Freelance Web Development Jobs??

poeticjustice

Just wondering, is there much work in web development/design these days for a freelancer or is there just too much competition out there?

I'd imagine a lot of work gets outsourced to India and similar places for a cheap and very good standard of work and with the likes of wordpress and wix, maybe a lot of people are doing the work themselves.

Just curious if it is a viable career option.

Thanks

Trojan

I don't like "freelancing". It might be great for a specific type of person who works as a short-term contractor, but it's a lot of work for not a lot of cash. Far better to start "a web design business" which at one level is the same thing, but completely changes the perception of your offering.

poeticjustice

Trojan wrote: »

I don't like "freelancing". It might be great for a specific type of person who works as a short-term contractor, but it's a lot of work for not a lot of cash. Far better to start "a web design business" which at one level is the same thing, but completely changes the perception of your offering.

Yeah you're dead right I think. A company is the way to go. Do you think the work is there though, or is competition too fierce?

Buford T Justice

poeticjustice wrote: »

Yeah you're dead right I think. A company is the way to go. Do you think the work is there though, or is competition too fierce?

I suppose that depends on your target market for business really - ie local businesses or online marketing to target clients etc.....

14ned

poeticjustice wrote: »

Yeah you're dead right I think. A company is the way to go. Do you think the work is there though, or is competition too fierce?

As with any self employed professional, you'll work like a dog for peanuts in the first few years until you've established your name and a pool of clients who think of you first when they have a problem. Expect at least three to five years of sixty plus hour weeks, no vacation, no leisure time, and occasional severe cash flow problems.

Once you're established though, you can back off significantly, and often very significantly because the money will roll in with very little work if you've built your business up right. I'm currently expecting to drop from a standard fifty five hour week to a thirty hour one in 2018 unless something surprising occurs between now and then. I'm looking forward to it, it's been a tough five years, you get very sick of computers after a while.

Niall

poeticjustice

Buford T Justice wrote: »

I suppose that depends on your target market for business really - ie local businesses or online marketing to target clients etc.....

I don't really have a target market currently as I'm just starting out. Just seeing if it is viable these days or if competition is very fierce. I would not close myself off to any potential market for the foreseeable future though

poeticjustice

14ned wrote: »

As with any self employed professional, you'll work like a dog for peanuts in the first few years until you've established your name and a pool of clients who think of you first when they have a problem. Expect at least three to five years of sixty plus hour weeks, no vacation, no leisure time, and occasional severe cash flow problems.

Once you're established though, you can back off significantly, and often very significantly because the money will roll in with very little work if you've built your business up right. I'm currently expecting to drop from a standard fifty five hour week to a thirty hour one in 2018 unless something surprising occurs between now and then. I'm looking forward to it, it's been a tough five years, you get very sick of computers after a while.

Niall

Thanks for the reply Niall. I don't doubt the amount of work involved and fair play to you for doing it. I'm sure it'll be all worth it.

Did you find getting clients difficult when you started off? where did you find potential clients? It's good to see that there is a demand for good quality work anyway

zig

Plenty of work in freelance web dev, and don't worry about Indian outsourcing or Wix, if anything they are helping things because so many people come back disappointed after trying that option.

As they say , "Im not racist but...", the standard that is being delivered when outsourcing to India is diabolical. And often clients that try the India option are best avoided, because they dont respect the value and cost of good service.

Dont worry about Wix etc. That stuff is so limited that the only clients that are being swallowed up by that are people who probably wouldn't have spent more than 300 quid on a website.

Huge demand for freelance web devs at the moment, by web design companies, branding companies and just general lower level clients that a free lance person can afford to service. In fact I believe the web industry as a whole is really standing on its own two feet at this stage and is now far removed from any tech or IT bubbles. While its not booming, its certainly not going anywhere anytime soon.

That said , as a career option? Im not so sure. Long term I would imagine your heart would be broken and you'd end up just getting a job for more money and less hassle.

But the experience will stand to you so no harm in trying.

To start getting work, the first thing I'd recommend is contact every branding company you can think of and tell them you're available.

14ned

poeticjustice wrote: »

Thanks for the reply Niall. I don't doubt the amount of work involved and fair play to you for doing it. I'm sure it'll be all worth it.

I actually tried quite hard to avoid ending up doing this just before we had kids, but the multinational I sold myself to downsized severely so I ended up back in Ireland debt free, though poor, with a child on the way. That forced me to find money quick, so back into contracting I went. The US economy has since substantially improved so business is now brisk, but it was no fun 2009-2012.

Did you find getting clients difficult when you started off? where did you find potential clients? It's good to see that there is a demand for good quality work anyway

I'm a software engineer rather than web developer, so mine is a very different world in terms of finding and retaining clients (web dev customer bases is usually individuals and small business, mine is usually startups or large multinationals). For me the global pool of clients is actually quite small and everybody in the industry knows one another - the global remote working freelance C++ consultant pool is in the dozens, not hundreds, so finding clients isn't the hard part, it's being available for hire when a contract comes up. For the clients the hardest part is similar, finding anybody available when their contract becomes available because they usually don't get to choose, it's their Legal and their Finance who does and they never release a contract at the right time! So there are long gaps of up to a year between contracts, but the contracts are well paid and can last years at a time. Business success is insane attention to cash flow, keeping yourself marketable, and a certain amount of luck of being in the right place at the right time.

Regarding demand for quality, there is always a tension between quality and timely delivery. There are only a handful of occasions in a professional career when you'll get paid to deliver quality work without cutting a lot of corners. The mark of a field expert is knowing which are the correct corners to cut in order to deliver something risky and uncertain on time without delivering something unsafe. It's not that different in some ways to web development and a lot of stuff like good testing and security conscious design are remarkably similar, but same as writing in assembler and C++ no web infrastructure is 100% perfect because it's not commercially viable. The customer generally wants something "good enough" for some fixed budget of money and time. You then weave the best magic you can, and move onto the next job.

Regarding workers from lower fixed cost countries, a few colleagues/competitors of mine are from India or Thailand and such. They're excellent, just as good as me, but they also charge very similarly to me because the market price is set globally irrespective of physical location. You might think they then bank far more than I would, and in absolute terms they do, but as much as they have far lower fixed costs, they say they have much higher unexpected costs too due to the much higher uncertainty in their countries. I have no reason to not believe them, and I certainly know that they think ill health is not just loss of earnings for them, but an existential threat to their children's existence. For me, me falling very ill tomorrow would be bad, but I wouldn't think my children would end up dead or worse as well. How much that fear of theirs is merely in their head versus realistic I honestly don't know, but it seems to worry them and that is not something I worry about.

There are big advantages to living in the West. It costs you yes, but I think it's not the rip off some people think it is.

Niall