How do I know when I'm ready to start doing web design/development work for pay?

Hi Nick :)

I'm gonna be dead honest with you. If you think your first work is going to be "high end", calm down. First of all, what's your idea of what a high end project actually is? The one thing that makes one project BIG and the other project SMALL doesn't lie in the number of people working on it, or how much the client is paying for. The "size" of a project is just a way of classifying projects and different people will classify stuff in different ways. I like to charge my clients based on complexity, because USUALLY, the more complex the site, the longer it takes to be done, the more people I need to hire to help me and so on. All of that adds in to the price: if I need extra people to help me or not, if I need to rent a photography studio or not, and so forth and so on. So, the bigger the site, the more complex it will be, the more resources I'll be allocating.

Another thing that concerns me in what you said is... "more often than not those business would be better off using wix than hiring me". Think again why you came to Treehouse in the first place. I mean you could be making websites in wix without Treehouse, right? Don't get me wrong, Wix and such services aren't bad as a definition, but the average user is just as able to benefit from it as the average user is able to benefit from Flickr. Check a flickr site by a professional photographer and you'll probably see what I mean. I, as a graduate graphics designer can use Wix and end up with a website that looks awesome, not because the service will magically come up with things for me, but because I know enough about form, style and color to turn the tool into something beautiful. Why is your client better off with you? Because you should know how to build the result wix can automatically build by typing all code. And why is it better? Because you're not limited to a set of templates, you're only limited by your own imagination. Wix is my answer to clients that simply don't want to pay me. More often than one realizes, a freelancer will be rejecting jobs instead of lowering the price. Why? Because you have a price and you should know better than your client what price that is.

What is the job of a freelancer? Making websites? You do realize that you will be most of the time alone in that task right? I mean: you will be your programmer, your designer, your photographer, your illustrator, or you will be buying a lot of work by other people, which is not bad. But you do have to understand that you will either get good in both frontend and backend, or hire people to do the part you hate. You like coding? Great, find a designer. You love designing? Great! Find a programmer. You can do both? For the love of Steve Jobs please remember to charge for BOTH. For every task you stack, your end price goes UP, not DOWN. Remember this one. The trick is to think that you are hiring yourself. If you have to hire someone you have to pay them whatever they charge and then charge the client. For instance, I will often go for the use of illustration over photography on my websites, just because I'm good at illustration. And then I charge the client a fee for "illustrations" as an item inside the whole website project. See what I mean? Nothing you work on should be for free in a project someone is paying for. You start doing little things for free and you end up being sucked dry by some clients.

If this all seem too daunting for you, dude, do not jump head first into freelancing... Maybe finding a job in an agency would be more like it. You will be probably working for other small businesses in your area for your entire freelancing carreer. Working for an agency will also give you an opportunity to work in projects belonging to big companies, but at least for me, that's not really fulfilling. I actually found it to be incredibly frustrating. There are so many people working on projects like that and you get to be responsible for such little pieces of it that your entire effort and personality goes lost in the crowd.

I did one website for a relative for free, then two websites for friends/relatives for very cheap. That gave me three "client" websites, plus my own personal site, that I could show "real" clients. I started with that, and charged my first few clients very little, explaining how new I was to the game. Then, every few months, I'd add a little more to my rates. I started doing web development for pay about a year and a half ago and now it's my main source of income, and I charge three times what I started out with, and the projects I take on tend to be much bigger. There are probably better ways of getting started, but that's what worked for me.

I hope it helps you get going Nicholas! Wix/Squarespace aren't the enemy, they're just a tool that you know of and can leverage to do what you're hired to do, help businesses get online.

All the best in your future endeavours. I wish you nothing but success. :-)

James.

That's a clever way to start, Cole, except you're not really "doing it for free"... You are investing. Just like when you take some cash and buy stocks at the bank, you invested in portfolio. which is intelligent. Good job :)

So glad I found this thread! I totally feel the same way about charging! It's funny - my mom and step-dad both own their own businesses and they tell me all the time you just have to do it - the more you start telling people your time costs something the more you will believe it and the more true it becomes. If you know more about something than the person you're talking to, in their eyes you're the expert - use that to your advantage. That doesn't mean that you're the final say and you can't learn more...it just means that in that particular situation you're the one with the upper hand. I wouldn't tell people that they can just go to Wix or SquareSpace and do it themselves - I would sell them my services and use those tools to make something awesome! I totally agree with Cole...start small and get bigger...you never know where you'll be in a year! Good luck! :-)