ive seen alot of these new freelancer forums starting up, and was wondering peoples experiences were of both using a freelance webdesigner and being one? How is the transaction normally conducted? money first or money 2nd? do you talk to them on the phone? or just IM?
Well firstly, there is a difference between working for yourself and being freelance. Freelance implies that you contract your work out to companies and can end up working at there offices and having interviews, in this case your payment can go through a company to sort out your pay and taxes, this will as said be contract based so you dont have to worry about money. However, working for yourself is when you basically do projects as like your own company, you create the applets/systems and then sell it to the companies who are interested, in this way you should basically get something in writing to confirm the job, expected deadlines and contract price for the entire thing, this way in future circumstances you can refer to it if they ask for anything more and say "Well ill have to charge extra since this isnt on the original contract" and then draft up a new contact. Basically when you're working like this keep all the records, sort out your jobs correctly and make sure you pay your taxes or they will find you eventually and ask for all of it at once, which can really hurt. Expect to communicate via phone at some point since sometimes its just too difficult to get accross points over email and messenger, especially if you get bigger jobs with larger companies.
I know that most of the time when you are dealing with large amounts of money people like to talk on the phone. I myself have moved out of desiging for a bit and am working on getting a newtwork of sites up. I have sold about 15 sites over the past year and about 4 people wanted to talk over the phone. Keeping in mind those 4 people where the 4 who bought the most expensive sites.
Only conduct bigger business contracts if you can speak to them first in my opinion. You'll feel much safer when you can hear someone's voice on the other end of a project. Expect to go without money for quite a while if you are working for a professional company. You can usually expect 28days+ if sending invoices.
Well I've only done one project so far. It wasn't "design", it was more "coding". The layout was already designed, and i just had to code it in a semantic, clean HTML/CSS code. Here's how it worked out: 1. I code the layout. 2. Once I'm done, i send a screen shots to the client from different browsers (i test on IE, FF and Opera). 3. If my client likes it, he sends the money, i send him the initial work and then i proceed to work on the rest of the site. If he doesn't, or if he has any comments on my work, i go back to step 1 (not start over, but modify the code). It was fair enough for both of us.
From the buyers perspective: - Always look for references and past work of a freelancer you are hiring. - Always ask for phone number or at least an IM where the freelancer can be contacted. Remember that legitimate people are not afraid to talk on the phone over business. - Good freelancers usually demand 50% upfront, be prepared to cover that. Positive sides of being a freelancer: - One of the best things of being a freelancer is mobility, you can not trade that for anything! You can work anywhere in the world and at your own pace. Freedom of waking up in the morning at whatever time you want, go to the store, fix a car, anything........ anything any time you want. - As I already said, you have freedom. In IT Corporation you always need to have a reliable car to get you to work. You always have to be on time, on schedule, on top of things and work in a team which is hard. Negative sides of being a freelancer: - Lots and lots of competition, if you don't have talent nor experience, its very hard to make a decent buck (depending on where you live of course). - Another negative is that most of the time you have to work on your own and your decisions must be perfect, there isn't a whole lot of time for revisions, otherwise you fall back on schedule and slow down everyone. - And the third and last one in my opinion is that when you freelance, you don't communicate. For example, when you work in IT Corp, you work around the people with same interests as you. Lots of information gets exchanged and you learn new things quickly. I hope I answered your questions.
I tend to use freelancing to get a few extra quid at the end of the month, although atm its my main source of income (i don't have anything to pay for at the moment, so its quite good for my situation at present). If you're going to freelance, have a portfolio. It always helps. I've used freelancing to actually build up my porfolio and im now thinking about approaching businesses myself and asking for work, with a nice pretty portfolio to back me up. You just need to try it and see if its for you