Starting Your Career as a Freelance Web Designer

By Neil Tortorella

Break out of the cubicle and gain the business savvy you need to launch your own freelance web design business with Starting Your Career as a Freelance Web Designer! Written by seasoned pro Neil Tortorella, this book guides web designers step-by-step down the path to success and helps them avoid common pitfalls. Jam-packed with practical know-how, this book also contains the wisdom and advice of noted industry authorities and business leaders. Readers will learn how to draft a solid business plan, negotiate contracts, manage time and money, deal with taxes, manage projects and clients, determine rates, and create winning proposals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allworth
• Release date: Sep 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781581158601

Book preview

PART I

Getting Started

and Laying Your

Foundation

What Does It Take to Be a Successful Freelance Web Designer?

You’ve decided to hang out your shingle as a freelance web designer. Congratulations! You’re in good company. In fact, according to the Freelancers Union, freelancers, independent contractors, and similar monikers represent roughly 30 percent of the United States workforce. However, this also describes temporary workers, small business owners, part-timers, and contingent employees. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are 10.3 million freelancers working today, or 7.4 percent of the overall U.S. workforce. Nonetheless, the numbers are impressive.

But what exactly is a freelancer, and what it is like to be one? Dictionary. com defines a freelancer as a person who works as a writer, designer, performer, or the like, selling work or services by the hour, day, job, etc., rather than working on a regular salary basis for one employer. For some, the term conjures up a life of freedom and flexibility. To others, it means unstable fly-by-nights. Still, others relate freelancers to a feast-or-famine, stress-riddled life. The truth is that it can be all of those. The trick is to build a solid, sound foundation for your freelance business. It is a business and should be treated as such. When done right, you can realize freedom, flexibility, and other benefits so many seem to miss.

The term freelance is relatively new, at least in the manner used today. Its origins date back to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), in which it is used to describe medieval warriors who were not aligned to any specific lord. They were free lances, similar to today’s mercenaries. The term in modern times is often interchangeable with independent professional, consultant, solopreneur, and even in some cases, small business owner. Many start as sole proprietors and grow into limited liability companies (LLC) or corporate entities. For the purposes of this book, a freelancer is a one-person business that may be either full- or part-time.

THE FREELANCE LIFE

With our term defined, the big question on the minds of those considering taking the leap is What’s it like to be a freelance web designer? That’s a fair enough question. It’s always a good idea to get a handle on what you’re getting yourself into. I’ll answer it with my experiences first and follow that up with the insights of a few working freelancers.

Most web designers, graphic designers, and other creative folk find themselves freelancing at some point in their career. For many, it comes early on, either due to a lack of full-time jobs available or in response to the opportunity, and sometimes the need, to make extra money. That’s how it was for me. I began my career as a freelance photographer because I couldn’t find a job as a photographer or an assistant when I got out of school. Starting my own studio was out of the question. I must have been absent the day the professor talked about just how much capital is needed to launch a professional photography studio. Although the competition was stiff, I hustled and found some paying work. Soon, I landed a great client, a cosmetics company, which became my primary patron. Suffice to say, I became quite full of myself seeing my work on billboards, in major magazines, and on product displays in fancy department stores. Alas, that was short-lived. The art director at the cosmetics company left, and the department head asked me if I wanted the job. I was about to get married and thought a regular paycheck might be a good thing. So I entered the world of gainful employment, benefits, a designated parking spot, and the nine-to-five grind.

This was also my entrance into graphic design. I had studied it a bit in art school but hadn’t planned on making it my career choice. I found I rather enjoyed it, and the cosmetics company job led to design firm and ad agency positions. But, through it all, I found myself to be a closet freelancer. Inevitably, a friend’s friend or a relative would need a logo, business card, or the occasional brochure. The extra cash here and there was great, so I decided that freelancing part-time would be a continuing part of my life. It wasn’t a lot, but it definitely helped.

It should be noted that working for someone else has always been something of a foreign concept to me. My parents both had their own businesses while I was growing up. My grandfather was self-employed, as was his father. It runs in the family, and my plan had been to have my own design firm someday in the not-too-distant future.

After roughly twelve years of working for other people, learning all I could about design, marketing, and business, along with making detailed plans, Tortorella Design was born. My wife at the time was my partner, and as luck would have it, she is also a gifted salesperson and project manager. The beginnings of my business were still based in freelancing, though. My wife would handle the sales, client contact, and business tasks during the day while I worked at a local newspaper. I’d do our clients’ work in the evenings and on the weekends.

