Ask HN: Is freelance web development still a viable path in 2019?
With the advent of wix, squarespace, and other code free forms of website developement, it seems as if the demand for custom built sites are at an all time low.
The little demand left is shared among a seemingly never ending hord of aspiring freelance developers, many of whom are willing to work at prices far below that of what their skills had once demanded.
With a market such as this what place, if any, is there for new developers who wish to break into freelancing? Is there any hope at all for these developers? Or have the days of freelancing been put to an end by abstraction and oversaturation?
145 comments
[ 149 ms ] story [ 4061 ms ] thread1. Commoditized website development where any tom dick and harry can setup a quick website on wix/squarespace etc because frankly, they don't need more than that. It is really hard to compete against tools like these because they sell $2/Year websites (or something low enough)
2. There are businesses (small-mid sized) that have built something way back (read:late 90s-early 2000s) who are struggling with their in-house system and looking for a better solution. But they are too scared to think about changing because they don't know who to talk to and what it will cost. You need to find those businesses.
Source: My company finds the #2 and it is a gold mine.
A business that relies on those platforms can't be called business.
For instance, I operate a bar as a side business. I just knocked together a WordPress site in a few hours because I don't want the website to suck up too much of my time or to become a cost centre.
For us, it is easier in the sense that we only deal with one specific niche. So we use things like linkedin sales navigator, hunter.io (to find emails)and plain old google.com. You ill be surprised how many prospects will actually give you 15 mins of their time if your call is well researched and relevant to their needs. This is not something you can do in your part time though. Requires a lot of research and execution. More about quality than quantity.
1. Find businesses in your niche with not-so-great websites 2. Find their contact details 3. Contact them with specific action items that can improve their SEO, sales funnels, conversions etc
That still doesn't explain how you can find clients with poor in-house tools, unless they are talking about it publicly?
Thank you for answering, this sounds like a lot of work - no wonder prospects are willing to talk to you!
Also, if you're looking to niche and don't have a client in the chosen industry, you can use other success stories in the industry to the same effect. Our first client in one industry we got because I set up a meeting with one of the companies in the industry that had recently made a large update to their website like we would like to do for others in the industry. Sat with the COO that told me all the improvements they've seen, increased revenue, & other advantages to the website overhaul. I took that info to another similar (but not direct competitor) company and said we could offer the same advantages with a similar product. Literally walked into their office and introduced myself, gave a business card, then followed up with a few emails to various people in the business until the Owner called me up one day out of the blue. Had a contract signed a month later.
Source: My company employs this same type of method, and previously were generalists with no niche and didn't target specific companies we felt were a good fit. Being on the offensive and actively finding clients is night and day difference to before.
Seems to be a real shortage of quality developers And we offer competitive rates at my current place of work
I work in London and was just wondering what those rates go for.
Haven't been actively pursuing other leads yet because of the fact that I have a three month notice period and people don't seem to be willing to wait that long.
20, 30, 45 - 50 ( with bonus ), 60 - 80 ( with bonus )
The JS field is booming if you are passionate there are many desperate companies I think I may even be getting underpaid in my new role But I have WFH and perks :)
Also I've had 3 months notice on both my jobs it sucks but many companies will wait ( especially larger ones ). Although my new one is 1 month luckily
Just go on any of the big job sites, search "Junior Ruby on Rails" in your area and take a look at whats available. If you find some good jobs, apply, go for an interview - if you get an offer put that to your current employer, maybe they will match it, if not you now have the option of leaving to a higher paid job if thats what you want. Its pretty simple really!
EDIT: Sorry I read that you are "outside london", but really you said you are "just outside london" - does that mean you can commute into london? If so then at 23k you are being paid far below market rates.
Basically I'm a sole developer for this company - I do everything from developing the Rails app itself to managing a bunch of servers running Docker / Docker Swarm. Fun.
If I were I would start applying to jobs, and when they ask you what salary you would expect I would go for 35k, you could reasonably push it to 40k depending on how confident you are at negotiating.
Feel free to PM me if you have anymore questions.
Do your research and you will see what the going rate is in your location.
