I was wondering, how does a web designer/developer start out in his buisness with nothing to show (in the sense of a portfolio,) and only his word to show he does good work? How are those people supposed to get buisness?
If you don't have a portfolio and want business, it is best to make your own site look incredible. Show people what you can do with your own site. Once your site is incredible, network with companies in your area, friends, family and offer your services cheap if they'll let you use their site as a portfolio example.
Once your portfolio is up, referrals should be coming in and folks seeing your site should be even more interested.
EDIT Per Martin's request, when you build your own site, please don't grab a run of the mill template like every other web developer out there. If you do take a template, make it yours, modify the heck out of it.
The best thing you can do for an empty portfolio is personal projects. I was hired for my first job out of college because I had created a website for my personal business. I was able to show that I had talent because I was in charge the entire site. You shouldn't ever rely on "your word" to get you jobs.
If you need ideas for a personal project, you can see if any friends/family need help, but that can be limiting. Still, it's another project to put in your portfolio to help you get more professional work.
I'd also recommend reading up on online articles dealing with starting a business. Some recommended reading:
alistapart.com/articles/startingabusiness/
alistapart.com/articles/business1/
freelanceswitch.com/general/101-essential-freelancing-resources/
Start by doing projects for people you know and work to create a small selection of work that reflects your current skill set. At the beginning, you may find that your talents are evolving so rapidly that your previous work doesn't reflect your current abilities — that's fine. Try to create a narrative on your portfolio site that shows people your progress and how each piece of work has built on the next.
Your portfolio site should demonstrate both technical and aesthetic skills. If you're an artist or industrial designer, you want your site to fade to the background and push your work forwards. Being a web designer means that your actual site is as important as the work featured on it. Your code should be clean and organized (you don't need to be a standardista, but be tidy).
If there's one skill you should really have before you start to work for clients, it's a sense of typography. You don't want to contribute to the ever-expanding world of poorly set websites.
Good luck.
I completely agree with all of the above - if you can demonstrate your capabilities with some sample work, that will count for far more than a resume in the end. Most of my work has come through people seeing my other work, not knowing my employment history.
Get yourself a domain, build a bunch of sample home pages, create a bunch of sub directories on your site. Make one for a small business, then maybe e-commerce, then maybe a blog, make a few different example scenarios of the types of sites that you would likely be asked to do, I have seen some people design mock home pages in Photoshop and just show them all as clickable JPEGS, that can be quick yes, although I recommend using all live pages on your site to show what interactive things you can do. Up to you, depending how quick you want it up and how important it is to you. I was paid $2500 to make this blog by a guy who was just completely web illiterate. I didn't quote that price mind you, he offered it to me out of nowhere after looking at a gallery of WP templates I had up as "possible" themes for a customer's blog. Sometimes, you are just in the right place at the right time. Best of luck to you.
Do side projects and see if you can build friends' websites (for free, or if they'll pay you, cool). Do whatever you can to demonstrate your abilities. Building a personal site doesn't hurt either.
I'd recommend making an online portfolio, if not to display past projects at least to post your resume and basically a cover letter. You can get a lot of free css templates if you're not comfortable with designing your own.
I'm building a site for my wife and a friend of mine from high school. If you're not getting work, its just the economy. I've been looking for work since March. It's tough.
Just keep at it, and it'll pay off.
You need to create a professional looking site. If you are a developer I also suggest that you start a small open source project (or a big one if you are so inclinded). It doesn't have to be any thing major...a widget or library. Something useful for people to play with. On your website show examples of your work. If you have no examples then sign up for accounts on getafreelancer.com, elance.com, scriptlance.com, guru.com, rentacoder.com and any of the other freelance style sites. Build up your portfolio by doing cheap work...but not work that is cheap! Create a resume and post it somewhere for google to find. Create a linkedin, facebook, and myspace account. Make it easy for people to find you and for people to find your work. Write about the things that you are interested in either by way of a personal blog or by posting articles to a site that already gets lots of traffic. Speak at small user groups or conferences to get your name out.
