Hey there folks,

 

I'm currently an Ethical Hacking student in Dundee and in my 3rd year at university. I have studied a few modules in web design and have a good knowledge of HTML and CSS with a more limited (but growing) knowledge of PHP and javascript. I'm currently stuck in a part time job offering very few hours and so I am looking for alternative ways of making money. I am thinking that I could target small, local businesses looking to get their business going on the web or just looking to improve on their sites. I reckon I could get templates close to what the client is looking for, build upon them for specific needs and sort out all the back end coding and security etc. The problem is, I have no idea how to go about getting set up and I have no portfolio to show potential clients. I would need to be able to work around my uni schedule and my current job (at least until I start making a regular income from this). I guess the biggest question here would be, is it worth it?

 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Welcome to the forums

 

How alot of us old timers (lol) got started was by building a couple of starter sites for free or low cost, eg for a friends business, just to get something in the portfolio.

 

Of course there's no reason why you can't build a few dummy sites for your portfolio, with working pages.

Thanks for the advice Blue!

Nice to see a fellow Dundee student! Although I am no longer a student. Ethical hacking, you must be at Abertay then? I graduated from Abertay in 2010 from Web Dev.

 

 

Is it worth it? Financially in the short term, yes and no. You will make more regular money from your part time job. You will never make enough regular money to quit the part time job. I tried for 2 or 3 years to quit my part time job to go freelance but with ever 2 good months I had 2 bad months where I wouldn't have much. Your best option is to either save the extra money you get or just treat yourself when you do get it because its very unregular to start off with. Maybe go to the Nether for a few pints

 

Long term though, the experience will set you for the rest of your career.

 

What I done was email all the small web companies in Dundee hunting for work experience. I done this a few times a week for about 3 months and eventually one of them gave me a 1 work placement at the start of the summer break between 2nd year and 3rd of Uni. I was kept on over the summer and had a total blast. I am still very good friends with the company owner that gave me the chance and opened the door to the rest of my career.

 

From there I never looked back, I seemed to always have freelance work but for all the work I done I never had regular payments in order to just quit the part time job. When it comes to exam time you NEED to have the ability to just not think about freelance and stop all extra working... something I made a mistake with and ended up paying for. I took too much on and ended up letting some people down, but mostly I let myself down because I should have known better.

 

So, in short... Don't go freelancing looking for clients of your own until you have experience of how the industry works. Clients will push and push and push, you need to learn how to manage client expectations and have a firm hand when telling them no. This is something you either learn from watching someone else like at a small company, or you learn the hard way by burning bridges with clients and losing money yourself.

 

Client management is the one thing Abertay can't teach you.

 

If you ever have questions about the Dundee web scene just message me, I might even be able to pass stuff your way!