You are in a good position to get that pay rise, because your current employer would have to backfill and pay market rates anyway.
In terms of your notice period - if you don't like working there anymore, quit now and then look for jobs after month 1 or 2, so that would give mean your new employer would have to wait only a month.
Or consider contracting.
There’s plenty of need for developers, yet almost no companies consider remote positions.
I know because I've been looking recently..
You have to really want that person because it is a trade off in terms of admin overhead and cost.
Today, we have one full time team member in Germany and in the past we had someone in the Netherlands too.
In both cases, we used specialised payroll companies who charge a fee to be that person’s legal employer. They take care of taxes, health insurance, and other legal requirements. The cost of such a service has varied between €350 and €450 a month.
The real cost though is in covering the different payroll taxes in other countries. Add that to the payroll company’s fee and it costs us at least £10,000 more each year to employ someone in Germany than if they were in the UK.
I’ve seen confusion here and on twitter as to why more companies won’t hire remote outside their own country. The reason might be that it’s relatively expensive and outside the company’s competence.
Details on tax optimization vary depending on your country of residence and the country where you opened your company.
For the "employer" company this is also very simple as they're just paying the invoices you send them.
Some countries, including the Netherlands and Germany, specifically prevent this in either law or regulation.
Offering remote positions is not just a case of throwing a switch. It requires significant cultural and process changes.
Speaking from experience, I’d prefer to work for companies that are committed to remote rather than one that accommodates one or two remote people.
Building websites for individuals (personal portfolios), non-commercial clubs and small scale businesses like barber shops or restaurants is a pain. You have to compete with website builders like Squarespace and pre-made templates for Wordpress. The amount of work needed to create one of these is way too expensive for most customers. There is still a demand for people settings these sites up (using a pre-made template), installing updates and so on, but I would hardly call this front-end development.
As @bnt said already: The market for JavaScript developers is booming. If you learn Angular, React or Vue.js, I am pretty sure you will not regret it.
If you present yourself in a good way on Linkedin, you will be flooded with requests from recruiters.
I would go with React, because there are the most jobs waiting for you. The market is huge!
Now I mostly work for a recruiting agency. They get a cut from what I make (quite a huge cut actually), but they in return make sure that they have work for me.
I am still figuring things out. What I most struggle with is finding a good work-life balance. I work way much than I did before.
Before starting to freelance you should make sure that you have enough money to survive ~3 month without any gigs. It will also take a while until your first gigs are paid. Something to keep in mind.
Being on Linkedin is absolutely essential imo, if you don’t have a network already. I just use the site to answer to recruiter-messages, that’s it.
Would you mind describing your path from deciding to freelance and where you are you now? You mention networking and unpaid/low paid gigs. I assume that you found projects in your near network, these projects were lower risk / with trusted connections, then you eventually built a portfolio and got the mechanics of freelancing down. Then made a connection with the agency and have continued your success inertia.
Congrats by the way!
My path to freelancing went something like this: I used to have some small gigs on the site while being employed—projects which were not interesting for the company I worked at the time anyway. This way, before I actually quit, I already was able to write invoices and did not have to figure this out as well (but it is not that hard).
My first project was a web-experience for a venue which was paid okay, but resulted in a lot of back-and-forth with the client. I am still working for that client every now and then. I was applying to a job-offer of a small agency on a job-board looking for a freelancer for that project. I spent a lot of hours initially to go through all available freelance jobs on that (German) platform, made a selection what I would be able to do and wrote some messages. I don’t know any more how many messages I wrote, but it were less than five until I got a gig.
The second project was a big Vue.js one for an agency, which is still ongoing part-time. I got this gig via a freelance consultancy. Everything is quite personal. No corporate. Remote work okay. At first I spent a few weeks working from their office, then enough trust was built for remote work. I now track my time and write an invoice each month. Being billed by the hour gives me some peace of mind to not make wrong estimations. It is still hard for me to realistically guess how much feature xyz or a whole web applications will be. I guess that comes with time and involves to look at projects in retrospect more.
