Web Design in Oslo, Norway

I'm a Web Designer. I design, develop, publish and maintain websites.

These are just a sample of the services I can offer as a web designer & developer. You may request a single service, a group of services or all. My rates are rate is the same regardless of the work, except under extraordinary conditions.

Customization¹

Nearly anything can be done within web development. If you can imagine and name it, I'll do my best to meet your expectations. I work directly on the code so I can best bend it to your will.

Efficiency¹

This is actually a service that follows as a feature of any other service. I have the knowledge and the hardware to get your project done asap.

Accessibility¹

Making your site accessible means to make it readable for as many platforms as possible. That means your site becomes friendlier to screen-readers softwares, people having difficulties to read or to differenciate colors, etc.

Usability¹

There are many principles that have been widely experimented and proven to increase user-friendliness. The right GUI (Graphic User Interface) combined with the ideal typography for your type of project is just a way to improve usability. When users are made the priority, they convert more goals, which leads to more ROI and a happier website owner — you. I can help you get happier users.

Call-to-action¹

To get your visitors to actually do what you expect them to do in your website, you'll need call-to-action. Subtle elements in your page play a big role on the overal design: they can attract or distract visitors from your goal. Therefore call-to-action must be used to your advantace in web design.

Valid Markup¹

Validating your markup to the web standards is not compulsory nor necessary. But it is a good practice since it will ensure that your website will be rendered in the same way a few years from now. I do offer that as a feature to every website I make from scratch, but if your site will validate or not will also depend on the complexity of the system and scripts being used. If you will have 100% validation it can be arranged, but it is possible that you'll need to compromise on the features that prevent your website from validating.

Resourcefulness¹

I have used a lot of different technologies to get things done, always giving preference to open-source resources over the commercial ones. Odds are that I probably know what you need to get your web page to behave the way you want. I really strive to keep myself updated on all the best solutions to common challenges.

Google Analytics¹

Google Analytics is beyond doubt the best choice for any website owner to track visitors and their trends. With this tool one can track not only hits within a date range, but also keep track of goal conversion and ROI (return on investment). If I perform any paid service for you, I can set up Google Analytics for you free of charge².

Media embedding

Do you want to stream an YouTube video or any other media on your site? Just get in touch and I will get it done for you in no time⁵.

Social Networks

Did you know that social networking websites/tools like Delicious, Digg, Facebook and Twitter can bring quite a relevant traffic to your site? It takes some dedication to get your website exposed with these tools, but I can help you make the best of it.

Coding

Want a fancy slideshow on your site? Want to use some non-Flash animation? Sliding panels, slick hovers? I use jQuery, a widely popular open-source javascript library that might be able to do exactly what you want to.

Consultancy

If you are curious to know what can be improved in your website, I can make an accessment and present a concise report. Along with the report you will get an approximate budget and timeframe^{3, 4}.

Support

Is your website down? Has it been attacked by hackers? Is there an ugly error coming up? Need a new email account? Need a backup? I'll be on the other end of the line if you need support^{7, 8}.

Maintenance

It seems that all should be fine and well once your super-duper web page has finally gone live. You built the perfect website and optimized it to the best possible level so that you could lie back and watch the cash flow in... Trust me, even the simplest websites require maintenance sometimes. If you ever need that, let me know⁷.

Debugging

If you find that your website is throwing errors at your users, you might want to check the code for "bugs". A single misplaced dot could cause errors. Even though it is hard to find complex sites that are error-free (since there are so many languages and platforms to be supported), it is still possible to minimize them.

Backup

If you need someone to take a backup of your website, I can do that once or in a regular basis. On systems/servers that support that, the same can be programmed to be done automatically^{5, 6, 7}.

Database

If you need to create, manage or backup your database, I can do it for you. I can also convert databases from Access, Excel or FileMaker or CSV format to a suitable format for importing to the most popular database systems. I can also transfer an user database from a system to another⁵.

Clean-up

Code-clutter is one of the most common problems in websites today, and WYSIWYG HTML editors are the main cause to it. One of the most noticeable side-effects of code-clutter is a page with a broken design. "Everything was just fine until I made some changes to the file yesterday" is a common rant among those who use these editors. Invisible elements take space and move things around, breaking the page. By working directly in the code, I can make all the clutter vanish.

Security

A page with less errors and less code-clutter is a safer page to browse on. Well-maintained pages have less vulnerabilities and therefore prevent annoying problems like hack-attacks. If you need to use SSL protocols — usually present in online store check-outs — I might be able to help as well.

E-commerce

I can set-up, develop, maintain or optimize an online store for your business. E-commerce is a very exciting venue for your products, and if you are serious about business you should ensure your presence online.

Marketing

Your presence online is all about exposure. Make sure you are visible by marketing your product — be it a dress or an idea — on those places your target group is most likely to be. I can help you find not only where your target group is but also make ads for you.

Advertising

For those who don't need to do marketing but do need to advertise their products, I can make Flash banners (with cool on-the-face/subtle effects), animated GIFs (images), promotional videos or simply static images. Ads made by me have been featured in many of the heavy-weight internet sites in Norway over the last 3 years, and were seen by millions of internet users.

1. Included whenever I'm designing a page from scratch, unless specified by me or limited by mutual agreement (to save on costs).
2. That does not include Google Analytics support nor tutoring.
3. Consultancy is provided on a paid basis.
4. Budgeting and timeframing will reflect only an approximative estimate and should not be considered final.
5. Access to FTP/phpMyAdmin/server administration account may be required.
6. Not all servers support that. If yours does, I'll need access to your server administration account.
7. Tasks like support, maintenance, regular backups or anything besides development are not considered to be a part of the standard web development/design package and are charged separately. Services included in the standard are marked with the number "1" besides their name.
8. Support is given on a paid basis. Support given on odd hours (18:00 - 09:00) are charged double hourly rate. Support is only given on the basis of my availability.

