Deciding to become a Web designer
I an English person living in France. My French language is improving but it is very hard to find engineering work, even if the language is excellent. So, to boost out income a little I decided to design websites for money (rather than 'free' as in the past). It has proved easy to find people who want English websites, or who will provide the French text, but harder to get them to pay for it.
A Typical Day as a Web Designer
I design often in the evening. It fits better around the other things I want to do. The main thing I have to force myself to do is ring customers/potential customers. I am typing this instead of doing that right now! Then I will take a page and mark out the concept, creating words for it if necessary using a word processor to brainstorm. Then I reorder the ideas and create the text. This is then coded and checked for its flow, style, and look. Often the text gets reduced again at this point.
If a customer wants a page created from their input, this is coded and considered in the same way. I will feed back 'suggestions' for page improvement (like cutting down to 10 the dozens of customer feedback comments they wanted to use). I may also suggest splitting the page.
Then at other times I research web code for immediate or later use.
At other time I go out and do some regular work that does bring in some cash that I can rely on.
Through all this I keep a ledger of what I do (for my purposes) and a record of what I told the customer, what he told me, and I include some web checklists, some of which are peculiar to the site, others are more general like browser checks for each page. This is a spreadsheet and every customer has one.
Advice
- Expect to take time starting up.
- You have to go and get the work.
- Get someone to read your site- especially if they are non-technical.
- Set achievable targets.
- Create a strategy for completing the site and getting payment. What will you do if it goes wrong?
How did you get started as a Web Designer?
I was experiencing 'slack time' as a full-time engineer and my boss did not want me asking for work all the time. So I learned HTML and then coded up a simple site for a club. Then another one, and so on.
What is your favorite part of being a Web designer?
I like learning something new and seeing a benefit on the website.
How many hours a week do you typically work?
About 12h steady working. Up to 20h to finish a site. 4h slack working.
What areas of your career would you improve?
Customer interfacing.
