How to pick a website designer in Oslo
Search a web designer online
Let’s say that you use Google to do a search. These are common words that people use to find a Website Designer in Oslo:
- Web design in Oslo
- Web design agency in Oslo
- Website design around me
- Webdesign Oslo
- Web designers around Oslo
Those search terms are very popular and website design companies usually buy ads from Google to appear in the first place. You can easily spot those because Google must add the AD label on top of the website link. In that way, you have the first 4 links and the last 4 links. Then depending on the term, you may have the Google Maps insert with other links.
The remaining positions in the index are divided between the websites that position better via white SEO and black SEO, and depending on it, the position will be less or more volatile. There are other positions where the domain name is exactly the search term, which also helps.
However, those remaining positions, or those with the ads, don’t necessarily shows the websites of the best web designers, but those indexed via SEO o paid ads.
How Google rank a Website in 2022
Google says that there are at least 7 parameters that contribute to gaining positions in the Google Search Index.
- Performance
- Accessibility
- Best Practices
- SEO
- Expertise
- Authoritativeness
- Trustworthiness
The first four parameters can be checked using the Google Chrome extension Lighthouse. Once the extension is installed, open an incognito view in Chrome, then go View/Developer/Developer Tools. Find the Lighthouse menu on top of the right panel. Open the website as you usually do, and click on Analyze page load button.
What does mean Performance?
Performance means how fast a website is ready for visualization and use. It depends on some variables like software installed, the main technology used, and hosting. Some of those variables are out of the control of the web designer, but it should be a number between 90-100. By the way, these tests were done using desktop view because the mobile view is a very tight test in current European conditions.
Why Accessibility is important in 2022?
More and more people are using the internet every day, and more Accessibility features are added to newer smartphones, tablets, and computers.
On the other hand, competence between websites pointing to the same target is getting higher, and Accessibility is gaining importance in some countries as Privacy: in some cases, it is mandatory the compliance with Accessibility rules.
The Accessibility capacity of a website is totally controlled by the web designer, values very close to 100 are highly recommended when you decide to pick a website designer.
What are Best Practices in web design?
This is related to the whole set of rules of the website’s underlying technology, which should be compliant with the newest standards of web development. This is 100% controlled by the web designer, and you shouldn’t expect less than that. When you see values under 100 in Lighthouse in Best Practices means the website uses old or deprecated technologies, most of the time found in cheap web themes for example, that will cause errors and low overall performance in search engines and user experience.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Although is quite obvious why the SEO should be 100, it is incredible that some web design agency websites fail on this parameter, and as consequence, they probably are not able to design websites for customers with SEO value of 100 either.
Transparency is being Ethical: technology exposes the distance between people, that’s why some people use it and others create it. In the case of these parameters that measure the quality of a web design, being transparent is crucial if the web designer really wants to avoid additional “maintenance” payments to the customer.
Examples of Lighthouse tests
Google’s Lighthouse Chrome extension measures how well a web page is built against current standards and technologies. Of course, you can have a plain text page with high values in Lighthouse, but that’s easy to notice.
If you have a finished web page, which looks good visually but with a low score, there is less chance of ranking in the search engine index.
How do websites with low scores rank? will wonder. Most of it is due to an aggressive backlinking strategy (black SEO). However, that is a topic for another post. Keep reading.
The following are examples of Lighthouse parameter values of the remaining positions on the search “web design in oslo“:
