How to Become a Freelance Web Designer

Web designing is a process of designing websites and maintaining them. We can also describe web designing as the process of creating the Front-end of websites, which involve the design of outward look of websites. It needs certain talents related to the creation and maintenance of websites. Those who possess such talents can become a freelance web designer.

Freelancing is a beautiful sector, which most of the web designers like to choose. Off course, it is a dream for the web designers to become freelancers. The reason is that freelance web designers can enjoy a lot of benefits, while compared with the professional web designers. In the normal profession of web designing, the designers need to go for an office and work for the hours insisted by the company. But in the profession of freelancing, they become free to work in their free timings. Also they can be able to work from any location as per their wish. They will have the freedom to choose their clients and pay rates and can be able to manage the workload according to their timings. They too become their own boss (Self – employed) and never need to rely on a company for making money.

Web designers with the following qualities can start their career in freelancing:

• Must have enough time to carry out and complete the allotted tasks.
• Commitment and dedication towards work
• Must have a business savvy mind with considerable skill sets.
• Must have a lot of creativity
• Must be quality – oriented
• Must be a hard – worker
• Must have a lot of passion and patience.

Career progression in freelance web designing:

The design of websites play a vital role in the development of an organization, since website design is an essential part of any business. Business without marketing is not possible today. Off course, marketing is a strategy that acts as a backbone to the companies. A company’s progression can be judged easily by the marketing strategies followed. In order to market products, services or brands, each and every business needs a perfect website. A well – designed website is having the capacity to reach broad audiences and to convert viewers into potential customers for the business. Thus web designing is a perfect choice for the young generation to initiate their career and to become a freelance web designer.

But before going to start our career as a freelance web designer, we should take a web designing course from any recognized institute.

Steps to be followed to become a freelance web designer:

1. The first and foremost thing that a freelance web designer needs to do is that he must learn as many technologies or languages as possible. Because, nowadays companies are willing to hire employees with extraordinary talents. They expect that the employees should know all the basic languages primarily and in addition, they should have learnt numerous number of programming languages. This seems that the employees with more skill sets are more prone to get a good job opportunity, in comparison with the employees with lower skill sets. Hence people should learn as much as possible to be getting hired in the top companies.
2. Start creating anything and everything as much as you can. Because, then only you will be able to get an adequate exposure and compete with your competitors efficiently. This can be possible only when you assume that you know nothing and you have to learn everything. Go through a lot of coding sites that you have on the internet to learn the basic concepts of web design. If needed, take a certification course too in the field of web designing. You can raise your confidence level by taking a plenty of HTML and CSS courses.
3. Before going for a website design, we need to develop the skills related to servers, domains and web hosting services. The reason is that we need to buy a domain and configure it correctly for designing a website. In addition we need some space, which is nothing but the server and we need to select a hosting plan for our domain. Thus as a whole, we should know the following aspects: Proper maintenance and management of servers, Proper domain configuration and maintenance of web hosting.
4. Learning about the basic concepts of graphic design is an additional plus, since we need to use such graphic designing concepts in our website design. Certain concepts include the illustration and the graphical representation of animated characters, and logos and so on. Nowadays, most of the clients insist us to insert the graphic design in the web designing part. Hence we need to be aware of those graphic design concepts, in order to get freelance work. If we feel that we We can be able to get more freelancing projects, if we concentrate more on graphic design.
5. Showcase your talents to the clients by building a smashing portfolio. A Portfolio is nothing but a document that reveals the skill sets, education, experience, and previous work samples of an individual seeking for a career. A perfectly designed portfolio will attract more and more clients into the business easily. We can have the freedom and rights to add the best themes and designs that we have made previously in our portfolio. By doing that, numerous clients will be impressed by our talents and the possibilities of getting a freelance job are also high.
6. The real worth of a freelance opportunity lies in the strategy of price fixing. We normally do not do the same amount of work for all the projects allotted for us. Also, the time consumption will vary from project to project. Hence we need some special tactics to analyze the cost rates for the services offered by us to our valuable clients. We might fix prices by following the steps:Search and find a contact number or email id of any web designing company on the internet. After getting the contact details, contact them either by making a call or sending an official email. Ask them for a web design quote by speaking like a new client. Now, you will get an idea about the approximate worth of your project. Then go ahead with the price fixing as per the idea gained.
7. Finding a job as a new freelancer is an extremely difficult task. But if we have the ideal talents required for completing freelancing tasks, then it might not be that much difficult. The only thing is that we need to select the right clients with the right platform, which suits best for our comfort. Nowadays, a variety of sites are available on the internet for finding freelance jobs. But searching jobs on such online sites may not be suitable for all freelancers. Also, there might be a lot of competition in those sites, while finding a freelance design work. Hence it is always better to choose any company or client for doing our freelance work and earning money.

