[Web Development] My Experience After Doing Freelance Work For 1 Month

I've been learning web development on my own for a couple of months before I started doing freelance work. I've always wanted to start programming, but gave up a couple of times in the past because I got really overwhelmed with the amount of things I had to learn.

It was really hard at first, but once I broke through the iceberg, it got way easier.

So let's talk about my experience in freelancing for the past month. It all started with me putting a local advertisement which stated that I am developing personal/business informational websites. I got around 5-6 calls the first week, but after some negotiations, they never called back (I suppose it was because I was inexperienced).

Surprisingly, the second week I got a call from a company which deals with lubricants and oils and we agreed on a price for a WordPress website. Keep in mind, I had almost no experience in WordPress development, as I only knew enough HTML/CSS/JS to create a moderate website, and minimal PHP. There was no other way but to expand my PHP and WordPress knowledge.

I thought that it shouldn't be that hard, since everyone is basically baking WordPress sites with ease. I tried using some free themes, but they did not exactly generate the result that I wanted, so I turned to creating a custom theme. This is the point where I realized that it wasn't as easy as I had expected. I spent almost a full two days trying to figure out how some basic stuff works. But as I struggled and learned along the way, I got everything working.

Basically, everything was fine on my end. The pay was really low but that's nothing spectacular, as I was completely unexperienced. I had the full design and product showcase ready and was excited to put my first creation into my portfolio.

The hardest thing for me was dealing with clients. They though that I was a slave who sits in front of a computer 24/7 and completes their orders in 2 days. They also expect really low prices for some decent work. Though I had to listen to their terms, as I needed to produce at least something for showcasing.

Another really frustrating thing is that clients do not know what they actually want (design-wise) and I had to revise some stuff for the company multiple times, which expanded the process at least a day. This is really not a problem, but it sucks when they tell you to do it on your own preference, and then change every little detail which in result ends up as a waste of time on my part.

I will continue to work on my web development skills and maybe land a job sometime in the future. But for now, freelancing seems the way to go, as I acquire some real-life experience and some pocket money.

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@cheaky