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Business

Asimo Barmea
Asimo Barmea
2,553 Points

What track should I take if I want to get into Freelancing as soon as possible?

I've just finished the "How to Make a Website" course, and now I'm kind of confused as to whether I should start on the Front-End Development Track, Wordpress Development or Back-End Development track. I'd like to get into freelancing ASAP, and would like to get advice as to the quickest route to get there.

2 Answers

I will share with you an article that helped me decide: http://freelancefolder.com/how-to-become-a-freelance-web-developer/

Firstly, you have to decide on what you want to do.

Do you want to design the website (front-end), or do you want to take care of the websites major functionality (back-end)?

Maybe you could do both.

In either case, many people recommend starting with front-end even if you won't stay for long because knowing how websites are built can never hurt, and it really doesn't take long at all. I made this last night in two hours: http://desimara.com and I have only used my free trial here on Treehouse (my account is on pause). It goes to show how easy front-end actually is, but mastery is another topic all on its own (as you can see, there are some inconsistencies in my site that I am working to fix). I basically learned all I know in making that site within the 14 day free trial on Treehouse, although I spent hours practicing every day so that I don't forget anything.

Once you decide what path you want to take, then learn it. Practice it. Make things for people for free to get more practice. Try and recreate websites from scratch (ignore minutia; just get the basic structure down).

All of the above has helped me tremendously. I haven't even been writing HTML/CSS for 3 weeks.. today is actually day 20 since I first started learning.

A side note: you seem to be in a rush to be a freelancer. If you rush it, you will not be very good at what you do. Take small steps and make sure to understand what you're doing. Most people recommend at least 6 months before starting freelancing, and thats just HTML/CSS. After that you can add onto your knowledge-base, but I don't recommend doing it all together as you will forget it all.

Also, if you want to do back-end you must be good at programming in general. I learned C++ and Java before HTML/CSS so as you can imagine they were a breeze for me because they aren't even programming languages. I also learned JavaScript and it was easy for the most part as well because most programming languages have the same logic. But if you have never programmed before, you may see the back-end side of things as "challenging", even though they really aren't, its just that you aren't familiar with it yet.

That's my two cents.

Edit: I looked at your content and I see that you've already stepped your foot into a few non-related courses. Don't do this. I did this as well but realized that it will be an information-overload and would not help me at all in my pursuit to learn HTML/CSS/JavaScript for front-end development. Choose one path and go down that path until you learn it well before learning something else.

I'm no expert, I'm just giving you reasonable advice.

That is a great post! Thanks for sharing that web developer freelancing link.

Freelancing is a tough sport. But I know you can do it. Like anything, it will take time to master. The first thing, you should do is to take the freelancing course that is offered here. And, at the same time, I would start on a server side track. I hope this helps!