So the best thing that has been advised for me is to get a job as a website designer so that I am ready to set up my own business, it'll give me a bit of money before being able to run my own business online, I do have my website running and I bet they would find it, they would search my name on the internet, they would see that my plan was to move on from them eventually and build a business.

 

I would like knowledge of each area of web services, I need to know design, development, seo, marketing in order to start my own business or otherwise I would pay other people, usually people aren't going to go to a business that just offers SEO services without the others, I guess in order to a designer you have to have a developer but you wouldn't need to know SEO, digital marketing could also be a service you could offer seperately too, but usually when people see a nice website they trust it, regardless of whether you're only offering SEO services or digital marketing services or not.

 

I think it's a good idea for me to get a job in this so I can get a feel of what it's actually like developing a website for a client, rather than learning aspects of the industry. It may take a little while before I earn something so I will apply.

 

How am I going to work around this, if I'm applying for jobs and they search my name, then find I already had a website they won't employ me, they'll know I'm moving on. I don't have any qualifications though, but I can say what I've been learning.

People have to start somewhere and have to learn their trade. It's no different to setting up as a builder or a car mechanic. You wouldn't expect to leave school, pick up a trowel and start building a wall. You need to learn how to do it and therefore you would start work with an experienced builder and learn from them.

 

What you do then is up to you. If you stay in a paid job you are at the beck and call of an employer but you do have some security and protection as an employee. You also have no liabilities.

 

If you work for yourself you have to keep on top of everything yourself. You will have a lot more freedom but you need to understand finances and your obligations to HMRC and the Contributions Agency. If anything goes wrong and you go bust you have little protection and before you can say 'bankrupt' the smirking bailiffs will be walking out the door with your belongings whilst some bloke from the bank is changing the locks on the door.

 

Just a little negativity to offset the chorus of calls to go it alone. For every start up that succeeds many more will fail within a fairly short period of time. No industry can stand over saturation and web design is actually a niche business. Only a narrow sector of society will ever actually want a website of their own. Also remember that many now reach straight for the DIY builders available from Moonfruit, WIx, 1&1, etc, so an already quite small pool of prospective clients gets smaller.

For me I started freelance (self employed) when forced via redundancy from a design agency where I was a junior. I would recommend going for a job first as the learning curve from hobby to profession is quite impressive. Even uni graduates find the entry point hard as it's not designing for a degree where you have time to rethink, you have clients (and the boss) on your case to get it out the door.

 

Most design companies are ok with you freelancing on the side, it keeps you sharp, just so long as they're small customers which the agency wouldn't entertain. There are some design companies with a no moonlighting rule but as I said, a small bed and breakfast site for under £1k is not the market your employer will likely be in.

 

Using this approach will give you time to improve, to learn of other designers at the day job and impress other small business owners without the need to actually 'go out and get the client' as they will start to come to you by name, this is where my business has moved to and I now play with some pretty cool clients who really don't care how much I spend on development.

 

... usually people aren't going to go to a business that just offers SEO services without the others ...

 

100% SEO companies is very common. It's also common for a designer / developer to specialise in a certain field and 'keep up' in others.

 

I guess in order to a designer you have to have a developer but you wouldn't need to know SEO

 

Quite the contrary but sadly a lot of designers / developers think this is the case. For developers they need to understand pages and paths, especially ways to prevent false / duplicate paths made from an sql structure. Designers need to understand the balance of word count / image ratio, semantic markup, open graph data etc which are all technical SEO.

I might have read your post wrong, but if you are trying to get a job at a web design agency without any relevent qualifications or commercial experience you will need a good portfolio of sites/designs you have made and a great deal of enthusiasm to even get a telephone interview or a call back from a recruitment agency.

 

Junior positions that offer the amount of training you are looking for are highly sought after these days, there are a lot of young (and not so young) graduates trying to get into this business, and people looking to make the move from freelancing to something more stable.

 

Interviewers are usually pretty sharp - they will grill you about your experience and future plans. If you are planning to hot foot it back to your freelance business after costing them 1000s in training and staff time and before you add any value to their business they will pick up on this, unless you are a very good liar.

 

Also, don't assume that any agency you work for will be cool about you taking freelance projects on. They certainly don't allow it where I work.

 

Best of luck with your future. This is a tough business to get into, but very rewarding in my experience.

 

Dorian

 

Best of luck with your future. This is a tough business to get into, but very rewarding in my experience.

 

 

 

This. Highly rewarding, i'd go as far to say this is the best industry to be involved in but I may be just a little biased!

Starting from somewhere is always appriciable, It might be the stepping stone, never let others know about it, since they then might become obstacle for you growth.