A Legit Article

Stuff Freelance Web Designers Should Know in 2014

By Marc Carson · Tuesday January 28, 2014

[ Above: Hot air balloons photo by Tomas Castelazo ]

I love being a freelance web designer. Every day there are new opportunities, I get to work with lots of great clients, and I’m in charge of my own business. But there are lots of challenges, too. If you’re interested in becoming a freelance web designer, or are a brand-new freelancer, I hope this list helps you get a better idea of the kinds of challenges that stand in your way, and gives you some ideas of approaches for dealing with those challenges.

Dealing With Clients

Who to accept work from? Do I believe in the product or service that this potential client is offering? Do I trust their character? I once had a man call and pronounce me the new technical officer of his natural food empire. Then, seconds later, he exploded in anger when I turned him down. That guy had a very black and white view of life.

I’ve learned that people like that are risky to do business with: If you are going to be someone’s technical lead and put maybe 30% of your working time into their projects, would you really risk a third of your livelihood on their unstable temperament?

I don’t think you have to believe in the product or service that your client is offering, either. It’s usually enough to just get a feel for its place in the market. Is it priced at the low end, middle, or high end? Is it designed well, or designed poorly? Is it advertised with corny taglines and garish colors, or is it modern and stylish? If the client is refusing to pay you anything in advance and wants your lowest bid on a rush project for a product line that screams “tacky,” run!

You may end up inadvertently working with liars, cheaters, and garbage-peddlers, so it’s important to at least have people to talk to about that—I like having a business consultant for that reason. All of these people can be dealt with. Remember that you don’t have to work for just anybody, and you can stop working on a project at any time if the client crosses the line. Just don’t do that on every project, OK?

I feel like I should wrap up this section by emphasizing that the vast majority of my clients are honest, thoughtful, and creative people who are easy to work with.

Associating With Peers and Colleagues

Who to work with, who to partner with? I like to watch detective shows. My favorite parts of any detective show are the “annual gathering of detectives” meetings or the episodes where the main character comes across other detectives. Usually, he learns that he’s better off cooperating with those people than competing against them. His experience and methods speak to a different sort of client anyway, so there’s not a lot of overlap.

Now, you don’t need to like the other freelance web people in your area or even befriend them. But it might not be a bad idea to knock on their door and get to know them. I’ve done that and I think it’s a wise idea to keep the door open. People who do what we do aren’t going to bite you.

In my own experience, I am only called to compete with other local freelancers when their clients are seeking competitive bids, which normally aren’t too interesting to me anyway. A beginning freelancer’s biggest enemies are their general lack of reputation, their propensity to procrastinate because they’re overwhelmed—things like that.

I’ve also bid competitively on the same project that a client was bidding on! That was a bit awkward at first, but I ended up joking about it with the client. I ended up winning the bid and they told me they didn’t really want it anyway. After completing the project, I knew why!

How Does the Money Stuff Work?

How much will I charge for my time? New freelancers tend to panic about what to charge. They think they’re being asked to cut a deal on every job. I’ve hired people who have cut their hourly rates by almost 50% in the course of a five-minute phone call, even though I said nothing about their rates except to ask what they were. Ridiculous!

Charging a reasonable rate doesn’t really hurt you as much as you think it will. What hurts you are points against your reputation, i.e. you do poor work, or you are dishonest in some way, or you are difficult to work with. If no one—not a single client—is complaining about your fees, they might be too low.

If you hesitate to pin a price on things, try this: Give your client a spread-spectrum estimate. Tell them what it would cost for three different levels: Good, better, and best. Then let them decide. The result might surprise you.

When will I get paid? Beginning freelancers often hesitate to ask for things like 30-50% advance payments or 100% down payments. But these are really, really common practices. Many experienced freelancers will ask for 100% if the total is below some amount.

Some beginning freelancers will even outguess their clients and write things on their invoices like “payment is required within 30 days” when the client planned on paying within the week! Novice freelancers can be kind of dumb this way. They feel like they still need to act like an employee and guess what’s most common and convenient for their clients rather than acting like a hired third-party with its own business to run.

Fears of the Future

Is somebody cheaper going to take my job? Will a mega-corporation invent a web design tool that makes it free and easy for anybody to make a website? Cheaper people are usually cheaper for a reason. Literally four out of five clients who choose a cheaper freelancer over me for reasons of cost will come back later and ask if I’m still available.

Regarding those web design tools aimed at novices, you might think “yes, it’s already been done! I can name five such tools right now! There’s no reason to hire a web designer! Ack!” but let’s remember that phrase “easy for anybody” and recall that not everyone has gobs of time to sit around and learn how to use software. It’s a hollow promise.

Besides, just how much of your job do you think software can really do? If you can be reliable and effective at it, people will hire the heck out of you. (By the way, did you know there are still people who make buggy whips and paint horse-drawn carriages? You have nothing to worry about here.)

Will I go out of business? Basic knowledge of finances and savings are huge for freelancers. You will need to know the minimum you need to make every month, and you will need to know how many months you can survive on your savings. There’s a lot of demand for web freelancers, but it will take some time to get your name around.

