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.

Benefits of Web Based

“When we look back on the desktop software era, I think we’ll marvel at the inconveniences people put up with, just as we marvel now at what early car owners put up with. For the first twenty or thirty years, you had to be a car expert to own a car. But cars were such a big win that lots of people who weren’t car experts wanted to have them as well.Computers are in this phase now. When you own a desktop computer, you end up learning a lot more than you wanted to know about what’s happening inside it….Ordinary users shouldn’t even know the words “operating system,” much less “device driver” or “patch.”
There is now another way to deliver software that will save users from becoming system administrators. Web-based applications are programs that run on Web servers and use Web pages as the user interface. For the average user this new kind of software will be easier, cheaper, more mobile, more reliable, and often more powerful than desktop software.”

Paul Graham, 2001

1. Cross-platform compatibility: Web-based applications can be easily designed to work on any system. It’s why with our products you can use the computer of your choice. Use Unix, Linux, Mac, or Windows equipment! You can even use any combination of systems, allowing you to choose the computer that best for you, rather than the computer that will run your application.
2. Updates: With web-based applications, updates are applied to one central location, allowing ALL users to benefit immediately from the update, without requiring the user to take any action, and without wasting the user’s precious time with downloading/installing updates.
3. Immedite availability: Web-based applications do not need to be installed and configured like standard programs. Instead you simply access the online application via your web browser, and you are immediately ready to use it.
4. Lower minimum system requirements: Web-based applications run on a web server rather than on the user’s system. This allows the vast majority of the application’s memory/CPU requirements to be handled by the server, leaving the user’s have far more reasonable demands on end-user RAM memory than locally installed programs. By residing and running off a provider servers, memory requirements very low. This can save even small companies thousands of dollars in computer equipment!
5. Fewer Bugs: Web-based applications can be run in a controled environment (web server), leaving them less prone to crashing, especially due to software or hardware conflicts. Also, everyone uses the same version, so there are no backwards compatability issues.
6. Price: Web-based applications do not require the distribution or marketing infrastructure required by traditional hard copy software. This allows web-based applications to cost a fraction of their hard copy counterparts.
7. Real time data availability: Web-based applications allow any information that has been input into them to be immediately seen by other users. No need to call them with the info, or send a backup that they need to restore. It’s just there, waiting for them!
8. Data availability across locations: Web-based applications allow you to use that same real time data availability from anywhere! If you input data at your California location, your regional manager can see it at his house, and your locations in Florida, Maine, even China can see it immediately! Distance is no longer an issue.
9. Data is safer: Hardware will always fail, however a properly configured server can minimalize or even eliminate the effect of suck problems. Most servers use redundant storage as well as regularly scheduled backups, so a single hardware failure, or even user error, does not result in data loss. Imagine that Sally, a long time employee clicks the wrong thing, and deletes an entire group of customers, and all data associated with them! Now imagine that this doesn’t worry you in the least! You simply roll back all data to 15 minutes ago! And to top it off, you have this same security against hardware failure or even the lates computer virus!