Tools required by freelance web designers:

Freelance web designing is a highly challenging but rewarding opportunity available in the IT market. We can easily earn a living by attracting more and more clients in our business. But for doing that, we need certain tools mentioned below:

• Free agent: It helps us in balancing the essential freelancing aspects like the maintenance and management of client invoices, tax particulars and personal financial aspects and so on.
• Utilization of basecamp: It helps the freelance web designers in finding and getting an efficient web designing work. It always directs them in finding the right clients and earning a handsome amount of money in freelancing.
• Zopim: It helps the freelancers by offering better and industry – recognized client support services. Its additional functionalities might be technical support and live chat support with clients and so on.
• Freelance switch: It helps the users in getting quick access to the perfect clients or resources required for freelancing. By using it, freelancers will have higher chances of getting hired for top recruiters or picking the best resources, as per their needs.
• Open site explorer: It is the topmost site for search engine optimization and its parent site is SEOMoz. It helps the users in understanding the importance of a particular domain by showing its guest posts, blogs and referral links.
• Toggl: It helps the freelancers in managing the strategy of time management. Since time management is an essential factor to be maintained in freelancing, we need to manage it efficiently for increasing the earning potential.

Advantages of freelancing:

• Self employment opportunity: Freelancing makes a person to be financially independent. Freelancers are self – employed and need not look for others for their living. They are having the possibility of earning a considerable amount of money for living a happy life. They can also be their own boss for the business.
• Freedom to select projects and clients: In full time jobs, there is no freedom for the workers and maintenance of proper work – life balance is highly difficult. But in freelancing, we can enjoy the complete freedom in choosing appropriate projects and clients as per our wish and can also be able to maintain a proper work – life balance.
• Flexibility in time and location: Freelancers are authorized to decide their work location and timings, which perfectly match with their comfort zone. They need not sit in the computer systems for a prolonged time in a particular place to complete the work. Instead, they can move on to any location at any instant and can complete their work by using the laptops.
• Work Comfort: Freelancers can be able to enjoy a higher level of comfort in their work. They can stop their work at any time and can also continue it any time, according to their wishes.
• Huge earning potential: Freelancing is the only possibility for making huge amount of money by spending a considerable amount of time.
• Possibilities of multiple project exposure: Since freelancing allows people to work on different projects with different clients, they can be able to get multiple work exposure. This makes them experienced and knowledgeable in the domain of web design, thereby enabling them to gain huge earnings.

Disadvantages of freelancing:

• Lack of organizational benefits: If a person is working full – time in a company or an organization, then he is authorized to get the benefits provided by the employers like pay leaves and insurance claims and so on. But these are not possible with freelancing, since we are independent and self – employed.
• solational issue: Freelance isolates a person from his surrounding. In a full time job, the employee can be able to work along with various co – worker in the organization. But that is not possible with freelance, since we need to work alone from our home. This leads to lack of interaction and communication with other people.
• 24*7 work coverage: Sometimes, clients want freelancers to work at any instant of time or on a 24*7 basis. Hence the freelancers must be ready to work at any time, as per the clients’ requirements.

Methodologies learnt from web designing courses:

By adopting to any one of the web designing courses available in the IT market, the freelancers can be able to learn all the basics related to the design of websites. In addition, we can also learn the following aspects:

• How to create a website: First of all, we need to start doing the creation of a website. We need to track which aspect will workout exactly for the design by playing with the website.
• How to become an efficient communicator: Communication plays a major role in the process of website design, since the freelancers need to communicate with the clients on a periodical basis. Such proper communication only will help the designers to make an error – free and perfect design.
• How to use CSS and HTML: The two primary languages needed for making a website design are Cascading style sheets (CSS) and Hypertext markup language (HTML). HTML is considered as a skeleton for web design, which lets the designers to create the structure of websites. On the other hand, CSS is nothing but a document format, created with the help of either SVG or XML or HTML.
• How to implement our designing skills into the website: We should learn to apply all the skills that we have, while making a design. In addition, we need to apply our creativity too, in order to make a perfect design.
• How to draw a wire frame: Creation of wire-frame is regarded as a brainstorm for a website design. Wire framing is nothing but a process of sketching the website to get an attractive and professional look. It is not merely an outline, but it is a website’s blueprint.
• How to pay attention to the design trends and user experience: Focusing on the UX or User experience design is a wonderful idea to make an efficient website, since UX design involves the creation of things that offer extremely relevant and meaningful experience.

It is also better to get an UX course certificate, by undertaking an UX design course. It will give us certain sort of practical exposure needed for the web designing industry.