Becoming a Freelance Web Developer/Designer

It wasn’t all that long ago (although in “web years” it’s been ages) that I was trying to break into web development as a career. Now that I’m more established, people are asking me the same questions I asked others when I was starting. They all amount to one thing: How can I take this from a hobby to a career?

In my experience, most web developers and designers (especially those trying to begin a career) enjoy what they do. They usually start building small sites or themes as a hobby, often getting together with other like-minded people at sites such as Open Designs. They do what they do because they like it, but who can fault them for wanting to get paid for doing something they love? It’s the ultimate goal.

So what do you do? First off, you need to understand that it’s a highly saturated market, and you’re going to have to put in serious time and effort to turn this into a career. You’re going to be putting in 40 hours at work to pay the bills, and another 20-30 hours laying the foundation for your future career. If you aren’t ready to put in the time and effort, you can stop reading right now. This is not a get rich quick scheme, it’s a plan that you can follow if you’re really serious about it.

Now that you’ve agreed to put in the necessary effort, here are some steps to follow:

Step 1:
Register a domain name, and get some inexpensive hosting. You can get hosting through GoDaddy for less than $5/mo, and if you do, you can get a domain name from them for $2 for the first year. Install something like WordPress or Drupal on the site, and put up some general info. As you go, you will build this out into a portfolio, but you need to start somewhere.

Step 2:
If you haven’t already, you should join a community like Open Designs. If you are a designer, create and submit designs. You’re not looking for quantity, you’re looking for quality. Your designs need to stand out as better than all the rest. Be unique. Find out what you’re good at, and perfect it. While you are aiming for quality, quantity DOES matter. However, that won’t be a problem since you’re spending 20-30 hours per week doing this right? I’m sure you can turn out a design every week or two, so you worry about quality, and quantity will handle itself. Release your designs as public domain, but keep your absolute best design for yourself. Creative Commons is more hassle than it’s worth, and you want your designs to be used.

If you are not a designer, try to network with designers. Offer to code their designs into themes for common CMSs, etc. You probably won’t make it very far as a freelance programmer if you don’t have some designers you can use. Build relationships with the quality designers, and remember that quantity will handle itself as you put in those extra hours. Also try to post helpful tidbits in the forums and answer people’s questions when you can. Networking is important.

Step 3:
Continue to build the site you started in step one. Take your best design and add it to your site. If you are a developer, ask a quality designer if you can barter work for a custom design. Document your work on there. Not just a gallery, post some content. Walk a visitor through your design process or make a tutorial on converting a design to a theme. Make sure to set up a contact page with your info so clients can reach you.

Step 4:
Do some inexpensive work for hire. Consider finding a charity or a socially proactive business and do some work for almost nothing. Get used to working with clients and doing things up to their standards. An alternative to the charities is to try out a freelance website. The competition is massive, because the market is global, but if you’re persistent you can get work.

Step 5:
Go for clients with a vengeance. Make a form-style E-Mail that has information about you, links to your portfolio (which should look pretty good at this point), etc. Leave room at the beginning (NOT the end, this is important) for a personal note that will let the potential client know that you personally read and replied to their request. Find places where jobs are posted for work that you are especially good at. Consider finding niche places like a WordPress or Drupal job list where there may be less competition.

Don’t limit yourself to job lists. More than 80% of jobs are never posted anywhere. Find local businesses that have poor sites or no site at all, and take them a proposal (in person) with specific ways they will benefit from it. If they have a bad site, make sure to be careful what you say, it’s VERY common to hear an owner say “my {insert relative here} made that site for us” and you don’t want to be insulting. Base your argument on facts and statistics, possibly taking mockups or printouts of sites that are similar to what you are recommending.

Step 6:
Make the leap. At some point, you have to let go of your regular job and switch to this full time. I haven’t really found a rule of thumb for when this is. It’s different for every person. If you’re having a hard time deciding if you’re ready to drop the 9-5, consider getting a part-time job elsewhere and doing this full-time. Maybe the extra income will help ease the transition. Mostly remember that freelancing is still a job, it’s just one you like. And it’s not against the rules to like your job.

