Forum Moderators: mack
This could take the rest of my life here!
You mean you have better things to be doing :)
Mack.
[edited by: mack at 5:37 pm (utc) on April 3, 2006]
I'd like to launch a freelance career
How many sites do you expect to make to earn enough money to have a freelance career?
How much will you charge for each site?
You want to live in a dumpster and scrounge for food, or do you want to be able to support yourself, pay your health insurance, have a car, buy insurance, raise a family, etc.?
You say you've never designed for anyone before, which means your new at this web design business.
No one will hire you without a decent portfolio.
If you're not willing to put in the time to learn, I certainly wouldn't hire you.
I'd rather have 3 high quality sites than 15 junk sites.
Your portfolio should include sites that don't all look alike- otherwise it's not much different than having just 1 site under your belt.
As someone who has been involved in the hiring of web designers, I like to see several different designs that the person has done in order to get a feel for their range. Some of the people that we've hired have been right out of school, and haven't designed professionally for anyone except maybe things for school and their own sites, and that's fine, because regardless of who they designed stuff for, they have things to show us.
In general, I think it's obviously better if you can show sites you've designed for actual clients other than yourself (usually, the path people seem to take is to work as a web designer for a company and then go freelance after having some work under your belt), but that's not to say you can't build up a freelance design business from scratch.
If you're only trying to do design and not development (e.g. PHP, Perl, Mysql, ASP applications) then you can design mockup sites, or sites for your friends or family who have businesses. Know anyone who does crafts? Design them a site. Know someone who does plumbing or flooring or carpentry? Design them a site. Got a hobby? Design a site for it. Got an interest in something? Make a site.
You don't have to make ten thousand-page sites, just 10 sites that show a range of what you can do. Just like a model's portfolio shows how she (or he) can look in different lights, poses, and attitudes, a web designer's portfolio should also show what you can do as much as possible.
I would say, do at least one very professional business type site, at least one whimsical and "fun" looking kind of site, at least one sort of Goth/artistic kind of site (black background), and find others to make so you have something to show. Having sites with different designs filled with "lorem ipsit" gibberish text is better than nothing, but if possible, do some small sites for real people that you know. This will also give you the experience of designing for someone.
You might also consider hitting some of the freelance sites and offering your skills to the lowest bidder. This sucks for you revenue-wise, but also builds a list of clients that you've worked for and can point to.
Good luck!
JK
JK
Make it do interesting things
Make it engage people
Make its users create useful content
build in link hooks (reasons for other sites to link to it)
Make it search engine friendly
Make it relevent
Demonstrate that it meets a demand
Then... when you are as proud as you can be...
Others will want you to do that for them. But by then, you may not want to be freelance anymore ;)
A good example?: WebmasterWorld
I'm sure BT has plenty of other sites, but only one that he'll be remembered for.
Designing = make pretty
Developing = make work
There are some people who do both but I would wager that most do one or the other. I for example can make anything work online, I can build you any piece of custom software you want an make it all web-accessable, but when it comes to making it looks pretty then I am not the guy to talk to. I just make it functional.
From what it sounds like you want to design, develop and author websites which is going to take a lot if you are not yet proficient in more then one of these tasks.
HTML is where you will want to start but if you want to do dynamic stuff you are going to need to learn a backend programming language.
I agree with Receptional when he says you don't need 10. I would say make 1 site and have it do cool stuff that you can demo. Forums, photo galleries, forms that email themselves to someone when filled out. That kind of stuff, then make some changes to the skin and then you can see what it takes to maintain a site. Also have a ook to see what the compition has and see if you can top it.
Back in the day.......I had ONE pretty darn good site too, which landed me my first job in IT. It was for my music publishing company, had it hooked up to a shopping cart, put a litle Flash in there, found some cool auction and classified scripts (no one ever sold or listed anything but it great to learn how to implement them) and even had streaming RM files for sound clips of the music I sold.
Never made much money from it, but it was a great learning tool, and it did get me the job.
Now I m designing Websites with ASP,ASP.NET,HTML,JavaScript,CSS and MSACCESS
So Far I have designed 5 complete sites and maintaining a total of 19 websites.
What shd i do to become to a complete pro
regards,
D
10 is a bare minimum IMHO, 20 to 100 would be something more suitable.
In 6 years I have about 400 unique client sites (20% of which are cloned with regional variations for additions), another 700 unique sites I personally own.....80% of the development done my me, 20% sub-contracted to specialist programmers when necessary for complex ASP/PHP/Java solutions.
As a new web developer your single biggest problem will be how to attract clients/merchants/Ad Networks! The answer is simply a case of numerical success. Put all your eggs in one basket (or a dozen) and you will most likely fail or under achieve, put your fait in hundreds of "irons in the fire" and your chance of success exponentially increases.....No magic here :)
What shd i do to become to a complete pro?
When you can support yourself and your family through income generated solely on your web designs, then you will be a complete pro.
You can't learn it all. You can become very good at some things.
So which backend program should I learn?PHP or ASP?
PHP seems to be more widely available. Just because of that, I'd learn it first. Once you have PHP, you can pick up Perl pretty easily. (Actually, I learned Perl first, and picked up PHP pretty easily, but I think it might be easier the other way around.)
ASP is also good to learn, though, because of all the Windows people. Again, though, once you've picked up one language, others are easier to figure out.
Everyone will have their favorite language, and will tell you which is "better," but I'd choose PHP at first just because there's so much of it.
JK
PHP is good because there is so much out there already written you can take advantage of. Although on the flip side I would guess there is more attack types for PHP then for any other platform, so you will have to include into your learning how to close the PHP holes.
I personally would recommend Python. The only reason to not is it is still not that big in North America, although it is gaining some ground. In Europe though it is huge. Some of the goverments out there have moved to Python webbased software because it is all open source. Saves them a lot of money in Lisences.