Where is this career field heading? Rapid changes in technology make some web designers wonder where their job will be in five or ten years. They see that they constantly have to learn new things to keep up, and just thinking about it wears them out. In fact, ten years ago I was worried about this. But things have worked out great! In my experience, these problems are more bark than bite, and they’re easy to deal with if you are open to working with other people, scheduling time to train yourself, etc.

Fears of Today

How will I keep myself on track? Procrastination is an absolutely huge risk for freelancers and can push good, paying work far into “not sure if I’ll ever finish this” territory. You’re designing websites with the same languages that are used to build Amazon, Facebook, and more. It’s tempting to promise the moon without thinking it through.

After promising big things, you sit down and try to start the work, but you don’t exactly know how to proceed and you panic, thinking of how much it’s going to suck to let this client down. It feels hard to motivate yourself to even get dressed in the morning, reply to emails…and pretty soon you have been surfing the web for hours and eating too many snacks.

This all depends on your personality of course, but you learn quickly to find projects that are a good fit for your abilities and resources. This is a huge risk for freelancers: A single bad project can throw your life out of balance so it’s important to be open and honest with yourself about what you can do. Business consultants can help with this, too.

Working Effectively

What tools should I use? Poorly-suited tools will be responsible for a huge amount of your wasted time. As an example, web designers often start to learn content management systems such as WordPress or Joomla or Drupal or Concrete5 because they want to offer a powerful tool that has lots of traction. I found this path was frustrating because I was trying to start by learning my way around the complexities of enterprise-level software. It was like learning to crawl by practicing on a rock-climbing wall.

I found other tools that accomplished the same goals, were much easier to use, and it turned out that my clients enjoyed using them, too. If you want a start, google “lightweight CMS” or “simple CMS” and find something that feels brilliantly easy to work with.

How will I educate myself? I remember one of my first projects that required JavaScript that I didn’t know how to write. I wasted hours upon hours trying different solutions. Within a week, my rate on that project had gone down to about $10/hr. I should have hired someone else to help me and then spent some of my spare time learning more about the subject later.

When you’re in learning mode, there are a lot of ways to learn new things. I’ve found that technical books aren’t super helpful for me. I buy them, read maybe 20%, then they gather dust on the shelf. Sometimes that 20% was really, really crucial, but I seem to learn best if I can try to learn new technologies by rolling them into existing projects before I am asked to use them on upcoming projects.

I think it’s also a great idea to find seminars and webinars that promise to motivate you and see if they help. I schedule about two hours a month for webinars and I’ve never (yet) attended one that wasn’t inspiring in some way.

Getting the Word Out

What is my unique value proposition? What is my special sauce? A lot of web designers like to advertise some secret, proprietary thing that they add that only they can do. For example, they might design a specific website feature that is useful to a specific niche client. Then they offer it to every client they can find in that niche. It gets a bit annoying to me to constantly hear other web designers say, “you know what’s so special and great about what I do?” and then listen to them talk like it’s some huge trade secret that they offer a membership system, but whatever keeps them happy, I guess.

How to brand myself? What should my logo look like? How many business cards should I order? What email address should I use? Should I have an office outside of my home? How should I answer the phone? Be careful, there are some really distracting topics there into which you can sink a lot of time. These are all good things, but if you can do them well enough for now, it’ll probably still be impressive to your clients.

How do I grow my business? My advice: 1) Team up with others who have existing clients. I have teamed up with some amazing clients and friends who started sending me lots and lots of work almost from the beginning of our working relationship. I am still incredibly grateful for these people and their role in growing my business. 2) Try to add something extra. Go back to the client and say, “OK, all done—oh, and there’s this new thing you might like…” You’ll learn the role of your own creative work in spreading good news about your business.

Charting Your Course

Where do I want my career to go? “Web Design” is an almost useless job description. There are numerous specialty areas such as web marketing, search engine optimization, back end development (writing code that geeky people use), front end development (writing code that normal people use), user interface design, experience design, content strategy, and more. And each specialty can be lucrative and rewarding. As a freelancer, you’ll naturally start to find a few areas that are most interesting to you. You’ll then have to decide, job by job and year by year, which way you want to go.

Charting Your Day

Should I work in my pajamas? Should I take a shower now or later? Should I tell my wife I can watch the kids for an hour? There are an incredible number of things that you won’t feel ready to do without a shower and a change of clothes. So, to keep your efficiency to a maximum and procrastination to a minimum, I recommend that you shower and change your clothes before work begins, even if you plan on exercising later. Taking a break to help your spouse or assist with family issues can actually be a great way to think through things, and most freelancers probably don’t take enough breaks.

Feeling Good About Yourself

What you are doing is amazing. You are floating the boat all by yourself—now hurry and get some others on board to help with the things you suck at. Be sure to take care of yourself: Get plenty of rest, exercise, and spend time with people.

No matter what the challenges of freelancing amount to, you can do it! I know many freelancers who are making a comfortable living, keeping their clients happy, taking regular vacations, and basically living a good life.