The Web Design Freelancer Journey

What is good y'all John here, you know the vibes! In today's video, I'm talking about the Freelancers Journey!

I'm going to break down how you can start as a freelancer and segue into the agency side of things to help grow and scale your efforts. Again, this is optional you can stay a freelancer for as long as you want you can make really great money doing that. But if you want to scale your efforts and kind of pull yourself out of the day-to- day and become more of a manager, without being like a manager, just follow these steps.

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Backstory

First, I'll give you my story I started out as a freelancer doing SEO, SEM, essentially everything under the sun and then the first hire I made was a developer. I talk a lot about this in my last video which you can check out right up here. But in the meantime I'm going to give you the abridged version of it. Essentially, I started as a freelancer and then I hired a developer on contingency.

Essentially paying him an hourly rate to help me finish projects because I was spending three and four hours working on one banner when I can spend that money doing sales. And so I segued and slowly started to hire team members to grow from freelancer to agency owner. But I want to give you some tips and tricks on how you can take your freelancing skills, scale those up and really explode your efforts. 

Learn the Basics of Design

So one, if you're just starting out, you're like “Listen, I'm a freelancer I don't have a ton of experience” the first thing you want to do is learn the basics of design. I see so many designers out here that are just copying what they're seeing and they're not understanding the basics of layout, color theory, typography and user experience. Now you don't have to be a master of all these but it's good to have a thorough understanding of how they work, how color theory works and how you can leverage these different things to build a name for yourself in this industry.

You might see designs and things out there in the marketplace and say wow this looks really great and you don't know why it looks great right, you just know it does. A lot of this comes from design and color theory and these design principles that you need to excel in this industry. So that's one, earn the basics of design. There are tons of online resources, courses and books. Drop a comment below and I will give you my list of my favorites but ultimately I'm going to keep this video tight and concise, so I'm going to move on to step two.

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Getting Familiar with Web Design Tools

And that's getting familiar with web design tools. Now we're a branding and web design agency, so there's a few tools we use for almost everything. One is Figma, that's our prototyping tool to create High Fidelity wireframes. We don't even do lowfi or midfi, we go straight from the client sitemap. Which is basically the architecture and blueprint of a website, straight into High Fidelity because lowfi and midfi most clients don't even fully understand it.

They're not getting a ton of value from it and so they love to see what the website's actually going to look like. So we take it from sitemap to High Fidelity. Also another tool that we use is Webflow for web development and creating CMS items. This is an amazing tool for building websites. There's also Wix Studio which is another comparable platform that makes it really easy and simple to create beautiful functional websites that can convert to customers.

So when it comes to our tool stack we use Figma for prototyping and wireframes. We use Webflow, Shopify or Rick Studio to build our websites. We use Clickup for our project management but there are tons of other tools out there like Asana and many other tools that you can use to get your project done. You want to familiarize yourself with these web design tools to make your job easier as a freelancer and to expedite the process. 

Understand the Fundamentals of Web Design

Next you want to understand the fundamentals of web design. Now in this day and age it's not required to know HTML or CSS because there are so many tools like Framer or Webflow that leverage code tools but make it no code experience. So you don't necessarily have to know code, you have to understand how that specific platform works and build out your websites that way.

But it's really great if you do know HTML and CSS because it can influence how you look at responsive websites and keeping those dynamic by using modal and other items to expedite that and get the job done. So it's really great to know HTML and CSS it's not required but if you have a background in development or code it's really going to be beneficial for you in the future as you build out these websites.

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Explore Basic Interactivity

Next and this is number four, explore basic interactivity. Understanding how to use a platform like Webflow’s interactions and animations to enhance your website designs is going to make it more dynamic, it's going to help it stand out and you want to find a happy medium by incorporating animations but not doing going overboard where you're now bogging down and bloating up the website so it loads slowly. So you want to find that happy medium.

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Build a Portfolio

Number five, build a portfolio. I don't care if you don't haven't had one customer. You need to start building work around what you do immediately even if it's spec projects. If you see a web page on Amazon that you think you can make better, do it. And then document your entire process as you do it. Here's why I'm doing this. Here's the reason why I use this color. Here's what it would look on mobile. Here here's how it looks on desktop.

So share that journey throughout all of your social media channels until you have that final product. There’s so many people that I've seen, show their work and they get tons of leads coming in because they're consistently showing their audience what they're capable of. Your portfolio is crucial to attracting clients and customers and if you don't have any clients or customers, create spec projects look outside in the marketplace and see ways that you can help people fix their problems through a website.

Stay Updated and Network

Number six is, stay updated and network your butt off. You need to stay informed on the latest features, the latest trends. I mean, AI has become so prevalent in web design and development it can help you as a freelancer really become a three four person team as one person by using tools like ChatGPT and Bard to get the job done.

Also it's important to network with the community. I can't say this enough, it's important please make sure that you're on Twitter communicating with people in your community, talking about what you're doing, asking questions and staying engaged. I love to lean on the Wix and Webflow communities by asking questions, staying informed and then providing insights and things that I've learned.

So anytime I learn of a new tool or a new feature, I'm happily sharing it on social media because I understand that it's going to help other people and it's also going to put me in a position as a thought leader. And that's important especially when people are looking to collaborate and work they're going to look at you because you've been doing this consistently.

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Practice and Experiment

Seven is practice and experiment y'all. Gain experience from working on projects and test some projects and personal things that you'd like to work on. For example, your spouse wants to start a business, build out their website your neighbor has a HVAC company, maybe work on some branding or a website for them. Don't necessarily look for the quick money grab, look for building that longevity and developing a community around what you do and then documenting that journey. It's important to design ideas and push boundaries of what you can create and make in the real world.

Learn from Feedback

Number eight is learn from feedback. Be receptive to feedback. Listen to clients. Listen to folks in the community. And try to pull out the things that you understand and things that you can leverage in your design and development process. Constructive criticism is a powerful tool y'all, use it. Don't get discouraged. You're still in the learning process.

You're always learning right. We're all students of the game so it's important to listen to feedback and Implement things from people you look up to or aspire to be. There are forums, social media channels, live chats, so many places you can go to communicate effectively with other folks that are doing the same thing you’re doing.

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Continue Learning

Nine and this is one thing that's crucial, as you can see all the books behind me is to continue learning y'all. I'm a lifelong student. I'm always looking to learn the new feature, newest feature. I'm watching YouTube videos. I'm a part of paid online communities and courses. I'm essentially a sponge that's looking to soak up everything I can around this industry. As y'all can see I'm in my late 30s, so I got to stay ahead of the game y'all.

I got to make sure I know what's going on in this industry. What's happening and how I can be be relevant in a space like this. So we've already begun to use tools like ChatGPT, created our own GPT’s for clients started developing copy and processes to help that system thrive for our customers. And it also helps us expedite our process as well. 

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Specialize or Diversify

And lastly I talked about this in a recent video as well you can check that out in the top right. Also specialize or diversify y'all. As you progress you might realize that there are certain aspects of this industry you're really passionate about. We started out as a full service agency as I said and now we just do design and development for primarily startups.

There's UX, UI, E-commerce, SEO, SEM. So many different compartments in this industry that you can both piggyback off of and leverage to really niche down in your industry. Embrace the process, experiment with your ideas and always look for ways to innovate and develop your craft.

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Welcome to the world of freelance and web design. I wish you all the best! If you have questions or comments drop them below and I will see y'all next week peace.