This all worked quite nicely until I thought it would be a good idea to add some employees and get an office outside of our townhouse condo. This was, arguably the single biggest mistake in my career. I found that having employees is akin to being a parent. I was now responsible for the livelihoods of these people. Add a little pressure to the mix. Our office came with rent, utilities, equipment, phone systems, and various other forms of monthly overhead. Add some more pressure to the mix. Plus, having the office was something like throwing a party and having no one show up. We rarely had clients visit. After a few business slowdowns and other snafus, we closed the office and started working from the condo as we had before the office shenanigans.

Fast forward to the mid-1990s: enter these new things called the World Wide Web, HTML, and websites. Yet another skill to learn, but also a new service to offer, and I found myself to be a web designer. It didn’t take long for web design to become a major player on my project roster.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A FREELANCER

These days, I get up early. Most days, early means 4:30 a.m. I’m in front of my main computer by 5:30 a.m., working away, although my business hours are 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and I don’t take client calls before or after those hours. I start with my daily marketing tasks. That can mean working on an article, researching prospects, drafting e-mails or scheduling tweets, Facebook posts, and other social media activities. Around 7:00 a.m., it’s time to jump on the client tasks. That can mean working on a website for one, social media management for others, or working on a marketing program for still other clients. If I have a meeting scheduled, I’ll get out of my gym shorts and T-shirt and put on my professional attire. When I get back, it’s off with the suit and on with a T-shirt and jeans. If I’m speaking that evening, it’s back on with the professional garb. Needless to say, my washing machine gets a workout, and my dry cleaner loves me.

For me, that’s a typical day. From what my freelancing friends tell me, theirs are pretty much the same, although they may not do as much laundry. Flexible? Sure. But the work still needs to get done. It is a business, after all.

Michael J. Hultquist, owner of Quist Interactive, Inc. in Lake in the Hills, Illinois, works with his wife, Patty, in a similar arrangement. Perhaps that’s not the hard-core definition of a freelancer, but their day is pretty much what typical freelancers experience. Hultquist said, "The alarm goes off at 7:30 a.m., and we’re at our desks between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m. I work with my wife, and we keep mostly the same schedule. We typically have a large number of ongoing projects, so we jump into those while also answering e-mails and performing other priority tasks, like a quickly needed update or graphic.

"Lunch is around noon. We like to go out, since we’re in most days, or I’ll make something quick in the kitchen. We’re back to work until anywhere from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., depending on workload and deadlines.

Also, if we experience any slower periods, we work on our own web projects, study trends, and learn new skills.

Kurt Elster, owner of EtherCycle in Park Ridge, Illinois, starts a little later in the day and keeps a bit more of a flexible schedule, but ensures the work gets done. "My scheduled hours are 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., but I frequently work longer to meet deadlines. I begin my day on Twitter and Google Reader, where I catch up on the day’s news, bookmark inspiration, and engage in social media. I then review my inbox, reply to e-mails and create action items for the day. The most important thing I do during the day is ignore my e-mail. By not checking my e-mail during the day, I avoid distractions and stay on task. At 5:00 p.m., I open my inbox up again and start replying. It’s my belief that push e-mail is the worst thing to happen to productivity since smoke breaks," said Elster.

An eight-year freelance veteran, Jenny Leonard is the owner of Pirata Design, a freelance business based in Houston, Texas. Her day is often different than that of a typical freelancer. Leonard has built a nomadic lifestyle, and her freelance business is central in achieving that goal.

When I was graduating college, I asked a friend of mine who worked at one of the best advertising agencies in town to give me a tour. When I was there, he described what the first five years of working would be like for me. He painted an awful picture, saying things like I’d be fetching coffee, not doing actual creative work, would be the last one to leave the office, would always be the one who had to work nights and weekends while the senior staff got to go home, would stay up so late at the office my only option to get some sleep would be to sleep under my own desk until everyone came into the office in the morning. He told me that I’d have no life, but that after I ‘paid my dues’ for five years, I’d be slowly rewarded. All of that sounded horrible to me. I couldn’t fathom why someone would want to waste five years of their life being held hostage to a job like that, Leonard said.

"When I graduated, I didn’t waste any time. I never went to one job interview, never sent in one application, and never talked to anyone else about actually getting a job. I started my own freelance business straight out of college. It was crazy at the time, and everyone I knew called me stupid. But you know what? I’ve never had a job, and I’ve lived a happy, successful life. I’ve had the freedom to live the life that I want to live, from volunteering in Vanuatu for six weeks to spending five months backpacking South America, and now I’m selling everything I own to travel indefinitely and run my business from the road. Freedom is what led me to become a freelancer.

