Featured in Businesses started by Freelancers

It’s not often you get recognized for what you do on the internet, so when you finally do, you’re allowed to brag about it right? Of course you are!

My typical winter work day

My desk

I’ve been working almost 5 months as a freelancer, and although it gives me much greater freedom than I had when I was in my day job, I still have to put in a normal 8-hour (or so) work day. What I find hard is actually separating between work and private life, although I’m not sure if it is actually a problem, but it is still not easy to distinguish between “working” and “surfing for leisure”. It gets dark and cold in the winter in Norway, and personally I’d rather sit in front of my PC and do something productive than watch TV.

Looking back at 2008

It’s been quite the year for me in 2008, and I thought a nice blog post summing up all my “achievements” for the year would be in order. This year has seen me transition from a part time, unknown web designer to a full time freelancer and co-founder of an online “startup”.

Here are some of my personal achievements for 2008 (and late 2007 to tie the knots):

November 2007

Made a couple of free WordPress themes after checking out WordPress for the first time. Thought it would be a good exercise since I wasn’t exactly pulling web design work. Saw that the free themes became very popular and were downloaded a lot. Decided to try and make a “premium” theme (or commercial/paid), after seeing that there was a market for this.

Sent an e-mail to Adii, who had a very popular commercial theme called “Premium News Theme”, about a possible collaboration on a theme. This would turn out to be quite a important e-mail that would change my path in life. NewsPress was released as the second theme in the PNT series.

Working as a Freelancer and Getting Paid

I’ve been working as a freelance web designer full time for just about four months now, but before I left my previous programming day job, I did a bit on freelancing on the side to see if I was cut out for this type of work. I made a few WordPress themes both free and ones I sold, and I soon started to get requests for custom jobbies. So what have I learned in this time of being a freelancing newbie?

Estimate and give a proper quote before project starts

At the start I took everything I could get my hands on, and I had incredibly low prices, because at that time I was just so thrilled at getting work that I didn’t think of it as salary. I made one website for $300 and used between 30-40 hours getting that site done.

The design didn’t take long, it was the fact that I hadn’t estimated the project before I started. The project specification was pretty vague, and I only calculated how long it would take me to design and code it. Even then it was quoted too low, but they had a budget, and I didn’t want to lose any work. It was the aftermath of tweaks and layout changes that came after I had finished my part that blew the project out of proportion. Today I think of this project as a great learning experience.