I need an advice

emuptuche · Post by **emuptuche** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 7:20 pm

Hello!
I'm new here. I've been browsing tons of forums for an idea of what to do. I was laid off from my job about 3 month ago. I've been looking for a job since then, but did not even get a single interview. I worked as a web designer for a publishing company for the last 5 years. Looks like forums.runrev.com is an active forum with active members and may be someone has some experience working as a freelance web designer. May be "Getting Started with Revolution Studio or Enterprise" category is not the most appropriate for this question, but I want to try anyways to get some opinions before I go ahead with my life. I'm wondering if it is possible in the current economy to find work for a freelance web designer and make enough to pay for rent and groceries. I was able to find a small project on craigslist and I developed a website for a company. It was a small project and took me only a week to complete. I got paid $800 for 1 week of work which is not bad. Please people give me some ideas. I have 2 kids and my wife is out of work as well. Thank you in advance.

FourthWorld · Post by **FourthWorld** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 8:38 pm

Step #1: make a web site promoting your services.

With all due respect, while the payday loan site is well done such businesses have what could politely be described as a "mixed" reputation, esp. among the sort of business owners you'd want to attract as clients.

Put together your own site for your services on your own domain ASAP, and replace the payday loan site with the URL to your services site in your sig line right away.

But can you make a living doing web work? Thousands do, and some live quite well. Most of my WebMerge customers are full-time webmasters, and a large majority of them are self-employed. A couple of them make many times more than I do (maybe I'm in the wrong business <g>).

Even today, there are a great many companies still not on the web, and a few million of those who are have really crappy sites that aren't doing them any good in terms of generating customer interest and converting that interest into sales.

Make your own site exemplary, then take a look at the businesses in your area, see who has sites and who doesn't; offer those who don't a great deal for getting online quickly and they'd be foolish to continue trying to grow in the 21st century without a web site. Tip: a lot of restaurants still don't have sites, and a many that do still haven't hooked into OpenTable to handle reservations conveniently online.

There's a lot to learn with commercial web work, esp. with the ever-changing best practices for SEO (and the many sites recommending practices that are at best outdated and at worst will get a site banned from Google).

But it's all well worth learning, and you can apply what you learn to your own site as well, ever furthering its reach.

Web work is highly competitive, and self-employment is very difficult. But the nice thing about being self-employed is that you always know what the boss is planning, and after a few years building the business up if it's still around you'll finally be able to take a vacation.

Tomorrow is 4/4, Fourth World's 15th anniversary. I'm going backpacking.

Best of luck to you, and let us know how it works out.

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 9:23 pm

Hi,

Really, it very easy to recognise spam and once you recognise it, it is very easy to find proof. Just copy a few lines (without the forum-specific text) and search for it with your favourite search engine.

I hope that the moderators will remove this soon.

Best,

Mark

FourthWorld · Post by **FourthWorld** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 11:02 pm

Yes, I do have a bit of a habit giving people the benefit of the doubt.

I'll try to be a bit more cynical, but given my history I may likely waste another minute or two here and there writing helpful things.

With emails I'm usually quick to spot stuff that was forwarded without a Snopes check, but I'm so used to well-moderated forums that frankly I rarely come across forum spam anywhere other than here.

keyless · Post by **keyless** » Sat Apr 04, 2009 5:40 am

Yep spam, too bad, I would have been all about telling him the first thing he needs to learn is a little CSS, that site is a table nightmare.

SparkOut · Post by **SparkOut** » Sat Apr 04, 2009 1:19 pm

There was some more westcoast payday spam recently that I noticed and asked Heather to remove. It was the "Time out - for some funnies..." thread, just some silly jokes as a disguise for the link.

bonbon · Post by **bonbon** » Sun Apr 05, 2009 12:57 am

Mark, good advice, I didn't know about that.

Richard, I wouldn't have imagined it was spam (though now I have an idea what to look for). Your contributions to the forum are enormously helpful, and much appreciated. Please keep it going !

Pete