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A quick note on the CV
Out of the past 20-30 designers I’ve received CV’s from only one has been designed well enough for me to get a good impression of the designer, and it wasn’t created in Word. It was two pages and contained links to his recent work, some thumbnails and was fully branded.
It didn’t contain: his education background as far back as when he attended Nursery, his grades breakdown and ten pages of reading material padded out with lots of stretched truth to do with what they did at their last job. Example:
McDonalds - Senior Beef technician
Lead a team of three people processing and preparing beef for use in gourmet food ate by thousands daily. Designed a unique technique of packaging that is used for top customers to this day.Translation
Was in a team of four saying nothing, doing nothing but unpacking pre-shaped burger meat and passing it down the queue. Figured that spitting just underneath the cheese in annoying customers burgers before packing them could never be found, and that tip is now passed down through remaining staff to new staff to this day.Essentially:
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Stop blabbing on, don’t send 100 URL’s with no explanation but send four or five latest pieces of work with explanations for each. Realistically I don’t have ten minutes for each applicant, so if your e-mail or application contains more than a minute or two of reading then it’s not going to get read. -
Why learning web development at college is good for you
I constantly hear people complaining that they aren’t getting what they want out of college, that they can do it alone and that they don’t want to be taught ‘behind the times’ ASP and that their college needs to be brought into the ‘current day teaching techniques’ - so here’s why I think all that is a load of crap.
With your teacher(s), you will more than likely deal with the hardest client you’ll ever have
With my first web development project at college we had to develop a random concept web site into XHTML/CSS. I submitted a div tag/CSS layout and was promptly asked where I took the code from and why I was trying to cheat in my college class. To which I explained that I had been developing outside of college for some time prior to joining the course, which wasn’t met by believing eyes.
You see this type of interaction with a teacher is what teaches you the fundamentals of dealing with bad clients, bad contractors and bad customers. Do you blow your lid and call the teacher a fool? Or do you politely explain you’ve got x years experience playing with sites beforehand?
If the teacher has past experience running their own company or doing client projects then they’ll be even further of a problem to you. They’ll teach you how old fashioned some clients can be by being old fashioned themselves - why aren’t you using tables? Does this validate to HTML 4.0 standards? Why aren’t you including food costs in your client billing breakdown?
Learning ASP isn’t all that bad, especially if you are in it for the money
There’s more money in ASP and there’s more real jobs available. The type where you sit in a company and develop all day long. The language teaches you structure, and gives you a first hand view of what it is like on the other side of the fence should you be a PHP/Ruby on Rails type of guy. Why is it a bad thing to be able to start a PHP/Ruby vs ASP argument with ‘well I’ve worked with ASP before, and…’?
If you’re good, you’ll learn to teach
I spent a lot of my time helping out my friends with problems at college, my grades suffered but at the end of the day but I gained a good knowledge of what it is like to teach. Today this is applied to how I can teach clients about how Rolled’s process works, how we teach them Wordpress or basic XHTML for post formatting in their CMS.
At the end of the day I finished basic tasks in less than a minute, and spent the rest of the hour helping people out and learning from it - just because you’re finished with something doesn’t mean there’s nothing else to do.
Presenting
I was useless at presenting when I first started on my college course, a nervous wreck when standing in front of the class. If your course includes presenting and you’re asking why - I honestly don’t know what you’re thinking.
The talent of being able to react to an incredibly tricky question from a teacher in front of 10-20 people and not look like an idiot is something of a secret that you can take to your grave. Putting passion into something you have no passion about when presenting is also another talent that few have, especially when it’s all put together the night before at 4am after getting in from a night out.
It teaches you how to place graphics, what fonts work and what don’t, how to present one idea but how to present another - and at the end of the day, it’s practice for pitching if you are to be in that position later on in life.
In conclusion
Stop whinging - stay in college and get your degree/diploma. College can teach you many things you wouldn’t learn outside of the boundaries until it’s too late. Do you want to present to a client having never done it before? Deal with a bad client for the first time on your newly acquired project? Have work go entirely dry and not have those Junior ASP programmer positions to apply to? Lose every PHP/Ruby vs ASP argument because you have no facts to use to back up your side of things?
At the end of the day it’s college, it’s not an experience many get more than twice for two to four years of their life. Suck it up, learn from it and experiment as much as possible whilst you can.
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Qualities of a great freelancer
The following are qualities that I consider core things I look for in freelancers I use when outsourcing work and getting things done. They are also the things that each and every freelancer working on jobs for Rolled At possess.
Personality
You may remember the guy who bored you to death on the phone, but you’ll remember the one you related to and laughed with a whole lot more. They’ll also become a pleasure to work with and you’ll use them more often. I can’t tell you how put off I am by the lack of a personality in some freelancers I talk to.