Since starting to freelance I noticed a few changes:
I say “no” more often. I had to say no to a few projects in between. Mostly interesting, badly paid short term projects. If I did not have to care about money I would have loved to work on these, but right now I prefer “stable”, well-paid projects. This is also because I come from a creative background, where projects are often interesting, but chaotic. Finding the balance between interesting and stable is not easy and everybody has to decide on their own what is important to them. Working on better paid (maybe less creative / interesting) gigs gives me more time to work on my own projects (in theory, if I would reject more client-work). It is very important to spend enough time writing proposals. It happened a few times already that the client and I had different views on the final outcome of a project. If you took your time to put everything in writing in the proposal, it will be much easier, because there is no ground (or very little) for ambiguity. At first I just wrote something like “Design and build website”. Now it will be much more detailed. I will write how many pages the website has, if there is animation, if xyz is involved or not and so on. My productivity in general increased. When being employed you usually know that e.g. at 5 PM you can go home and do whatever you want. If you don’t feel like working between 3–5 you have to look busy or just do some work somehow. When you are freelancing you can listen more to your body and decide on your own when working is okay. If I notice that I am not productive I will most likely stop working and continue at a later point. This way I get more done in an hour of freelance work than an hour of work in my old job, which gives me a better overall feeling.
One last thing about the biggest down-side from my perspective: work-life balance. You have to decide for yourself when it is enough. For me it is not easy to tell myself: “You worked enough today, now you should do something fun”. There is always more to do. Also if you get more done today, less work will be there tomorrow. Right? Nope. I personally need to find rules to restrict myself regarding working hours. Having some (personal) rules might make things easier.
There's a lot of react contracts on LinkedIn which you usually find through recruiters that take around 25%, they pay well but the work isn't as interesting or engaging to me (usually big corporations in generic markets).
The best work for sure is through referrals. My first gig was through an old boss, and I'm starting to learn that letting your friends and old coworkers know you're looking for work in the near future is often better than taking something more 'secure'. Clients often want someone immediately and aren't willing to wait two or three weeks while you finish up a previous project, especially if the project is more attractive (and the competition is higher).
I used to do a decent amount of this work, and I couldn't agree more. Outside of something I'm going to do Pro bono, I turn down requests altogether. Generally speaking, the budgets are nearly non-existent. And, you end up fighting with clients about small details that don't matter.
My suspicion is there are two things driving this: Angular is More Enterprisy™, and the businesses that have committed to Angular have a slightly smaller pool of experienced Angular devs to draw from, increasing dev negotiating power. I expect that to continue for as long as Angular can hold a significant enough threshold of the market, but regardless, longer term, I expect React to be the new jQuery (essential for most web devs to know).
However, contracting seems as strong as it ever has done, especially in areas like Javascript and Python development. I would opt for contracting rather than freelancing, especially if you are able to get remote contracts.
I know lots of people who do make a living from web development, but they are largely within medium sized companies that have a marketing/sales budget and are able to cope with multiple large contracts simultaneously.
Unfortunately this usually means having built your prior career around said software as it's not always cheap /easy / possible to get a cop and self-learn. There are exceptions of course.
AEM and Salesforce developers make a ton of money, especially if they are good. Contract Sitecore developers also make a ton of money, and never seem to be short of work.
The scariest money I've seen was from a guy that is/was an "ActionScript developer". He made most of his money travelling across the country to work on maintaining and extensing retail systems that used Flash as an interface, and ActionScript for backend logic. He was working for a client of my employer, and we got to chatting when we were in the city for a few days. I didn't get an overall figure, but he'd made £10k that week...
It didn't sound like he enjoyed the work, but most of his skill set was actively around legacy tech - ColdFusion, Cobol, Classic ASP, etc.
Almost all Web sites are similar these days, and there’s a value to designing the UI/UX in a way users expect. I suggest that, for startups, and small businesses, there’s virtually no need for anything other than a basic Web presence. With the rise of social media, the appropriate account(s) will solve that problem for most.
I worked through the wild west of this industry, and it was semi-fun, but I think we’ve moved on, things have settled down, or are settling down, and there’s a minimum sufficient requirement for a Web presence that’s pretty freakin’ minimal.