You get to choose your own clients, choose your projects, and choose your income based on how hard or how little you want to work. You can tailor your work to fit around the lifestyle you want to have. What more could you ask for?

TRAITS OF A SUCCESSFUL FREELANCER

Every freelancer wears many hats. Some wear them better than others. As a one-person business, a freelancer needs not only to be skilled in web design, but also at marketing, sales, and financial tasks, including invoicing and collecting and project management. It’s a lot to digest, but faltering in any area can mean the demise of your business. Simply put, it takes more than web skills to be successful. Those skills should be a given. The freelancer who prospers is the one who actively adds to and improves his business skills and abilities. If a freelancer isn’t willing to do that, it’s probably a good idea to continue working for someone else. Not everybody is cut out to own and operate a business.

You have to be seriously proactive in all areas of your business, Hultquist said. By this, I mean you have to go after the business and also go after the knowledge needed to provide valuable services, like appropriate software skills, design skills, programming skills, SEO skills, etc. Stay on top of the industry and don’t slack off.

At or near the top of the business hat rack is self-discipline. When you’re working alone, there’s nobody to tell you what to do and when to do it. Self-discipline is the ability to get things done regardless of your emotional state. Intentions are nice. Actions are better. Perhaps you are one of the lucky ones gifted with this ability. Most are not. Fortunately, it can be learned. Start off with small goals and tasks within your comfort zone. These are things you know you can accomplish. Add some loftier ones and keep to it. Soon self-discipline will develop into a habit.

Six-year freelancer Arron Lock is the owner of Alchemy Design, based in Eustis, Florida. He shared, One of the stumbling blocks I think every freelancer has to deal with is getting ‘discovered.’ I have learned over the years that you can’t wait for things to happen—you have to make them happen.

On your quest to build self-discipline, give yourself enough time. There is a myth that says doing something for roughly twenty-one days will create a habit. In reality, there is no hard evidence supporting this time frame. A study titled How Are Habits Formed: Modeling Habit Formation in the Real World by Phillippa Lally, Cornelia H. M. van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts, and Jane Wardle, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, showed significantly different numbers. In a study with ninety-six volunteers, research showed that the time it took habits to form ranged from 18 days to 254 days. The average was 66 days. That’s a long way from 21 but certainly still within most people’s abilities. In the ironic end, it takes some self-discipline to build self-discipline.

With self-discipline comes another important success factor: self-confidence. Self-confidence is the ability to believe you can do something. In this case, being a successful freelancer. It’s important to note that authentic self-confidence is different than being excessively proud or overly self-assertive. The latter tends to be loud, boastful, arrogant, and in the vernacular, cocky. Plus, it?s often not true. Genuine self-confidence tends to be quiet and realistic. Clients want to work with designers who are self-assured and confident in their abilities. Self-confident people see setbacks as temporary and find ways to overcome them.

Developing self-confidence is similar to developing self-discipline. Since it’s about knowing you can accomplish something, you should have done it, or something similar, before. For example, you may have taught yourself HTML. Learning CSS might not seem that big a challenge and well within your abilities. It’s taking smaller steps before taking the big leap. Over the course of time, with tenacity, you build and hone your abilities and become confident in them.

Technical skill, as I mentioned earlier, should be and is often expected to be a given. I will not be spending a lot of time on the technical aspects of web design since it’s not the focus of this book. There are plenty of books and websites that ad-dress the technical aspects, and you should buy and visit a few. That said, web design is an ever-shifting landscape. Beginning with plain text pages, the move to table-based de-sign, on to CSS and more, it’s almost a full-time job keeping up on the technology. But keep up you must if you’re to be in demand with prospects and clients.

IT TAKES MORE THAN TALENT

When many designers consider setting up shop, there’s a notion that if they do good work, clients will beat a path to their door, and they’ll be successful. This is often not the case. There is much more to business success than being good at what you do. There’s the whole business side. If you don’t know the top from the bottom of a profit and loss statement, what it costs you to be in business, or why you plan to charge this or that rate, some education is in order. Fortunately, it’s not too tough to get that education. Many continuing education programs offer business classes. Colleges and universities are also an option. Check your local business press for workshops and seminars. For learning business know-how from seasoned pros, consider contacting your area SCORE office. SCORE provides free counseling for both those considering opening a business as well as those with an existing business. In days gone by, SCORE was an acronym for the Service Corps of Retired Executives. In the twenty-first century, it’s SCORE: Counselors to America’s Small Business. Started in 1964, SCORE has more than 350 chapters throughout the United States and its territories, with more than twelve thousand volunteers nationwide. Both working and retired executives and business owners donate time and expertise as business counsel-ors. Odds are, there’s a SCORE chapter near you. If not, the organization also offers counseling by e-mail.

