Freelance Web Developing Work

the_Grinch

I had a couple of questions for the freelance web developing people out there. I am working to get myself up to speed on web development. At this point, I am looking at it as a way to supplement my current income (in the future, looking at probably about a year from now). Has anyone done this? What was the good, the bad, and the ugly of doing it? My hope in doing this is to develop a portfolio and to see if I would enjoy doing it fulltime. I see a lot of postings looking for people to make a web app, facebook apps, or develop some website. But as I look I wonder about what happens there after? Meaning, will I be getting tons of calls to fix things later on? Or will they hand it off to someone in house after work is completed? Thanks in advance!

Pash

the_Grinch wrote: »

I had a couple of questions for the freelance web developing people out there. I am working to get myself up to speed on web development. At this point, I am looking at it as a way to supplement my current income (in the future, looking at probably about a year from now). Has anyone done this? What was the good, the bad, and the ugly of doing it? My hope in doing this is to develop a portfolio and to see if I would enjoy doing it fulltime. I see a lot of postings looking for people to make a web app, facebook apps, or develop some website. But as I look I wonder about what happens there after? Meaning, will I be getting tons of calls to fix things later on? Or will they hand it off to someone in house after work is completed? Thanks in advance!

Hey Grinch,

I never managed to earn enough to solely rely on freelance work. Infact I was working in retail at the same time for most of my time doing this (as my primary income). I did a few interviews for web studio jobs when money was really tight when I went back to college (to do MCSE/CCNA courses), they sometimes involved second interviews and even in some cases I was asked to produce concepts of upcoming work they had lined up and they would pay me if my design was up to par. I didn't get these jobs at the time, I was simply told that my portfolio didnt hold enough weight and that it wasnt 'beefed' out enough (in hindsight I knew this was the case as well). Your portfolio will be your key to how much work you get, freelance or studio based.

My advice would be to really practice your coding, learn to be good at commenting on your code so you can revisit things at a later date, not too good so that someone else (non techical) can do it . When designing PHP functions (as an example), save them and name them accordingly so that you can use them for future work. Get a good portfolio together and make everything stand out in there. Make sure all of your work is hosted, so that you can fling your web brand about. This is key.

A few good links for inspiration and website/image creation critique:-

247 media studios web design - portfolio (small but very well known web studio in germany)

BB FORUM - Powered by X M B 1.8 Partagum Final SP1 (one very well known freelancer in the states)

CGTalk (this is more for image work, but it may bring some good ideas for you)

The above communities arent as lively as they once were but I am sure some others will have some more links to give.

The previous work I have done freelance - the work was handed over completely on customer agreement being signed. I was never involved in improving or supporting anything. I did have to create documentation a couple of times for a couple of projects, nothing too large though! I am not sure if others have had different cases....

All of that said, there are volumes of people out there making there way in the freelance world. Little projects going against the huge gobbling behemoths such as Google and MS.

dynamik

the_Grinch wrote: »

will I be getting tons of calls to fix things later on?

I guess that depends on how many things you had broken when you originally did the work

The good was that I made good money quickly when things went smoothly. The bad was the work was often very tedious and rarely enjoyable. Aside from the initial design phase, it was just monkey work. The ugly's a tie between trying to get things to work right in IE and problematic customers. Both make you wish you went into landscaping instead.

It took me a bit to wise up, but try to get in a place where you can get residual income from people. Offer to give them an hour of work per month at 50% your normal rate if they prepay a year. Most people who get that rarely have you do the work. That's good once in awhile, but if you don't keep on them to take advantage of it, they won't renew the next year. Also, host with hostmonster.com or some other place that allows you to host multiple domains under one account. Then you can provide hosting/domain registration services as well. Go with Mosso if you need something better, but that's about 10-12x expensive.

If I ever get any work at this point, I actually just theme WordPress, so I can hand control of the site off to them and have them leave me alone. It's difficult to turn down a nice check, but I have better things to do then deal with all their minor updates in the future.

the_Grinch

As always thanks guys! I want to do this right so gotta get some facts!