Websites need design, visual assets, integrations, customised features, etc. It’s definitely a volume trade: you need to primarily be concerned with new biz, but it’ll be viable for a long time to come if you know what you’re doing .
For startups it’s even more important.
I think it heavily depends on your network and the market in your location. Sure, if you're in the Bay Area, freelance might not make sense; but find a city with 100-200k population and start building a network among small-business owners/operators and you can do just fine.
If 2-3 represents all of them then I would just put in conversation with them that you'd appreciate any referrals they can make and if you think it would help offer them some financial benefit for it (the amount is culture dependent, I find).
If you exhaust them and the rest of your professional network, try local industry meetups (especially industries that you have made sites for before).
If all else fails then try your luck in the forums and job boards. I suggest taking on small stuff to get your foot in the door and aggressively vetting the personal and business characteristics of new clients for this way.
I'm back to full time employment though so make of that what you will!
I'm also at full time employment but I miss the autonomy and working from home.
What exactly would you try to automate? (Having done some coding) I see very little room for automation. Social media marketing is all about strategy and content. Or is it not?
1) Curating third-party content to post.
2) Scheduling owned content to post.
3) Sending DMs to new followers.
Also, it’s not only about content but about proper timing and strategy in your communications.
Recycling content, finding out optimal posting times, posting content ... sure, these can all be automated.
But how do you automate generating content, especially good content and not article spinners or whatever? Can you explain?
You can create pipelines that save labor - like clients for platforms that make answering common questions / interacting with users way more comfortable and suited to your targeted workflow than the default clients.
On the creativity front, you can also generate random, semi-plausible stuff to inspire you when you're in a rut.
It's not quite about making everything automated, but about leveraging code, systems thinking, and collaborators in such a way that your performance is incredible. It's really feasible.
To your point about "becoming a social media expert", I actually began lightly dabbling in this, and felt nauseous after some time...Allow me to describe:
You begin admirably trying to help a business (or individual) to gain legitimate views and insights from their audience...but hoping to grow to full, positive engagements, and so forth - not for merely having a social media presence, but rather, with the overarching goal of growing their business, or meeting some other business goal of theirs...and eventually, they begin to get addicted, and whether its a true value to their business goals or not, they begin chasing the dragon of growth. And, much like i can only imagine like drugs - they get hooked. Whatever ethical advice i would provide is ignored, and they only want advice on how to grow their audience like crazy (think: hockey stick growth numbers, etc.) including employing fake follow bot accounts, etc. Their "chase" for ever more audience continues on a darker route...wanting ever more clicks/likes/views/attention - even at the risk of their business' main value proposition. They begin outright ignoring your continuous protests. You begin to feel sick - as if somehow you are the gun salesperson selling a gun to a person you are only now discovering is dangerous. Your client keeps pushing you for more and more dark patterns to employ, and you continue to refuse...ultimately ending the business relationship.
Now...are all clients like what i noted above? No, i'm sure there are good clients out there that don't go dark...But for me, I kept encountering the dark ones. So, for what its worth, I would not go down the route of being a social media expert. Good luck, and cheers!
Are you sure?
Even with the big projects I've gotten, it winds up being about $20/hour. Versus about $60/hour at a regular job
With a conventional visual design process it takes time for some visual mockups to be made, approved and then sent on to the programmers for them to make in a paint-by-numbers process. By then you have a team of ten and all of them have rent/mortgages to pay. Before you know it the client have a six figure bill. It is actually very difficult to make money if you own an agency and have these UX people, UI people, SEO people, marketing people, sales staff, micro-managers, team leads, test engineers, backend developers, frontend developers, devops people, accounting and admin staff to pay for. The actual job as brought in might actually only have two programmers doing the work that actually gets delivered. Everything else is meeting room hot-air.
This agency team is not going to be able to move quickly to use CSS Grid as everyone is specialised and the process that goes with it is rigid. However, CSS Grid enables frontend web development to be done in a fraction of the time. Getting a team to us it though? Not easy when people know what they know and are used to doing things the way they have always done them.