There is a lot you can do it is just a matter of how badly you want to succeed. Programming or designing is just as much a business as selling physical products. It is all about how much you saturate a given space with good words about your services. Marketing!
Related
Context: Ok so I am building a website for a friend. Hes a designer with a high need to daily include his projects (images and text).
Problem:
Ok so I know pretty much how to code in html/css/javascript a front end responsive website, that is the easy part for me, the hard one is the content page. I've never done it so I don't know the best way.
A page that he goes daily put a new project, new images, formatted text (A like a blog). But since he doesn't know anything about coding and front end, it has to be simple enough for him to understand.
Resources: I made several searches and found some websites that allow custom templates with content, one of them standing is wordPress (haven't used it for years). I am currently abusing tumblr for that matter, but their support is quite bad. Should I use one, should I buy a host like bluehost and create my self one, what you guys recommend? I tried google it but perhaps I am not doing it the right way since I am not finding any answer to my problem.
Look, you've come to a programming website, so the most common suggestion you'll get here, and the option I myself recommend is:
MAKE IT YOURSELF!
It really is a fun and very educational experience.
There are many, many ways to do this. In general you'll want to have a front end that communicates with a back end API.
For the front end, there are a lot of options. From templating engines like Jekyll, to MVC frameworks like Laravel, to full fledged high level abstractions like Angular and React, which are admitedly harder to learn but so, so robust, and useful once you've figured them out.
The selection of tools you can use to make the API that supports the website is just as rich. There is ASP.NET for C# (which some people use for the front end as well but I wouldn't), there is Node.JS for JavaScript, with a myriad of libraries and packages to get you started. Flask is a popular option for Python. The list goes on and on.
Oh and dont forget about Ruby on Rails.
As for the interface which your friend will use to add their work, turning all that complicated back end into a simple, easy to use interface is a fundamental part of UX design and, IMHO, quite satisfying once you get it right. Make it sleek and, most of all, intuitive. One shouldn't have to be taught how to use it. It should be apparent from the first time they open the page. You should always ask for their feedback as you are developing it. Some even opt to create mock ups of the interface, in order to get feedback on both its aesthetics and its intuitiveness before a single line of code has been written.
Now, regarding how you'll actually do it, the answer really depends on the tools you opt to use. In general, you'll want to read up on things like the MVC pattern, or React's component architecture. The former is something you'll come across on a wide variety of platforms. The latter is mostly React specific, but in my opinion, understanding how to properly build a website using component architecture means you're in the right mindset, something that will help you no matter how you choose to build it.
All that being said...
Web development is complicated. Creating dynamic websites is a much larger undertaking that designing a static page, or even making an SPA. Though I do wholeheartedly recommend you do it at some point, starting with your friend's website might not be the best idea. Or, you may simply not have the time to sift through all your options, figure out which is best for you, begin the learning process etc.
In that case, there are plenty of publishing frameworks and tool sets to choose from. Wordpress has become very popular in the recent years, and templates and plugins for it are abundant. Alternatives like Medium and Ghost have also gained some traction.
There are plenty of commercial CMS type frameworks. One I have heard good things about is ExpressionEngine. However, I cannot speak for it with certainty.
If you are looking for a website builder, there are also plenty of options out there such as Weebly, Wix, as well as Squarespace. Google sites is a relative newcomer in that department, but seems promising.
So, in summary,
I wholeheartedly recommend building it from scratch. There are many, many languages, frameworks, and tools out there you can choose from, each with its own patterns, best practices and idiosyncrasies. If you lack the time, or simply don't feel like going through that process of building a dynamic website from scratch, you can use one of many tools available. However, that wouldn't be nearly as much fun, and would likely produce an inferior result.
