I’ve always had ideas bouncing around in my head. Aside from a blog and personal site, I wanted to create a website that offered a service. I was a junior in college and knew I had to make something that would create a constant cash flow, just in case work got slow. I spoke to my friend Steve, who at the time was better than me at both design and programming (he still is at design, but I think I win with programming). I proposed this idea: a website called College Housing.
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Earlier in the month, I wrote about pricing my first gig. I used the hourly rate I was getting from other jobs as a base for how I came up with the price, and for the first few clients, it worked- but it wasn’t a lot. As time went on, more clients [I didn't know personally] started coming in and I had to come up with a standard way to price my services.
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It was my first semester at college that I realized if I wanted to continue getting freelance jobs, I’d have to hone my web design skills. Up until that point, I was working in FrontPage, and hand coding some HTML to get the hang of it. I was also offering some awful (really bad) graphic work. It was at my work study job that I met my friend Stephen Mekosh, who introduced me to CSS, PHP, and a whole mess of resources to keep myself afloat in an always changing industry.
Tags: beginning, blog, links, skills, tips | Posted in Advice, Stories | 1 Comment »
I wrote a few days ago about my first freelance gig. It was a parish- church with school, on a fairly low budget. They weren’t looking for anything spectacular, which was great because I was just learning the ropes. So I set out to find my first niche.
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One of the most troubling issues continually facing freelancers is coming up with rates. You can go to any freelance forum and find several dozen threads dedicated to pricing, estimates, rates, and the like. Especially when first starting out, I was worried that my rates would be too high and I would lose jobs because of it. But when pricing my first job, I had no idea what I was doing, because I had no frame of reference.
Tags: beginning, price, rates, tips | Posted in Advice, Stories | Comments Off
It was 2002 and I remember a couple of my friends had built websites of their own. I thought it would be cool to try out, so I got my hands on a copy of Microsoft FrontPage, found a couple of good resources, and dove in. I’d do something, and then check the source to see how it was done. It was shortly thereafter that I was approached about what would be my first gig.
Tags: beginning, clients | Posted in Advice, Stories | Comments Off
