Getting into the web design business.

[GAdesignGA]

So basically I'm a college student majoring in engineering. I currently have no job, so I no source of income. I want to start making web pages part time because it sounds interesting and I can work whenever I have time.

Now how exactly does one get into the freelance web design business? I don't know anything about making web pages, so I figure I would start by getting a book about it and making a web page for myself. I know a few people who definitely use a web page, so I was thinking I could them some for free to build on my resume. Then maybe advertise locally? craigslist?

So, how do I get into the freelance web designing? Any tips I should know or things I should do?


Thanks

 

[spire-web]

I started my web design company from scratch 3 years ago. I quickly grew out of the dorm room and have multiple employees on the team now. What worked for me was the following:

1. Treat your customers like gold. Over-deliver on every promise you make, and get them so happy with your work that they rave about you to others.

2. Offer incentives for your early customers to tell friends about your services.

3. Remember that your customers are business owners. They aren't looking on Craig's list. But there are easy ways to hit a bunch of business owners. See #4.

4. Produce a color postcard. I found some cheap online printers like CustomPostcardsDirect.com or OvernightPrints.com, and then mail the postcard to all the chamber of commerce members in your local area. You can get their addresses by picking up a Chamber Business directory... every Chamber has one. I'm telling you, this is one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising I've found.

5. Finally, if I can put in one subtle plug... one of the things that helped us grow the fastest was the popularity of our in-house content management system. A good CMS gives content control to your customers and provides something you can bill an ongoing fee for. Our CMS is popular because it's ridiculously easy to learn AND it helps your customers get more traffic, because our CMS is very search engine-friendly. I now have a program where we install our CMS for web designers who want to focus on quality design & content. Keeping designers from getting buried in a bunch of programming stuff. Here's a quick/low res video demo. Let me know if you'd like to talk about offering this CMS to your customers.

Best of luck GAdesignGA!