Everyone has had a website already in the world of business. They know how much it costs and how tedious the process is. They have established their branding along the way. The UX of the web has also settled. But what they don't know is that for the first time ever the web has a decent layout engine - CSS Grid - so what they see as the website no longer has to be built with hacks and more hacks. Even if these hacks are professionalised and given fancy words like 'responsive' it is still a world of hacks and code that is a nightmare to maintain.
For this reason - the game changing nature of CSS Grid - I believe that freelance web development is not only viable it is a veritable gold mine. The only thing holding you back being the realities of running your own business, charging people and getting paid as well as doing the actual work.
CSS Grid is a new skill set. There is no horde of developers up to speed with it. The benefits can be sold to clients as it is quicker, results in pages that download quicker and it can be maintained. Accessibility comes into the bargain too as for CSS Grid there is no need for HTML to be a mix of div elements and class attributes, it can use the proper HTML5 elements and have the accessibility benefits that these elements bring.
There is no point competing in the world of 'naive HTML'. You can make qualitatively better web pages for people and command a premium for it that no agency can pay you for.
So the challenge is to market one's CSS as a quality product rather than the naive CSS that most websites use. So it is a 'Mercedes' rather than 'GM' product, a Swiss watch rather than a badge engineered generic Chinese watch, a fine meal rather than a bag of fast food.
The reality of most websites is that they are throwaway, within a couple of years it will look tired. If this premium website product can last longer without having a refurbishment then that can make a difference to a business that cares about more than the next quarter.
However, those are ugly websites. You could make more being a beautiful website creator. That is a different skill, requiring vision.
You could make more complex websites, ones that interact with the database in custom ways. Full stack web development is not dead. Although likely pays less than working at fortune 500 with the same skill set.
For established businesses in healthcare, accounting, legal, and many other non-obvious, absolutely. A law firm might pay 100k for a simple website because they both have the budget and want to be absolutely sure they're paying for quality.
So if you target the right clientele and position your freelance business well (look established and not like there's a chance you could be out of business tomorrow), it's absolutely viable.
If you package yourself properly (for example, "I help founders take their startup idea from dream to reality"), you have now placed yourself in a new, more valuable, bucket. You have to hunt for the proper client fit but your offering is of greater value (in this circumstance you make dreams a reality).
Granted, entrepreneurs aren't the best market but the key is having some differentiator in your market and not offering a commodity service (which is what Wix, Squarespace, and frankly "web development" is).
The x axis is "complexity of website" and the y axis varies. For the red line that slopes from top left down to bottom the y axis is "demand for website". The blue line is "Cost of website produced by web developer". Everything to the left of the vertical green line has a tool (wix, squarespace, wordpress etc) that makes it easy to produce that type of website. And over time that green line moves along the x-axis complexity scale. But the green line will only go so far, because you can't justify handling increasing complexity with a decreasing demand indefinitely.
Also, at some point it becomes easier to hire a web dev to make you a custom ecommerce solution, than to search through the 500 ecommerce solutions to find the one you want, when what you want is weird.
My strategy since 2006 has been to stay to the right of the green line, but not too far. My experience is that clients I've had on the right side of that line are still clients, and those who were not, have moved on.
I think there's a lot of legs left in that strategy. Finding a client who is on the right hand side of the line often means starting with some kind of integration work they are struggling with, or updating a legacy web app, which is always a pain. Or doing something weird. But once you've got through that successfully you're established as a meaningful cog in their corporate machine.
Interestingly, I drew the graph in 2006, and wix was founded that year, and was one of the examples I used at that time, so it's funny to see it still being mentioned now.
The strategy has given me a varied set of problems, I've worked on custom ecommerce solutions, funding application and claim management systems, CPD management, eLearning tools, and other more mundane things.
I've earned more each year I've been doing this, and it jumped up a couple of years ago, so it's still working well for me.
My business grew organically, with introductions from friends, old colleagues and distant family. So there were calls at the beginning. Now my business number goes straight to voicemail, and important clients get to call my mobile. So the answer is that I don't do marketing and sales so to speak, I do quotes, so I suppose that should be included. That accounts for less than a day a month.