I happened to visit this website and found it really really fast, it was like layers over layers but doesn't need to load the site at all, even once. Call me old but I'm really impressed by this technology:
https://www.bookofthemonth.com
If anyone knows what technique they're using here in this website please share. And furthermore, does Wordpress have any theme like this? For this site as a blog would be hard because it eventually needs to load and accumulate too many resources, true or false? It would be awesome if you can make a blog with articles on a site like this!(or at least that's what I'm looking for) Thanks everyone in advance.
You can always do View Source... on an internet site you like.
If you do that to the site you mentioned, you'll find that it's a react.js site, not a site delivered by a standard cms such as WordPress.
Still, this site is a typical "single page" design, with
a slider at the top
row of information showing five interesting posts
a row of hyperlinks (the How It Works) row
a row of information showing five more interesting posts ("Meet our members")
You can certainly find several, or more, WordPress themes handling this.
It's also likely that the site for a recognized brand (like the one you mentioned) is delivered by a highly scalable web server infrastructure with caching and a content delivery network. So, can you make yours as fast as this? Not without spending some serious money.
How to proceed? Look for an appropriate "One Page" wordpress theme and follow the directions.
Once you get it looking correct, you can adopt Cloudflare or another content-delivery network platform.
I do small websites for local companies. All I know is HTML5 and CSS3, no JavaScript, no PHP.
I have this client who wants me to make a website for his coffee shop. All good so far. I have an idea for a beautiful responsive design which will get his coffee shop a lot of fame.
The problem:
The guy wants to be able to manage his website, meaning: he wants to add a photo if he needs to, or even some text on a particular page. He doesn't want to depend on me so he wants to do it by himself. The problem is that I can't teach him HTML so he would download the HTML file and write the code for the desired thing.. I need to do beautiful websites for my portfolio.
No Wordpress: I don't like Wordpress because it's limited so I can't be creative with the design. I thought of that as being the only solution requiring his needs.
I'm willing to learn more: if there is a solution that I could implement in one month or two, I will do this and learn what is needed, but can't learn PHP in two months.
Any advice?
You might find that CushyCMS does what you want. From the site:
Allow clients to safely edit content
No software to install, no programming required
Takes just a few minutes to setup
Define exactly which parts of the page can be changed
Produces standards compliant, search engine friendly content
From experience, a couple of downsides:
No choice of editor
You have to add pages that can be edited - the client cannot create new pages.
I am working with an artist to make her personal website. She would like to sell her artwork from the website. The issue is, she would like to be able to add, remove and price the artwork herself. She would also like to use paypal as the payment method.
Obviously design and coding is easy for me, that's all static. I am not sure however, what the best method would be to set up a way for her to add artwork herself.
I know there are some open source e-commerce sites (magento, zencart ect.) but I have never used these and feel they might be a bit overkill for a simple art site. Is there something else really simple I should use?
Any general thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Use a ecommerce site, its the obvious choice if she wants to sell stuff.
Zencart isn't as overkill as you think - it allows you to remove all the bits you don't want from the site using its admin gui; so you keep just the categories and the cart sections.
It also has options (IIRC, but I may be thinking of a different one, like CRELoaded) that provide for pay-and-download links.
Certainly, reusing ecommerce code will be a lot easier than writing your own.
Always use an existing framework for commercial sites. It's just too easy to make a silly mistake which allows hackers to take over control of the server.
I recently found a really cool (and free) method of using php and javascript to upload, resize thumbnails, and display all uploaded content from the folder.
Taking this code from a free tutorial and pairing it with a customized javascript gallery looks really slick (used it for my own photography site as well as a few clients who loved it).
Very soon I will be combining it with a site for a historical golf course architect... a gentleman has come to me with hundreds of pictures he would like to store on the web, but he wants the capability to upload himself at any time. The trick is this: If your client artist wants to price it herself, the gallery use would require her to be able to navigate the basic html framework enough to change the descriptions which appear beneath all of the pictures as she adds/changes them.
