Getting Started With Web Design – Becoming a Designer – Part 3 Selling Yourself
Getting together all the software and hardware you need, learning about what the job involves and beginning those first tentative steps into coding and graphics can be a scary and sometimes expensive process. The important thing is not to lose sight of your goal of becoming a designer.
Hard work and practice really does pay off, but there are thousands of other designers all doing a similar thing. Take a few minutes to Google designers in your local town and you’ll probably find hundreds of results. So how do you even begin to make yourself stand out from the crowd? The first step is a professional and well designed website.
Working on your own website is a great way to begin your first steps as a designer with a client who won’t get annoyed about how long you take or how many mistakes you make: yourself.
A website is more important to a web designer than just about any other business you’ll find on the net. Not only can it give you all the usual important information about your work and services; the site itself can be an unspoken testament to the designers own skills.
Here are some tips when you’re thinking about your own site:
o Don’t overcompensate by trying to add flash images, complex programming and a ton of content. Even if you’re confident with using these things – and many beginners won’t be – you don’t need to show potential clients every single trick you know. Sometimes just a clean, fresh page with accessible information is more than enough to impress.
o Make sure that all your contact information is visible right on the front page. Let clients know either your email address or telephone number and you’ll have a much higher chance of being contacted for a quote.
o Make and maintain a portfolio
This last point is the single most important step to becoming a professional web designer. As someone that deals in a very visual medium you want to move away from telling people how good are you, and start showing them.
If you’re starting out, you won’t have any professional work to put in here. The smartest thing you can do is go out and find some work, either for free or at a reduced cost. Does anyone in your family run a business that could benefit from a website? Do you have any friends that could use your services for a project?
There’s no shame in getting your first few jobs from people close to you. The experience you’ll gain from working on their sites will be invaluable, and it will give your portfolio the first few entries. You also won’t have the pressure of creating something perfect first time.
Your portfolio should include a link to the sites you’ve worked on and a small explanation of what the client was looking for. Mention any special skills or languages you used to create the site. After that, you can let your previous work do the talking for you.
Web design Bristol
Web design Somerset
Author: James Godwin
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Android phones