Different clients will value your skills differently. If you can fix a website and that creates 10% more sales revenue, somebody making $2,000 can only afford to compensate you $200 or else they're losing money. But the same skills and labour to a client making $2,000,000 represents $200,000 of value. If you want to make money, you have to work for the people who value your time, skills, and labour _more_.
So with that in mind, here's my secret: the profile of a profitable freelance client. This has been from my experience, and I've made money from clients that don't fit this profile too, but in general this is what making money in freelance looks like now:
- US-based small to medium sized business
- that is already profitable and making money via their website
- that is an organization still small enough you can speak directly to the owner or a key decision-maker
This is the kind of client who:
- has money to pay you
- values your skills
I think too many freelance clients think that because they are a small business, they must work for like-sized businesses, but tiny businesses simply don't have the money to value what you do enough to compensate you. A profitable company that's already making money from their website is precisely who will value what you have to offer more!
The client doesn't even need to be a business that's larger than your own, as long as they have lots of money. There are websites out there that are run by literally one person and get tens of millions of page views per day. Be the engineer who can solve his scalability problems, and he'll throw at you whatever money you ask for.
I've also found professional associations to be well-paying clients. They're too busy making money in their own professions, if they encounter an IT problem, they'll pay anything to make it go away.
If you go down this path, though, be prepared to read and endless stream of legacy code, write compatibility layers, do live data migrations, and spend a lot of time in general trying to untangle other people's spaghetti PHP/HTML/JS/whatever. It's an established website, after all. You're not there to rewrite it in your favorite framework. Come to think of it, maybe that's why I face so little competition ;)
At the smaller scale (think $2k budgets), clients are honestly better off with a Wordpress template. I never recommend Wix or Squarespace because the code is usually atrocious, which impacts mobile and SEO and accessibility, but there are lots of excellent WP templates.
Clients who have bigger budgets can now look at things like:
- Honest to goodness great copywriting. If the purpose of their website is to sell their products and services, great copywriting is the easiest way to improve. It's inexpensive compared to everything else, it's super fast and easy to test ideas and optimize results.
- E-Commerce. This is usually best served with a service like Shopify, but it's still relatively involved enough that clients tend to like having some assistance in the process.
- Uniquely good design. Design CAN have a tremendous impact on a business. But I list it in 3rd here because the vast majority of web designers are putting out the same site[1] over and over again. If you're not doing something truly unique, or if the client's needs are best solved with a relatively standard template, then why are you re-inventing the wheel?
- Engineering. Virtually any business can benefit from good web engineering, because the out-of-the-box options will never 100% meet any businesses precise needs. However, the cost versus benefit is usually far too high for most businesses.
This is why I say the money is at the higher end of the market. Businesses that have annual revenue in the double digit millions will not be well served by default Wix or Wordpress templates. They generally need quality design, copy, and engineering. And they won't be scared off if that ends up costing $50k or $100k or even $500k, so long as the value is there.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you can make some quick-hit money helping clients who simply don't want to do it themselves. I tend to charge roughly $3k for a simple site, I'm 100% transparent about what they're getting (a template, customized for branding; out-of-the-box WP functionality; very light copy editing), and so far a lot of smaller businesses have been happy with that service. The value is there for them, and they get the confidence of knowing I'll solve any unforeseen problems that might come up.
[1] Ex: https://www.dagusa.com/
I can't vouch for Wix, but the code in Squarespace is actually usually very well done and semantic for most themes. And honestly, they can end up being just as bad or good as any WP template you'll find, so I wouldn't personally just throw that accusation around.
Fair enough. I may be scarred from seeing some truly horribly implementations in the past. But I've seen just as bad in WP.
Freelance doesn't necessarily mean you need to work for businesses without a budget.
However, if you're marketing yourself purely as a "web developer", you're already commoditizing your skills. Instead, become an expert in a specific type of business/client and sell your ability to solve problems in that business domain. Your clients should not care about the tech you're using. You need to instead be seen as the expert who solves their problems with tech.
If you go this route, not only is freelancing viable - I think it's the best way to maximize your earnings as a developer.
I wrote about freelancing in more detail if you're interested: https://andyadams.org/everything-i-know-about-freelancing/
Any examples you'd like to share?