What is the best CMS? This is a question that I am asked all the time. There are so many options out there that answering this question is no small task. Once again Jeffery Scott comes through with an amazing article as he reviews the The Top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems. What does his list look like? Here it is:

1. Drupal
2. WordPress
3. Joomla
4. Media Wiki
5. Liferay
6. TYPO3
7. Moodle
8. Dolphin
9. Pligg
10. Movable Type

His conclusion was that Drupal edged out the top spot because of its ease of use, great support, and vast number of modules. He concedes that WordPress is a really a close second. I’m not sure I agree with his exact order, but I’m biased because I’ve been developing on WordPress for years and I’m very familiar with it. I’d probably put the top three like this:

1. WordPress
2. Drupal
3. Movable Type

Of course, with the introduction of Acquia to the scene, that may change in the near future. Either way, the article is a great read.

Eight months ago, I was talking about open source eCommerce, and I asked Can open source eCommerce contend? At the time I was worried by the lack of quality and even more so the poor user interfaces offered in the open source eCommerce solutions. However, I talked briefly about a new solution that was soon-to-be-released, Magento. Well, it’s been released and in my opinion it is probably the best solution available.

Jeffery Scott posted a great article called Magento – The New Standard in Open Source eCommerce over at our recently launched Web Developer News site. Magento is making huge progress, and I hope that this new blood forces other eCommerce solutions to take action. A little competition could benefit us all.

As many know, Xavisys recently launched a web developer resource site called WebDevNews. Jeffery Scott really helped kicked things off right with a great article: Acquia Gets Ready for Release of Carbon – Commercially Supported Drupal

He talks about Acquia, a new company that was launched by Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal. It will offer commercial support for Drupal. It seems that Acquia plans on supporting Drupal much the same way that Automattic supports WordPress and SixApart supports Movable Type. With this kind of support available to our clients, Xavisys will now be offering Drupal solutions in addition to the WordPress and custom solutions already offered.

As a web developer, I know that there are tons of resources out there. I also know that many of them are outdated, contain limited information, or seem to only cover the very basics. I decided that we needed something better. A place where developers, programmers, and designers could share their knowledge in a variety of areas, and we could all benefit. I decided to launch WebDevNews - News For Web Developers. Web Dev News is a collaborative blog, where the content is generated by people who really know what they’re talking about.

If you are a professional in the web development field, please consider contributing to Web Developer News.

Xavisys experienced some server problems tonight. It seems that the main hard drive in our server was going bad and needed to be replaced. There was a little downtime, but the server is back and better than ever. I apologize if it was an inconvenience.

I just uploaded version 1.2.2 of my WordPress Twitter Widget Pro plugin. Since twitter has slowed down, a lot of people (especially on slower servers) have been getting the “Could not connect to Twitter” message when twitter was slow but not down. I’ve added a setting on each widget to specify the number of seconds to wait for Twitter. It still defaults to 2 seconds, but you may have to bump it up. Just remember that when twitter IS down, it will try for that full amount of time to reach them BEFORE your page loads, so don’t set it too high!

Please discuss this plugin on the Wordpress Twitter Widget post.

I just uploaded version 1.2.2 of my WordPress Google Analytics plugin. It squashes one major bug that has been plaguing some users. Those that switch back and forth from visual to HTML editor, will not longer have problems with it getting stuck!

Please discuss this plugin on the WordPress Google Analytics Plugin post.

I just uploaded version 1.2.1 of my WordPress Twitter Widget Pro plugin. It includes the removal of the “friends feed” option, the addition of custom error message setting for when Twitter is down, and optional anonymous statistics collection (more on this in a moment). Unfortunately, the database query that Twitter had to run to retrieve these feeds was contributing to their constant crashes. They have removed this functionality, and have no immediate plans to add it back. If they ever do, I’ll redo the plugin to use it. I’m sorry, but it’s completely out of my hands.

Regarding the anonymous statistics collection, as my plugins are getting more and more popular (1000s of users now), I’m struggling to keep in touch with my plugin users. Gathering some statistics will help me to design my plugins to meet the needs of the users. This is not meant as an invasion of privacy, and you can easily disable it from the options page.
Read the rest of WordPress Twitter Widget Pro 1.2.1 released! »

A quick bugfix on the activation routines that generate the installation ID, released as 1.2.1.

I just uploaded version 1.2.0 of my WordPress Google Analytics plugin. It includes some minor bug fixes, and updated options page, and optional anonymous statistics collection. As my plugins are getting more and more popular (1000s of users now), I’m struggling to keep in touch with my plugin users. Gathering some statistics will help me to design my plugins to meet the needs of the users. This is not meant as an invasion of privacy, and you can easily disable it from the options page.
Read the rest of Google Analytics plugin 1.2.0 released! »