Career Path

Brizian

Okay, so I studied graphic design in college, and really intended to focus on web design. I have always intended on moving to a larger city, as the one I am in is not that great for this type of work.

After graduating, I was hired on at a local start-up to work in email marketing (NOT SPAM!). I have done very well in this position, and despite severe cuts and numerous layoffs, I have managed to keep my job. Unfortunately, the company does not seem to be doing that great, and while my pay seemed like a small fortune upon graduation now appears to be a slap in the face, after nearly two years without a raise.

At this point, it's fairly certain that if I ask for a raise I will be, at least, rejected, if not terminated. To complicate matters, even legitimate email marketing seems to be frowned upon in the web design field, and so it seems that I have spent the last few years doing absolutely nothing that will advance my career to the next level.

I am quite handy with xhml, css, and JavaScript. I know my way around a WordPress, and a handful of other content management systems. However, I have absolutely nothing in my portfolio that shows off these skills. For the life of me, I cannot find a soul who will entrust me to build them a website, even for free!

Does anyone have any advice for starting your own freelance business? At this point I have become extremely discouraged.

Jasconius

Email marketing is not a waste of time. Creating good HTML newsletters is not easy to do, and if you can do it and make it look good in all the major mail clients then that is a skill.

You may not find work in what you would think of as a conventional web design shop, but there are plenty of web marketing and e-commerce firms out there who need those skills.

But, emails by themselves may not carry you far, you need to get into "regular" web design, and probably start looking at the interactive side of the web, advanced interface design and so on, to get you to the next level.

The economy is also a little shitty right now in the US and the service industry (under which web design falls) has been decreasing in size... so now is not an easy time to land a new job.

Brizian

I forgot to mention: I had to sign a non-compete agreement to obtain my current job. Basically I'm not allowed to do email marketing for anyone else for the next five years.

Thanks for your response though. I've also wanted to get into interface design for a while now. Do you happen to know any good books on the subject?

Jasconius

I cannot help you there, but I would be very suspect of that non compete. 5 years is... drastic in the web field. Might want to do some research to see how aggressively they enforce that once employees leave.

falsedef

I'm primarily an app programmer, but whenever someone hears that I can potentially make webpages, that's all they want to talk about. There's tons of people looking for cheap webdesign freelancers (cheap compared to corporate designers). I had people coming to me to do websites. And there was tons of listings on job boards for contracted web designers and programmers.

Take screenshots of your email creations. They look just like pages, don't they? There's your portfolio. Make your own awesome website to market yourself and put it on business cards, and bam, that website is now the crowning piece in your portfolio.

You should start learning an actual server side language, or find a freelancer who can do that part for you. Team up and start marketing yourselves and asking around. You could probably find a dozen people looking for a web developer just from family contacts.

edit: non competes don't hold up in courts, at least in the states with actual brains.

edit2: make the title of your threads more descriptive, too.