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.

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The question that I’m asked most often when I talk to people about open source software is “Who pays for all this?” as well as variants like “Then how do they make money?” or “Won’t people eventually stop working for free?” We live in a capitalistic society, and people don’t understand why someone would work for free when they could be making money. In this article, I’m not going to cling to ideals on why doing something for the community shows more worth than your bank account balance, instead I’m going to explain how open source developers (myself included) do in fact make money by developing quality software for free. Hopefully in the process you will find a way to give back to the community and get your piece of the pie.

How can I make money from Open Source Software?

There’s more than one approach to making money from free software. Companies like Trolltech and MySQL AB use a dual-license approach, where they retain ownership of their code and offer it with an open source GPL license and a more traditional license. Why would someone pay for a product they can get for free? The top reason is usually support. Companies, especially the big ones, want to use software that has a company standing behind it. A company they can go to with questions and even hold responsible if something breaks. The second reason, one that is more specific to these companies that use the dual-license approach, is actually the license itself. If a company wants to include the MySQL database into a traditional closed-source project, one they hope to sell, they can’t legally do that with the GPL’d version. Instead they must purchase the alternative license. These “second generation” open source companies are bridging the gap between open and closed source. It’s a fine line to walk, and I’m not saying that either company i mentioned is a shining example of what this kind of company could be, but there is no ignoring the fact that these companies profit from open source software which also benefits the community.

Another way to make some profit from open source can clearly be seen in companies like Zend Technologies. The company was founded by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, who are very well known for their contributions to the PHP programming language. Zend Technologies develops products relating to the development, deployment and management of business critical PHP based web applications. They have proprietary tools that they sell, such as Zend Platform, Zend Guard, and the amazing Zend Studio. So how do they contribute to open source, and how does it benefit them? Well, their company is built around PHP, an open source language. It’s in their best interest to make sure PHP is the best it can be, and as such they contribute huge amounts of code to the PHP project, in turn helping the PHP community, even those that don’t use their products. They also release things like the Zend Framework, a high quality open source PHP framework, which can drastically reduce project development time, increase portability of code, and ease the process of creating an MVC application in PHP. Again, this helps to increase the number of programmers that use PHP, which increases their customer base. No licensing strings attached, just a mutually beneficial relationship.

Then there are companies like Automattic. Automattic is built around WordPress, an open source project that I happen to be quite interested in, since a decent portion of Xavisys’s work is done on WordPress. They run WordPress.com, but have diversified their income, making money from upgrades, VIP hosting, ads, Akismet licensing, and enterprise services. WordPress.com uses the WordPress software, so when Automattic’s developers commit code to WordPress, it helps their company, but also benefits the rest of us that use WordPress. So why don’t they stop doing this, and keep the code to themselves? Well, because while they help me, I also help them. When I see a problem with WordPress, I submit a patch to fix it. When I see a feature that I would like, I submit the code to add it. In the end, they make my software better, and I make their software better. It’s mutually beneficial. I think a lot of other industries, and even other sections of this industry, should learn to embrace of this kind of symbiotic relationship.

So you see that large companies can turn open source into monetary gain, but what about you? What about the smaller developer? I’d like to respectfully submit my last case study, Xavisys. A company that I happen to know quite well. I don’t help the community for monetary gain, I do it because I think that community is extremely important to the well being of the human race. I think that people who are involved in their community make the world a better place to be, and I want to be one of those people. However, even though it’s not the reason I contribute to the community, I do reap the benefits. One of the difficulties of being a development company is that there is so much competition, it can be hard to be noticed. You might be twice as good as the next guy, but if no one knows about your company and the services it offers, you’re out of luck. Not too long ago, I started releasing all my WordPress plugins into the WordPress.org repository. I gave a bunch of code away for free. The most popular one (WP Google Analytics) has only been up for 19 days, and has been downloaded 2,635 times. It feels good that so many people are benefiting from something I wrote, but how am I benefiting? Well, since I started releasing my plugins, traffic to my site has tripled. I don’t run any ads, so I’m not making anything off the traffic itself, but I’m getting more paid jobs from people who are already confident in my abilities because they use some of my plugins. These people are easier to sell my services to, because they are already convinced that I’m up to the task.

What does this mean? Look for something mutually beneficial. A way that you can help others and in turn they help you. No exploitation, a symbiotic give and take. Now that you know it’s possible, wouldn’t you rather make money that way?

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Building a company is hard work, but I’ve decided to draw a line in the sand. Xavisys is going to be a great company because I stand behind it, and I’m an upstanding, honest person that you can get to know.

The term “Marketing strategy” sounds like a group of people in a back room, devising ways to fool you, the consumer, into buying whatever they offer. It gives the impression that trickery or underhanded tactics are being used. I want to blow that out of the water. There are plenty of great businesses out there that have great people standing behind them. Rackspace gives me an account representative that actually answers the phone when I call, and works to get any issue (even the minor ones) resolved as quickly as possible. Not exactly status quo with hosting companies, but it should be. My good friend James Pearson has a socially proactive business called Acholi Beads, and I would be able to guarantee it was great even if I knew nothing about it except that he stands behind it. That’s the kind of business I like to deal with, and that’s the kind of business Xavisys is, and will continue to be.

There are other places out there where you can take your web development work. There are other places that have a thorough knowledge of WordPress customization and plugin development. There are even other people out there with years of real world experience. While I have all that, and am confident that Xavisys can stand on technical merit alone, that’s not why you should use Xavisys. You should use it because I’m active in my community (online and off), and have people who will speak to my character. You should use it because it’s a family owned and operated company, and my wife Christen and I personally guarantee you will never be charged more hours than were really worked, and that corners won’t be cut that will cost you in the long run. You should use it because you know that it’s named after my son Xavier, and I want it to be an example of how he should live, not how much he should make.

That’s my commitment, not at the expense of quality work, but in addition to it. It’s a high standard, and if you ever think I’m not living up to it, let me know.

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