A love for the job
Clients don’t want their leg humping, but they do want someone who wants to do the job they have available. Someone who wants to see the product of their work come alive at the end of everything.
Chances are if you don’t love making websites, the ones you’ll be creating won’t be very good once your finished. The first question I ask anyone when I talk to them the first time when I’m adding a freelancer to my list is ‘do you love what you do?’ and if the answer isn’t yes with a convincing follow up statement then they don’t last passed that first question.
Patience
Can you wait for a job or are you going to be asking me every day about it? Are you going to blow off a huge list of insults at a client when they merely suggest a small change? Patience in my mind, is something that every freelancer needs in order to be a freelancer. You need to be patient in order to wait for a client getting back to you, to hear back from a job follow up and patient with your work too. If your forever complaining that something is going wrong instead of simply looking for a solution then your going to be closing doors instead of opening them.
Flexibility
Don’t work with frameworks? Someone else’s code? Pre-built scripts? Other people’s CSS/XHTML? These are all basic examples of lack of flexibility in some areas. Whilst they aren’t vital ingredients of a web development freelancer they do effect your ability to get work if you aren’t a specialist or established.
A speciality
The freelancer who specialises in one area and becomes a guru is someone that can - providing the speciality is of importance - become a cornerstone of a business. A talent in one area can be what gets you hired over someone else for a particular job, and it can be something that allows you to make more money that someone who generalises over multiple areas of knowledge. They do a better job, they have more experience and in most cases they take less time to get things done.
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My five golden rules of freelancing
I find I come across a lot of freelancers who don’t enjoy their job as much because of a variety of different things. They aren’t living by a set of golden rules as I do, so I thought I would share the rules that I live by whilst freelancing in order to benefit future and current freelancers a like experiencing problems in their day to day work.
Golden rules are simply something that you stick by, they are your code of ethics and they are how you conduct yourself in day to day business.
1. Keep it interesting
Working the same job over and over is always going to get boring eventually. That’s why I tend to diversify what areas each job is in and the specifics of those jobs. Occasionally i’ll see a job which is completely out there and send a message about it on the spot. This will either allow me to meet somebody new or just experience what it’s like to work with that area of the web.
It’s all about breaking the routine that every freelancer drops into from time to time. It shouldn’t feel like your copying and pasting what you did last week for a new site and changing the name on top - it should be that your adding something to your skill set, experiencing something new and dealing with different people on a week to week basis.
2. Don’t work with people that you don’t like
There’s nothing more aggravating than working with people you don’t like. It demoralises you, makes work a chore rather than a passion and basically makes you question why you do what you do.
Always be sure to save up your money in the background and have a backlog of pay stored away. This gives you a position where you can turn down clients you aren’t sure about and pull out of deals that are making your life hell.
The last thing you want to do as a freelancer is to break a relationship with a client by pulling out of a deal. But I feel that if it’s no longer fun or interesting to work (or even aggravating to work) with that client then you should be moving on and finding work else where.
3. Know when to escape
Knowing when to take a break and when to stop working is a key part of freelancing. Otherwise we’d all be doing 12 hour days every day and just get burnt out all the time.
Take weekends off, read a book, get some DVD’s, join the gym, walk the dog, visit the local shops to get a sandwich … all of these things you can do to escape working.
(This is all of course outside of work hours and during breaks.. not to avoid working in the first place.)
4. Treat every job as if it’s your first
Don’t get comfortable with a long term client, your standard should be as high as it was when you first worked for them. The day you decided that if you did a good job on the first project there may be more in it for you. This should be how you treat every job - as if your out to impress in a job interview and need that job to survive. That hunger to impress the client and keep them happy is how you deliver consistently and how you keep that client wanting to use you in the first place.
Think about this - are clients going to refer you to a friend if a friend needs work? Are they more likely to refer an excellent freelancer, or one that delivers average results?
Of course there is a twist to this rule - we all know our first jobs weren’t the best and where possibly even sloppy. That is something you’ll have to refrain from doing with this rule of course.
5. Communicate beautifully
Spell checks and grammar checks are vital for the less than able English speakers here. I often find clients talking about how poor ex-hires where with their English and it will always be off putting when a client wants to deal with the client with long conversations about jobs.
Another important part of this rule is to put communicating with the client as a priority. If they send you an e-mail it’s not ‘I’ll do it later’, it’s ‘OK I’ll respond now’. This is any time of your day your at the computer and this is what can set you apart from the rest. Having an instant reply or instant action towards the e-mail they’ve sent (if they want/need something doing) is always going to be something that a client likes - and it’s something that’ll win you over if your trying to impress them.
So there we have it, my golden rules of freelancing. I hope to have benefitted a few freelancers with this articles and I welcome any comments you wish to leave.
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