Create Sean: Journey to Professional Designer

I’m in the process of trying to secure new clients. This is really hard to do when I don’t have any current referrals and live in a country where I don’t speak the local language well enough to network. I am of course networking with the expat population, but my experience is that they are for the most part cheapskates who wouldn’t buy their own mother a drink let alone pay for a web site (blogger is very popular).

I’ve registered with get a freelancer (and added a link to the sidebar), but it seems like either the budgets are too low for what’s being asked or the scope of the project is beyone my skill and knowledge. I have bid for two projects, but am not particularly hopeful at this point. If anyone is reading and would like to recommend another freelancing site I would be very grateful.

In my searching I also found this article by Andy Budd on the 7 habits of a highly successful freelancer web designer. The article is quite old, but still seems very relevant to me at this point.

In other news I’ve set up XAMPP on my desktop for local production. I’ve also set up a no-ip account so I can post a link to my local dev when I run into troubles and need help. It’s not running right now, but is available.

In the meantime, I’ve started mockups of two different personal sites: my family web site which desperately needs a new look and a portfolio site for my teaching (day job). Unfortunately I can’t find the notes I made a few months back about what i wanted to do with the site, so i’m starting fresh.