Freelance Web Development
My Work
In my career, I’ve done some freelance work:
- Wedding Site - Ember Code and Rails Code
- Business Site - Code using a static site generator (Hugo)
- Travel Blog - Rails Code
All which have been done more as favors with little compensation. It was mostly to explore the idea of freelancing and what it entails for a web developer.
Should you do it? If you’re a web developer and you’re considering doing freelancing, I can’t tell you whether it’s a good idea or not, but I can share my experience and advice on it.
How to Freelance
To be a freelancer you need to be a business man. Regardless if you’re building a site for a friend or building sites for money, they are the client and you are the seller.
The benefit of working with a friend is that you don’t have to worry about legalities. As a personal business, there is always the chance that someone can sue you or not pay you. Make sure to have a lawyer or look online for legal contracts that can protect you.
Personally, I don’t have a freelancing business so I can’t talk much about that. I can talk about working with a client, figuring out due dates, requirements, and managing expectations.
Setting Expectations
Before building anything, it is crucial talk about expectations with your client. I inquire about:
- What kind of website do you want?
- Do you have any design ideas or examples?
- When do you need the site to be done by?
- What content do you have available (images, writings, etc.)?
- How often do you foresee yourself wanting to make changes?
The goal is to learn what your client wants and how much work it’s going to take from you. If they have the design all done with images available, you don’t have to do mockups. If they want dynamic content, you’ll need a server with back end configurations. If they want to make constant changes, you will also need to build their interface to add content.
Ask tons of questions. After getting a good sense of what they need, you can be more honest about meeting their deadline and how much it’s going to cost. I encourage charging per hour, not per project. Clients have a tendency to change their mind and add new features.
Be Agile about it too. Don’t tell them it’ll be done by a certain time, give them a rough estimate and work on iterations. Tell them you’ll work on a few features and check back weekly to show your progress. At each meeting, reevaluate the plan and tell them what you’ll be working on for the week.
Templates and Generators
Now that you are clear with what you’re building, it’s time to start coding.
Content Management Systems, such as Wordpress or Drupal, are ideal for freelancers. They have great templates so you don’t have to build everything from scratch, they have great support for deploying and hosting, and most importantly, excellent GUI for your clients to manage their site after you build it. The down side is that you have to learn a lot on how to use a CMS which takes a lot of work.
If you don’t want to learn how to use a CMS, you can do it my way and look into static site generators or frameworks like Ember or Rails that make web development easier.
A lot of the work goes into front-end development. I like to use free templates from the web like HTML5 UP whenever possible.
Hand Off
Something to keep in mind from the beginning is the work required after the site is built. What if your client wants to add a new feature or there is a little bug?
The easiest way is to hand off everything to the client and they can hire you again if they want more work to be done to the site. I create an email account for the user, purchase domains, hosting services, and other services with that account and have the client own it. Any hosting or set up fees I have the client pay themselves or reimburse me.
I like to use AWS services for price and convenience: EC2 for web hosting and S3 for static hosting or images.
You want to set it up so any developer can pick up from where you left off. Be organized and write necessary documentation. It’s good practice and helpful even for you when you go back to the project after a long period of time.
