Freelance Software/Web Design

Ganluan

I know there are some freelance web designers or software developers out there, so I thought I'd ask here.

I'm looking for a way to make some extra income to offset my wife's lost income after our baby is born. I make pretty good money as a salaried software developer, and I figure I could make some extra on the side doing similar work. However, I'm not really sure where to look or how to go about finding that type of work. Any advice on where to start?

Kate of Lokys

wasted pixels could tell you more than I, but he's sleeping right now, so I'll pass on what I've picked up second-hand.

One of the major freelancing websites - and the one he uses for all of his web design work - is Elance. Here's how it works.

1. You register on the site, and create a user profile with a resume and/or portfolio to show off your past work. There are various certifications and evaluations you can have on your profile - for example, if you graduated from McMaster University with a BSc in Computer Science, you can submit that information to Elance, and for a small fee, they'll verify it so you get a nice official education certification on your profile. They also have several proficiency tests you can take, depending on your area of speciality, and your very general rank on those will be displayed as well - top 5% of all providers in HTML 4.01, top 10% in CSS 2.0, etc.
2. Clients in search of freelancers post descriptions of their projects in the relevant area of the site. Good clients are highly specific about what they want ("I want a dynamic, easily-updated website that displays information pulled from RSS feeds, with a robust user management system and an integrated forum); bad clients are not ("I want a website like oprah.com to use for my shoe company"). They post an estimated budget for their project, and they can specify their timeframe as well.
3. You search Elance for posted projects in your area of expertise, and submit bids for any that interest you. It costs a small amount to do so - $1-3, depending on how big the budget of the project is. Bids are pretty much half realistic description of your plans, and half self-selling sales pitch. You tell the client how much you would charge them for the work, how quick your turnaround time would be, and why they should choose you over everybody else.
4. The client reads over all of the bids on their project, then - ideally - chooses one provider to work with. (Not all projects end up being awarded to someone). Some clients just choose the cheapest providers, others pay more attention to the quality of the bids and the portfolios of the providers.
5. If you get awarded a project, it's yours! Elance has a fairly robust client/provider communication system that allows easy communication, and they handle most of the financial stuff as well, serving as an escrow service. You and the client will both sign a contract specifying deadlines for completion and payment, and there's usually some haggling done over how those things should match up. Deadbeats happen on both sides of the equation, so it usually ends up going something like "You give me 30% up front, I start working, I give you 30% of the completed project a week later, you give me another 40%... etc." Elance does take a cut of your payment, but it's fairly reasonable.

If you have any questions, I'm sure pixels would be happy to answer them once he logs on!

OremLK

Let me toss in real quick that I've looked into just this thing, and from my perspective, Elance seems awfully expensive to get started in right now. Their "connects" system will probably milk you for a lot of money before somebody finally decides to go with an untested provider, and you'll quite often be bidding against a lot of other providers with a more robust profile than your own.

Ganluan

Thanks for the detailed response Kate. Is this something he is able to do full time?

I wish I could add things to my portfolio that I've done on the job, but I can't for obvious reasons. What other implications are there when doing something like this, as far as maintenance/support go? Is it normally just handing over the completed work and then it's up to the client to maintain/support it? It seems like most of the bids on that site come from full companies... how does a single person get work there?

OremLK, when you looked into this, did you end up finding a better solution?

wasted pixels

Kate's summary of how things work over on Elance is pretty accurate, and since it sounds like you're more interested in software dev than web dev (and thus not competition to me ), I'll heartily recommend that you give it a go over there. And yeah, I'd be happy to field any questions you may have on Elance or freelancing in general.

OremLK wrote: »

Their "connects" system will probably milk you for a lot of money before somebody finally decides to go with an untested provider and you'll quite often be bidding against a lot of other providers with a more robust profile than your own.

I'm on the $9.95 a month package, and I think I've only had to buy extra connects once. I started on Elance at the ground level; the firm I'd worked for folded, so while I had a lot of experience on Elance, I had absolutely nothing to my (user)name there. With nothing more than a portfolio and some fairly polished business communication skills, I was able to win about 66% of the jobs I bid on in the first month. The trick to getting your foot in the door is just going after a lot of quick $50 projects instead of one or two $2,000 ones. You can't be underbid at the $50 price point, and (I'll be frank and politically incorrect for a minute) if the cost is the same, a US buyer would rather hire an unproven westerner than an experienced Indian or Filipino.

I spent my first week or two fixing people's CSS problems, osCommerce error messages, and lots of other quick, boring tasks like that, and I had plenty of positive feedback after just a few days of that.

EDIT: looks like you posted while I was writing this.

Is this something he is able to do full time?

80% of my income comes from Elance or contacts I've made through Elance. I don't make money hand over fist, but I also took months at a time off this year to spend time with Kate. When I really have my head down, I can make three or four grand a month pretty easily.

What other implications are there when doing something like this, as far as maintenance/support go? Is it normally just handing over the completed work and then it's up to the client to maintain/support it?

This depends entirely on the project. Those sorts of things (ownership, maintenance, support, and security implications) are usually discussed during the bidding phase, and it's basically up to you how much/little you want to commit.

It seems like most of the bids on that site come from full companies... how does a single person get work there?

This is very deceptive. A lot of those "full companies" are one guy -- keep in mind, most Elancers are designers first, so we know how to make ourselves look as big and powerful or as small and intimate as we want. In my case, I openly work as a "lone gun" freelancer, and it has never, ever been a problem for me.

One point along those lines, though... if you're not familiar with LLC companies, get familiar with them before you get yourself involved in this kind of work. There are some massive legal ramifications as far as liability in this kind of work, and you need to familiarize yourself with the differences between working as an individual and forming a company.

Ganluan

I'm familiar with how LLCs work - are you working as one?

What happens if, for some reason, you take a project but are unable to complete it on time? I assume that's where the negative feedback comes from?

wasted pixels

Ganluan wrote: »

I'm familiar with how LLCs work - are you working as one?

I'm not, but I have no meaningful assets. As a family man, you should be a bit less reckless than me.

Edit: Ninja'd.

What happens if, for some reason, you take a project but are unable to complete it on time? I assume that's where the negative feedback comes from?

Yes, that scenario could result in anything from merely renegotiating terms (some clients don't mind an extra few days) to bad feedback to the whole project coming unglued (some clients really get upset over an extra few days). You can avoid this entirely by setting generous milestones for the development cycle -- giving yourself an extra three or four business days per milestone makes sure that if things go pear shaped, you'll at least probably have a weekend in there to grind it out.

meeker

No experience with freelancing or web design. But I have a LLC and used this in the past. Very simple, they do everything for you.

Free this week until Friday. State fees only.

http://lifehacker.com/5100949/mycorporation-founds-your-company-for-free-this-week-only

Basically an LLC means that if you sign a contract and fail to deliver on the contract, the contracted can't sue you and take your house.

Hypatia

If you decide to go the non-Elance route you can occasionally find jobs on company sites and postings, sometimes you can also get a quick job just looking at peoples' websites in the area and taking note of which ones don't look like they've been updated in a long time.

When you're working outside a service thing though make sure you've researched how to write up letters of agreement etc so you get things in writing. The Graphic Artist Guild has some suggestions but it's coming from an art point of view instead of a programmer one, so I don't know how much you can get out of it.

The biggest things I've found on doing freelance web stuff is that you have to make sure it says something in your contract about what happens if they don't get you the content in time and putting in clauses for the number of revisions/corrections they're allowed before you start charging them for it.