I'm under fucking lot of emotions while I write this, I might as well regret this tomorrow morning!. I've burnt to ashes my 7 year experience in Electrical design ({did you know I was Manager in that Dept??} mainly circuit and Schneider control panel design, if that makes any sense here) experience just so I can join you guys. It was my dream from childhood to make myself useful in digital front, but I've a little less artistic flare than you guys. As almost always, the words come easily and talent later, I've tried designing logos, websites (pls @deathshadow , not now!) and joining as many contest sites I find redeemable. You'll be surprised though, by the amount I've gained in 3 months.. zero$!. I'm now trying affiliate sites, but I'm a bit introvert and target oriented, that I find my position literally in the dump! All of you have started from somewhere. Please let me know that 'somewhere' so that I can use it to get a grip on my life!. I currently took training on HTML, PHP, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and so called talented stuffs. This is almost the first time I joint a community, I hope your cumulative response will help me live a life worth flaunting ! Personal thank-you to each one who post a response.
Well... one of the important parts of trying to do any type of creative work is to have a portfolio to showcase. So build stuff. Sites, themes, code (if only small snippets of useful code) - promote your skills everywhere - partake in these forums, for instance, and show that you know stuff. Try getting local businesses (maybe ones without an online presence, or outdated online presence) to hire you to do their website. Talk to friends, colleagues, aquaintances, join "First Tuesday", "Last Thursday", "Last Friday" and so forth - make sure you have a LinkedIn profile showing off what you know, make sure you have a good webpage for your own business, and so on. If you try to take on clients from forums, contests and similar avenues, don't sell yourself too cheap - if it's small work, maybe a few hires on Freelance and similar sites to "get you off the ground" and make you receive stars/ratings/show that you have actually done stuff. Pick up the phone, load a local catalog, and start calling. Pick small, independent companies with next to no online presence, try to sell them a simple website - base it on something you know, even if that is Wordpress or something similar, which you can set up quickly - after a while, when you get a name, you can start creating your own solutions and so on. Yes, I know somebody here will tell you that isn't the right thing to do, that WP is crap and so on - but if it's about getting paid, or getting no money at all, you do what you need to do.
If you are doing layour using Photoshop, you are already half way to failure. You do not draw layouts you code them with semantically correct markup that says what the content is. It sounds like you are making the most common mistake for a novice. You are putting presentation at the top of the stack instead of where it belongs as the lowest priority. A good site starts out with CONTENT The content goes into coded layout that supports and enhances the content. Presentation styling does not get applied until the page is able to stand on its own with nothing but naked layout. All PS will do for you is teach you to do things backward. You do not need great presentation skills to be successful, but if you are not a very good coder, you are going nowhere unless you can find a developer who will hire you to do pretty pictures for him. In my local market there are hundreds of web designers looking for work, but real developers who can actually do the whole piece to make client content POP are in constant demand and well paid for both in house and contract work. The in demand group do not handicap themselves with poor choices like Photoshop and Dreamweaver. All they need is a text editor, samples of the content going on the site, and browsers for testing. Anything else just gets in the way; slows down development; and results in lower quality work.