The way I work as a Webdesigner

The way I charge my clients is widely practiced among freelancers. Here I've put together points that I'm often asked about. For more details on each point, please refer to the greyed observations below, as they are important. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.

• A fixed 1 hour rate: NOK 400,-/hour¹.
• The hourly rate is rounded-up to half-hour in the first hour, in case the work takes anything from 1 to 29 minutes. After the first half-hour everything is counted by the minute. This does not apply for hours counted after the start of the job.²
• Support given on odd hours (18:00 - 09:00) are charged a double hour rate: NOK 800,-/hour.
• The client will get a message on every completed 10th hour, with a short briefing on what was done so far³. Before the next 10th hour, I will just continue to work and charge my hourly rate, unless the client has specified a limited timeframe/budget.
• The client will be sent a receipt through an email with the job details as a PDF attachment.
• I only work with this system. I don't, for instance, charge a fixed amount "to make a website"⁴.
• I use an iPhone app called "Jobs" to keep track of my time. Click here for more details.
• Important: Taxes are not included in the price. In Norway, a 25% MVA tax is included in this kind of services, so all my rates (excluding the flag-fall fee) will have 25% of the total value charged on the top of the total job cost. UPDATE: I'm not charging taxes at the moment, not until my income exceeds a certain amount/year. Anyway, that will only be an advantage to you as a client if you are abroad and can't reclaim the MVA.

1. I reserve to myself the discretion to change this rate anytime. The rate will not change once a job has started.
2. Example: A website maintenance job takes 17 minutes. These 17 minutes will be rounded up to half an hour from the start of the job.
3. In that way the client can decide if the project will continue or not, if features once requested will be cut off, etc. This was a request I got from a few clients concerned about the cost of their projects.
4. That's because making a website is a complex task — every project is an unique project. I have made the mistake of charging a fixed amount for the whole work several times, and found myself working 4 times as much than planned because the clients kept changing their mind and the project never finished. As a result, the projects took even longer time as I did not have the proper incentive to continue to be productive since my earnings did not justify my efforts. By working with an hourly rate I keep myself motivated and your project will be done faster.

Another important aspect of the way I work with clients outside Norway: except for services performed directly on your server, I work on my server. In that way I have a better control over the development environment, which is less of a headache for both developer and client. The web design / web development should be paid before delivery. Password access will be given to a temporary online preview of the work I have done on my server. That is only to prevent "already had bad experiences" in which the client simply copied the whole code from my server and ran away with it without paying. In this kind of work, there should be a good trust between the parties, in this case me as a web desinger and you as a client. I have a clean record and I hope that my references speak for themselves. I only work this way so we can best trust each other.

I hope I made my working methods clear, and that they won't scare you away... :D . I tried to describe it in the best way I can, but if you are still wondering about something, just ask by e-mail or by using the contact form. Please do read the greyed observations as well, they are important.

Watch out for bad Web Design

Given that more and more people get access to personal computers as technology evolves and become more affordable, the "digital-jobs" trade grows at a stunning rate. In that, web design is no exception. This fact should be a very positive one for you as a customer and for me as web designer: you get to pay less to get your website done, since web-design offers are rising, while I have to keep myself sharp to sell my offer.

But that does not change the fact that Web Design is a very specialized job. Most people have the wrong idea about what this job actually consists of, and that is very understandable. There are so many technologies and programming languages being used in web design that it is indeed hard to answer the "what are web designers and what do they actually do?" question.

All the content you see on any website is rendered by a chunk of code, that makes absolutelly no sense for those not versed in it. This code is called HTML (though more recently it is referred to as XHTML, a revised HTML). Web Design used to be something reserved for weird-looking coders, but that changed with the advent of visual HTML editors, which took away the need of knowing HTML at all — or so one would assume...

I have heard it said that "anyone can do a website". I must agree with that, I don't think anyone lacks the capacity to make one, specially with so many free rides like Wordpress.com, Blogspot.com and Myspace.com. But – and here I'm getting to the point – not anyone can develop an online store, an online community, an online portfolio or any web design task optimally without knowing what they are doing.

That leads me to an even bolder statement: most of the internet content is absolute crap. It consists of badly designed, wrongly coded, unsafe, unstable, barely accessible and poorly maintained websites which have totally useless content. Ad-farming domains, outdated and forsaken websites ­ the hackers' paradise, unsecure payment gateways, etc. Then comes the second biggest part of the internet, which has all the qualities the beforementioned has, but with good, great, excellent and even awesome content. If one could fix all these problems our internet experience today would be very different.

What I'm trying to say is: beware of inexperienced web designers. Even though they will do their best to deliver the product you paid for, they might not do everything available to promote your product in your best interest — not necessarily deliberately, but out of lack of knowledge!

Feel welcome to look at the work I've put together in my portfolio, or to read more about what I can do/what skills I have on Graphic Design.

By the way, if you like what you see and wonder if I can make your web design project come to life, don't hesitate to contact me by e-mail or by using the contact form to send your message - whichever way you choose, you will get your answer in a timely manner.

If you want to know even more about me, meet me in one of my social networks. If you are interested in a more CV-like presentation with past jobs and education, you will find it in my Linkedin public page (it needs some updating...).