How to Become a Freelance Web Designer

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 11:09 AM PDT

Being a freelance web designer is not something that I expected to land on. But during my early years I really have that strange deep interest in almost anything that involved computers. I am not surprised that even after taking up engineering and passing the boards for that, I still find myself doing IT-related jobs: these past few years I had been offering my services as a freelance web designer.

Many of my friends and strangers ask me: what have you been up to lately? I answer them – I do web design (but I am mostly concentrated on doing WordPress blogs). I also earn from blogs. All these I do full-time right in my home.

Some people expressed interest in learning web design – either from old friends that I find again in Facebook, or emails from strangers who drop by on this blog. There are also other freelancers who want to learn this skill because they are after the higher rates. In my personal opinion, it is possible to learn web designing to be a freelance web designer, but it is not that easy.

HTML knowledge: This is actually the easiest part in learning web design. Many people could follow and even memorize HTML tags. Some could even go further into learning CSS. In addition to that, there are various software that help generate web pages such as Dreamweaver, MS Publisher and CoffeeCup HTML. Because this part is easy, some people have that misconception that web design is easy.
Scripting: Debugging scripts is the reason why technical jobs in IT get higher pay, and IT freelancers are not an exception. Making JavaScripts, Flash, PHP and other programming languages work with web pages is not something for those who don’t like to play with code.
Databases: Can you get inside mySQL databases or any other database if there’s some troubleshooting needed with the data? Are you able to make web pages work so that data entered by the user is stored into these databases?
Graphic Design: Possessing graphic design skills is also important as this spells out the appearance of any website.

To be able to learn all that, one can opt to enroll in a full bachelor degree in IT or related courses which can take as long as four years, or simply go to computer schools and go after associate or diploma degrees (that teaches many of the fundamental skills and languages) which usually takes two years. It is also uncommon to find computer schools that offer 6-month courses (or less) on these skills.

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