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Killersites.com Forum
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Business of Web Design
Thread: The Journey-a very curvy road
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 6
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mestoughton
Stranger USA Joined: Dec 8, 2008 Post Count: 13 Status: Offline |
Hi, I am new to the forum, but not to web design. Let me tell you a brief, hopefully not too boring background story. My purpose, is that I need desperately to dialogue about getting my business launched. But I have a lot jumbled in my brain, so I am going to make a couple of posts. This one is a description of my journey. It has been a 10 year journey. In '98 my son who was weened on DOS showed me how to build my first web site with Frontpage. I wrote about what I loved: homeschooling. Well, I had 6 kids at home and my husband decides he is not happy so he leaves. Within 3 months I am enrolled in the local community college with full financial aid enrolled in their fledgling web design degree which is considered a Technical Arts degree (non-transferable). My dream was to be able to work out of my home and continue to raise my kids and homeschool. I kept us afloat cleaning boats and eventually houses, which paid well and I only had to work a few hours a week and did 98% of my school online. I graduated in 2003....uh that was 5 YEARS ago and I am still cleaning houses and now businesses. I never did fulfill my dream of a home business, but though I am discouraged, I have not completely given up. I am at a cross roads. I had some clients leave town (the Navy does that a lot to their people...always moving) and I have 2 days a week that are free. Well, I wanted to concentrate on my web design business, but it looks like I am leaning more on launching a janitorial service that uses green products. Life has to be paid for. Look you guys, I am 53. I am scared to death to market myself. What I have actually done to develop my business is to take on free clients, which evolved into 2 paying customers and one barter. The barter is everything Stefan says they are. Demanding and also intimidating. The one client who was my biggest money maker left because she wanted to go local and the other is leaving because he found a friend of his sons who is more experienced. So, now I have no paying customers and a bit discouraged. Mary ---------------------------------------- "Keep one leg on each side and your mind in the middle" Cowboy Mack |
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Susie
Advanced Member Ohio, USA Joined: May 30, 2004 Post Count: 2677 Status: Offline |
Hi Mary, Welcome to Killersites! I certainly understand your fear of marketing yourself. I feel like I am so clueless when compared to many of the regulars here and when compared to the many awesome designers that are out there. BUT, I know the basics and I am always trying to learn something new. I have a website and a portfolio to show for my work and believe it or not, I have quite a few clients with a couple more possibilities coming up. My suggestion is to make sure you are very comfortable with HTML and CSS and can write your code by hand. Knowing how to do that will help you have websites that are standards compliant, cross-browser compatible, and will ensure that you can troubleshoot issues that arise. If you only know how to work with a program like Dreamweaver (WYSIWYG) and you don't know what's going on behind the scenes (code), you'll struggle a lot. I don't know what your experience is, so I apologize if you already knew all this.  Do you have a website? If not, build one for yourself and include samples of your work. Get active on discussion boards like this one (4 of my clients found me here). Take a look at your local Craigslist to see if anyone there needs a basic website that you might be able to help with. These are just a few ideas. And finally, I'll suggest that after you know HTML and CSS very well, perhaps you could learn something like Wordpress or CMS Made Simple (or other CMS). It will make you marketable - I'm finding most of my clients want the ability to edit the content on their sites themselves. Good luck to you and I hope you'll stick around. Let us know how we can help.  Edit to add: Oops! I should have paid more attention. I see that you do have a website with a portfolio. Sorry about that! ---------------------------------------- [Edit 1 times, last edit by Susie at Dec 9, 2008 1:42:17 PM] |
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mestoughton
Stranger USA Joined: Dec 8, 2008 Post Count: 13 Status: Offline |
Susie, really great of you to take the time to write. I visited your site and love what you have done with your branding. I like the realistic and clean images of dirt and flowers and spades. Very nice. Let me tell you a bit about my education. At the college where I got a Technical Arts degree, they expose you to almost everything. I soon realized what college was not going to land me a job, but continueing my self-education would. I had decided to continue homeschool my 6 kids after the divorce, so at first I relied heavily on Dreamweaver. The first thing I taught myself was CSS. I bought a couple of books and lifted code at friendly tutorial sites. I have a grasp on it, albeit I have quite a struggle getting my code to be cross-browser compatible. Life happened all around me and I lost track of learning anything else up until the beginning of this year. I studied a bit about how to make my site more marketable. And learned about blogging and key words in your content. I want to write about what I have learned, but I get writers block, and so far have only written about what fun I have on my motorcycle. I have one barter client who really wants more control to save money (what money...we barter...and what is funny I have never used the gift certificates) Anyway, I finally found Joomla and built a site. I was so excited. It only took me a couple of days to learn the basics. I can see how to manipulate the CSS sheets. The challenge is to come up with my own Joomla templates. I get designers block as well as writers block. My next project is to learn PHP. I landed on this essential because I tried to build a shopping cart with an Open source software and was stumped by the PHP. Shopping carts are essential, right? So I am going to start with Stefans video tutorials. Susie, I feel like I can only see one step in front of me. I am excited to hear you are working as a web designer. That actually gives me hope. You said you have found a few clients here. How else do you? Craigslist is an idea that I neglect. My daughter just graduated from Western Washington with a BA in Fine Arts...with a concentration on web design. She found a small flash job there. Good tip. Glad to meet you, Susie, Mary ---------------------------------------- "Keep one leg on each side and your mind in the middle" Cowboy Mack |
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mestoughton
Stranger USA Joined: Dec 8, 2008 Post Count: 13 Status: Offline |
fro ntdoo r-web-desig n.com [remove spaces] I have to admit I had no idea what back links were and thought I couldnt post my web site here after reading the post to newbies. It will help to see what I am talking about. Mary ---------------------------------------- "Keep one leg on each side and your mind in the middle" Cowboy Mack ---------------------------------------- [Edit 1 times, last edit by Thelma at Dec 9, 2008 6:19:55 PM] |
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webmachine
Stranger Canada Joined: Aug 23, 2008 Post Count: 1 Status: Offline |
I am finding the hardest thing to do is just get started. I am a self-taught web designer - my first site was in Dreamweaver two years ago, then I went straight to HTML and CSS. I retired from teaching high school math last June after 31 years in that career, and registered my web design business the week after. I have plenty of pro bono work to do (collecting sites for my portfolio) but it is December and I still haven't had time to complete my portfolio, create my logo, get business cards and paperwork such as contract, and actual market myself to get paying clients, let alone expand my knowledge to include Javascript, PHP and MySQL, CMS's etc. How do you find the time to do all this? |
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iceVet
Stranger Joined: Dec 5, 2008 Post Count: 4 Status: Offline |
I retired from teaching high school math last June after 31 years in that career, and registered my web design business the week after. It's nice to meet another fellow teacher here, albeit retired. I'm still working the daily grind at my school and love it. I also used to help run a district website until the district closed down the program. That was fun and gave me tons of invaluable real-world experience about creating/desiging web content.Mary- Sorry to see you struggling in your business. IMO, the website design business has rapidly evolved beyond the point where a versatile skill set is required in order to stay afloat. i.e., you've gotta know a lot that's going under the hood, both client and server sides of the WWW. Hopefully things will turn around for you soon. Just like webmachine said, the hardest thing is to get started. I got my start through my aunt. Even then, I still don't have much, and am not in the web design business at the moment. (zero clients, dammit!) ---------------------------------------- [Edit 1 times, last edit by iceVet at Dec 13, 2008 8:48:13 PM] |
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