With self-discipline, confidence, design talent, technical skills, and business savvy, you’ve got something to sell. Before you can sell your services, prospects need to know about them. Therein lies another stumbling block for many a would-be free-lancer. To be successful, you have to have the ability and willingness to promote your practice. Like it or not, for a freelancer, that means self-promotion. The problem with self-promotion is that folks think they’re being boastful. After all, Mom always told you it’s not polite to talk about yourself in such a glowing manner. Sorry, Mom’s wrong on this point to a degree. She may be right on the boastful part, but consider this: If you truly believe that your web design work is good and will really help your prospects build their businesses, aren’t you doing them a disservice by not telling them?

Getting the word out is imperative to building a solid business and avoiding the notorious feast or famine syndrome so many freelancers experience. For the new free-lancer, getting those words out means investing time and resources. It?s not unusual for someone who?s just starting out to invest 50 percent or more of their time into marketing and promoting their business. Those first few clients need to come from somewhere. Chapter 10: ?Marketing and Self Promotion: Planning, Tools, Tactics, and Techniques" will provide you with a wealth of in-formation to help promote you and your business.

In a perfect world, clients would flock to you, never balk at your rates, and dig deep into their pockets to swiftly hand over a deposit. They’d also pay in full upon completion of the work or at least within thirty days. As you may have noticed, the world in which we live in is far from perfect. This imperfection often results in a cash flow faucet that seems to have been turned off. At times that faucet is so tightly turned, it’s more than a challenge to open it. This is one reason why managing money is paramount.

Without good money management skills, a myriad of problems arise. When there?s more month than money, anxiety rears its ugly head. When you?re anxious, you can?t do your best work. Beyond this is the cold reality of losing sleep worrying about paying your bills. When cash flow erodes into feast-or-famine syndrome, you’re in a very dangerous place. Sure, you could hire someone to manage your money, but that costs more money and will only add to the problems.

Fortunately, money management is also a learnable skill. There are scores of books available on the topic as well as classes, seminars, and workshops. If you feel you’re afraid of money, lousy at managing it, and numbers make your head spin, consider investing in some training.

All this is for naught without a good work ethic. As a one-person show, you’re responsible for getting projects done, billed, and collected, even when you’d rather be doing something else. A work ethic is often defined as working hard to achieve your goals. But I think there’s more to it. I believe a work ethic goes beyond just working hard; it also encompasses being professional, striving to go the extra mile for your clients, staying on schedule, doing what you say you’re going to do, and exceeding client expectations.

Plus, I believe it means enjoying what you do. As a freelancer, we may strive to keep normal business hours, but getting the job done on time can mean the occasional evening, a sixty-hour week, and working some weekends. We spend a lot of time working. Even with regular business hours, it’s estimated we spend 30 percent of our lives working. That’s an awful big chunk of life doing something we don’t truly love.

Other important abilities are organizational and communication skills. Building a website involves managing many components and often people. Keeping track of who has what, where things are, what else is needed, and who can provide it and when can easily prove a difficult task. Add to the mix client contacts, writers, photographers, programmers, etc., and your head will spin if you don’t have a process in place.

Likewise, good communication skills are needed. We’ve all heard the tale of a story being passed down a line of people. What starts out on one end is completely different than the story winds up at the other end. Web design projects can be like that. Plus, the technical aspect of web work often complicates project communications. For example, copying the client on an e-mail between the designer and programmer. While the content is likely crystal clear to the designer and programmer, the client doesn’t have a clue what they’re talking about. Avoid trade jargon when possible. Repeat things back to other project team members. For example, If I’m understanding you correctly, you mean … Always keep a paper trail along the way. E-mail is good for this. If an issue comes up, you can refer back to the e-mail for clarification or a reminder of what was said. Going out of your way to be clear in your communications and your understanding of what your client and project partners are saying will help ensure a smooth project.

Flexibility is yet another significant trait. In the business of freelancing, things don’t always go the way we think they will or should. A rush project will come up, and you’ll need to reschedule other client work. Odds are, you’ll get sick at some point. You’re only human, after all. A hard drive spins its last. We’ve all been there. Anticipating and planning for the unexpected goes a long way to ensuring that when it happens you have a system in place to deal with them.

A good way to plan for flexibility is to do some what-if thinking: Look at some worst-case scenarios and have contingencies in place. For example, what if your main monitor gives up the ghost in the middle of a project? Do you have funds put aside to buy another one? What happens if you get sick and can’t work? Do you have a backup resource to complete your