If you want to get started on your own check out some of the tutorials here:
http://net.tutsplus.com/category/videos/screencasts/page/3/
as well as finding a gallery that you both like for displaying the photos in an attractive way... Let me know if you want anything else from me :)
Why don't you create a simple administration panel where s/he can add, remove and price the artwork? Do you know any programming languages? PHP?
Virtuemart is based Joomla CMS , very easy to set up, an Open Source eCommerce solution. You might find a lot of free extensions of Joomla for photo gallery and other things.
Gallery2 is an excellent web-gallery software, suitable for presenting images, videos, and audio.
It has a "CheckOut with PayPal" plugin.
Gallery2 will require some time to configure, it is unlikely that you will use it "as is" after install.
Gallery2 is easily embeddable - provided minimal PHP skills, and good HTML/CSS skills, one can make it fit inside any design (maybe except for the grid-like thumbnails layout, which I guess is possible but harder than average).
As a software developer, I have done many web page applications and been doing blog for my programming experiences. I would like to use pictures in many cases. Pictures worth thousand words and they are universal language!
You could create your own clip art images or download graphics(actually many are open clip art/image libraries available, Open Clip Art Library as example). However your time and art skill are limited and you can only keep limited library of images.
I wish if there is any open art/image library web sites with permanent references available so that you just add a simple reference in your html page like this just like a way that you could use other people or web site's graphics:
<img src="http://OpenArtLibray.net/icon/work/DoItYourself.png".../>
In this way, there is no need to waste time to download and upload images and no waste on your and other computer's disk spaces(no duplication). Just one place with a huge amount of variety of images available, and open for people to use, or with some reasonable fees. People may vote the popularity of art/images as well.
Is there any such kind of web site available?
Typically sites discourage this. What this really does is shift the bandwidth cost to the hosting site. There have been cases where sites with pictures have analyzed the referrer to determine if images are linked to from other sites, then servering an image with text claiming the image is being 'stolen'.
The point of that, is the idea isn't very well liked.
However, some sites like w3c, allow you to link to their certification images. It all depends on what you are linking to.
It is hard to think of a business doing this, as there doesn't seem to be a revenue aspect.
Even if some were charged fees, there's a lot of work involved in checking/verifying who has paid, via referrer texts. Maybe you have a new business plan.
Update:
Oh, I have a friend who always sends me emails with links to flickr. Maybe their license lets you link to images on their site. Something for you to check out.
Update:
This text, "photo hosting sites", makes for an interesting, relevant google search.
Thanks for Chris explanation. I could accept it as a answer. However, I raised this question because I really don't like to "steal" images. I can see it is hard to charge fees, but there are some many open resources available on the web. Actually, I found one Open Clip Art Library, which allow people to contribute and share images. I found many good pictures there and downloaded. I may contribute some when I create images for my blog so I'll let people to use my.
Flickre is an open social place for people store and sharing pictures. As long as pictures are shared there, specially by people, I think you can use and link images there. Still you have to do the work: creating and uploading. Actually, I tried another open social site called as DropBox. I can create a public folder there and add my pictures for sharing. All those sites have one common problem: personal account and may not be available if inactive for certain period of time (90 days for DropBox?).
That's why I asked this question here in StackOverFlow. I hope some people may know some hosts available or any other alternative options available. Maybe it is just like Chris said, "the idea isn't very well liked".
Actually, I realize that Open Clip Art Library I mentioned in my previous email does provide image hosting-like service. If you click on any one's picture download link, it will open a new tab or window to display the graphic. The display has its URL. I have created a new user name and submitted my picture. It works well. I can include the graphics in my test web page. Not sure how long the URL will be there. It looks like permanent one.
Try searching Creative Commons licensed works. People will often upload and share photos on such places as Flickr under a Creative Commons license which allows you to remix, reference or use on your own projects, blogs or site.
There are different types of licenses under the CC with some asking you to not use their works if you're going to be making money from it or if you're engaging in commercial activity.
You just have to nod back to the original author when using items under CC and if you link back to them, that's just good karma.