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Career Change/Advice

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  • 14-03-2017 8:53am
    #1
    frankthehack
    Registered Users Posts: 1 ✭


    Hi

    I recently came into some money and it would be enough to fund me for 6-9 months if I were give up my current job.

    I've wanted to get into website design and digital marketing for a while now, so it would be a good time to increase my skills, I have built some pages in Wix, Weebly but pretty basic.

    I'm living in your typical small Irish town, and it seems a lot of businesses have webpages, and while I think I'd get a good few to try me out, I don't think there's enough to survive just doing site builds.

    So, do Web design companies tend to do much work for clients on an on-going basis, the digital marketing design element I guess?

    Looking to make a call on which courses to take, e.g. if a carpenter wants a €500 site I could build that pretty easy now but with room to improve. However if there's more work on monthly SEO, social, maintenance, etc I'd invest more in those courses?

    Any advice would be very appreciated
    Thanks
    Frank


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    #2
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 0 ✭ [Deleted User]


    It's a tough market. There are a lot of kids coming out of college now with decent qualifications in web design, development and marketing. As a generalist, you'll probably be really good at one discipline, passable at another and mediocre at the third. It's pretty much unheard of for one person to be good at all three.

    It's one of the only disciplines where a college degree is not a requirement (courses tend to be out of date and out of whack with the real world). When I hire, I do so without regard to qualification. I need to know what the applicant can do to make a secure, beautiful, functional, usable product. I'd rather see a killer portfolio or github account than a doctorate.

    If you're thinking of doing this for a living, start by working it nights and weekends while maintaining the day job. You need to be sure you can actually feed yourself. Do not quit until you've had some satisfied paying clients and some market research to show that you can keep yourself in kit kats and cola by making websites.
    • The biggest problem is getting clients, and getting them to pay what you're worth.
    • The second biggest problem is defining the work to be done and managing expectations.
    • The third biggest problem is actually getting the work done.
    • The fourth biggest problem is maintaining those clients and getting repeat work.


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