How to setup as a freelance web designer?

NullZer0

I think I'll start by saying excellent job with Boards.ie ! I was a member of adverts for so so long and never wondered over this far. Hopefully I'll be here more often. Keep up the good work!

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Ok, so the title pretty much says it. Well Im interested in setting up as a freelance web designer, problem is Im not great with photoshop or graphics (Im sure I could improve over time). Coding is more my thing.

Im just going to list my questions to make this less confusing:

1) Photoshop - How can I get more experience in creating web interfaces/ graphics and working with Photos?

2) What exactly should I expect business wise if I do start up (part time at first) as a freelance web designer?

3) Can anyone recommend the best way/places out there (preferably Ireland... Dublin of course) to get jobs, experience and build up contacts? What methods would you use?

4) Does it pay well? I'm more interested in the work itself though rather than the money, but it would be great to get paid for something that I love.

5) I currently own Macromedia Studio 8 and Adobe Creative Suite.... can I throw my ideas of moving to Linux out the window? I was looking at linux as an alternative to Vista - If I went to Vista would it decrease the performance of these applications (I would be using 1gb of ram).

6)Are there any people out there looking to work on projects together?



Well that about covers it! :cool:

DJB

Lots of questions. First thing... what is your skill set, experience, qualifications, etc?

Answers:

1) practice... practice... practice... just keep trying designs. Have a look at www.cssmania.com for good designs to give you some inspiration. Maybe pick up a couple of books. www.sitepoint.com/books has a good PhotoShop book and another on the Principles of Beautiful Web Design.

2) if you were going full time, I'd say prepare to starve. Build up a nest egg to fall back on. Another book that might help you is the web design buiness kit from sitepoint. It has lots of info on running a web design business. Don't undercut a job just to get it... pick your price and stick to it.

3) My business usually comes from word of mouth but get your own website up and get a portfolio together. This is one of the main things your clients will pick you on, along with a recommendation from someone.

4) It can and it depends how good you are at it and how good you are at selling your skills.

5) You should be fine on either operating system. I'd pick one or the other based on the programming language you develop in.

6) I'm sure there is. There's a lot of graphic designers out there that need backend programmers so it would be an idea to team up with one (or more) of these.

Best of luck and just ask if I can help any more!

Rgds, Dave

generalmiaow

iRock wrote:

5) I currently own Macromedia Studio 8 and Adobe Creative Suite.... can I throw my ideas of moving to Linux out the window? I was looking at linux as an alternative to Vista - If I went to Vista would it decrease the performance of these applications (I would be using 1gb of ram).
Well that about covers it! :cool:

Dual boot like the rest of us I don't do any of my HTML/CSS in an application but they can be useful to check. A serious web designer needs to be able to look at things in different OSes and user agents anyway, and browsershots type sites simply aren't enough - prepare for insane random scrollbars in IE7 and some bizarreness in opera.

You'll find that for handwritten HTML there's a lot of good stuff in linux. Even gedit (the default editor for GNOME systems, think notepad on speed) highlights code. Screem is also an excellent HTML editor with previews.

What exactly do you mean by your last question?

The Corinthian

1. Outsource. I'm of the opinion that for all but the lowest end sites you really should not try to be a jack of all trades. So find yourself a Web designer you can work with, let them do the designs and you implement them and do all the clever stuff underneath and you'll find that they'll start reciprocating.

2. Expect that you'll get little or no work for the first few months while you whore yourself out and get a pipeline of work up and running. Expect that even if you do get work, you may be waiting months to get paid.

3. Word of mouth. Numerous Web sites and mailing lists where people will look for work done.

4. Depends on how good you are, as has been suggested, and how professional you are. By professional I mean how you handle your contracts, project management, credit control and other admin.

5. Why do you need to move to Vista now? Or Linux?

Eoin

The Corinthian wrote:

1. Outsource. I'm of the opinion that for all but the lowest end sites you really should not try to be a jack of all trades. So find yourself a Web designer you can work with, let them do the designs and you implement them and do all the clever stuff underneath and you'll find that they'll start reciprocating.

The outsourcing seems like the way to go - I'm of the opinion that most people in the industry are either good designers or good developers, I've found it quite rare to find someone who is very proficient in both. To me, it's a different mindset, but I'm sure that people will disagree with me on this one.

Check out www.sitepoint.com/contests - you provide a brief, and multiple designers come back to you with screenshots. You can then ask them to make minor changes, and they might oblige. This means for a couple of hundred quid, you have a coded template that is bespoke - not like one of generic poorly coded ones out there. Another ones include scriptlance.com and rentacoder.com, but they cater (as the names suggest) more towards the back end, rather than graphical side.

If you can afford to take the time, go to a few local businesses or charitable organisations etc, and offer to do them a basic site for free. This will get you a portfolio pretty soon, and if they are happy with the work, they will recommend you.

I'd definitely recommend making sure that your OS can support as many browser types as possible - as much as many people hate IE, it still seems to be used by over 80% of the people who use my site. The stats that the likes of W3C provide from their usage are bound to have a higher number of alternative browsers, because of the nature of the people who frequent the site, but for most commercial websites IE is very much the dominant player.

squibs

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but I was very interested in the sitepoint contests. Has anybody here used this before? Also does anybody know of a similar site for php/mysql coders that they would recommend?

Eoin

squibs wrote:

Don't mean to hijack the thread, but I was very interested in the sitepoint contests. Has anybody here used this before? Also does anybody know of a similar site for php/mysql coders that they would recommend?

The other two links I listed should have lots of PHP coders available. I've not used sitepoint yet, but given that the buyer is given plenty of opportunity to comment on the designs, it looks like a good proposition.

Gizzard

iRock wrote:

I think I'll start by saying excellent job with Boards.ie ! I was a member of adverts for so so long and never wondered over this far. Hopefully I'll be here more often. Keep up the good work!

*****************************************

Ok, so the title pretty much says it. Well Im interested in setting up as a freelance web designer, problem is Im not great with photoshop or graphics (Im sure I could improve over time). Coding is more my thing.

Im just going to list my questions to make this less confusing:

1) Photoshop - How can I get more experience in creating web interfaces/ graphics and working with Photos?

Do a course, and practice practice

2) What exactly should I expect business wise if I do start up (part time at first) as a freelance web designer?

do it part time, start small, advertise on some of the dev auction sites, do some test portfolio sites to show ppl

3) Can anyone recommend the best way/places out there (preferably Ireland... Dublin of course) to get jobs, experience and build up contacts? What methods would you use?

Make a website to display your skills, start from there

4) Does it pay well? I'm more interested in the work itself though rather than the money, but it would be great to get paid for something that I love.

not in the beginning unless your real lucky, lots of competition

5) I currently own Macromedia Studio 8 and Adobe Creative Suite.... can I throw my ideas of moving to Linux out the window? I was looking at linux as an alternative to Vista - If I went to Vista would it decrease the performance of these applications (I would be using 1gb of ram).

forget vista XP is fine, dont try and do too many things like move to linux at the same time as learning web dev, focus on dreamweaver, photoshop, and your CSS skills

6)Are there any people out there looking to work on projects together?

not sure

Well that about covers it! :cool:

see my included responses above, Good luck