always
Source code, database, media, domain, administrator access. Nothing is licensed back to you, nothing phones home, and nothing breaks if you decide next year to work with someone else. Vendor lock-in is a business model I would rather not have.
Boring, portable technology
WordPress core, WooCommerce, native Gutenberg blocks, standard SQL. No closed page builder, no bespoke CMS that only I understand. The mark of good work is that the next developer can read it without calling me.
Speed is measured, not claimed
Core Web Vitals on real devices at handover, not a screenshot from a lab test on a fast laptop. If a target is missed, I say so and we go through why, which is usually image weight or a third-party marketing script.
You talk to me, not about me
No account manager in the middle. That is the whole structural advantage of working with one senior engineer, and it disappears the moment I put somebody between us.
I say no when no is the right answer
If your budget does better in advertising than in a redesign, or the project needs a team I do not have, you will hear it in the first conversation. Work that does not fit helps neither of us.
Tell me what you are building
Describe the business and what is not working. You will get a direct answer, including the answer that you do not need the thing you thought you needed.
Answered personally by Konstantin, within one business day.