A couple of lame examples:
Instead of "I'm a React Developer", think "I build web-based software for the mining industry".
Instead of just "I build websites", think "I help nursing homes build websites that bring in new clients"
Though nothing has changed with the freelancer themselves, this has many benefits including:
* Helping the freelancer to realize who their ideal client is.
* Allows said clients to self-select into the freelancer's services - clients don't know they need a Shopify developer, but they sure know they need a website that can take customer orders and do fulfillment.
I actually would not want to limit myself to one industry. Working at a digital agency has its short comings but one thing I enjoyed is the variety of clients we get.
For example, I have a mixed skill set of web development and graphics programming. That's allowed me to interview at companies from a variety of business problems that leverage the graphics skill set, such as CAD/CAM, indie video games, or space mission simulation.
I want to say "I solve these problems" without limiting myself to one industry but relying on my tech skill as the niche. Is that just as good?
The trap I fell into: I specialized in WordPress performance. I was really good at solving complex performance problems. But...who is my client? Maybe eCommerce stores, but which of them have performance problems? Typically, when they did have performance problems they felt it was a temporary problem and didn't _really_ want to spend the budget to fix it.
So that's my warning: If you tout yourself as a tech-specific problem solver, you should have a clear picture of how you're going to find clients with that specific problem. I find this harder to do than the reverse process of picking a type of client and THEN identifying their problems.
PHP dominates the web, but I'm sure there is plenty of business elsewhere. The internet is pretty vast - some of my clients are in niches you've likely never heard of. If you were working in particular industries, you might see ASP/Java more often, depending on who the major players are there.
One caveat though...you gotta know your shit. The days of babysitting websites and charging fairly outrageous fees are mostly over, and good riddance.
I've found that true LAMP or MEAN-full stack dev is really in demand now...so much so that I recently raised my hourly to a once-only-dreamed-about $100/hr US on Upwork, and I'm getting more interest in my services by the day.
Sometimes I actually have to pinch myself to believe this work environment is real...I often tell my friends, as sincerely as possible and with true humility, that I work in an absolute dream world that, up to now, only Rock Stars inhabited.
I mean...who else gets to work their own hours?...do whatever I really want while working?...travel the country/hemisphere on a whim?...goto music festivals and get paid while doing so?...live on the beach one month and on a mountain top another?
Well..I do. And man, am I grateful.
Find a small business with a crappy website and make them a better one. I mostly did restaurants/bars. I took partial payment in food.
If you are in it for the money, then no, it is not worth it. If you are in it for experience and to progress in your career, then go for it!
Obviously, I can't guarantee it will work for you, too. But it worked for me. I recently landed my first contract with a start-up, and I should never have to go back to taking partial payment in food :-)
I built a sass called , https://freepage.io. that allows people do get their own personalized subdomain, SSL and publish a webpage using markdown. You dont need hosting etc. Anybody and I mean anybody can create a website in a few minutes. so if you are a freelance learn something lie nodejs, or golang for backend. lots of demand.
1. In SEM and SEO both, technical performance is blossoming as a crucial need in both search engine ranking and the ad bidding process, say nothing of the benefits to mobile conversions and decrease in bounce rates. All of this is well-covered in numerous e-com/retail studies. There's significant value here for companies if you can articulate why. AMP isn't a cure-all in any way, and many clients are going to look at the investment versus return and decide instead that the investment in optimizing what they already have is worth the price.
2. Accessibility is also massively growing, due to increasing litigiousness and the contemporary view that the ADA covers websites in general as opposed to individual legal mandates (such as those in public education, healthcare, etc). There are also specialized, legitimate certifications such as the IAAP [1] where you can pretty much write your own paycheck with the amount of consulting work out there.
But you _really_ need to know your shit for both of them, and increasingly, specialized consultancies in these areas have formed or are forming to go after those companies. You're not going to get away with half-assing it either--especially #2 due to the legal liability--and you'll absolutely have to demonstrate your value. Additionally, this actually opens up opportunities to consult for companies that make site builders and other tools, to ensure they're thoroughly considering these specialized aspects of development.
There's also still a lot of good remote roles out there for more experienced folks; about 3/4 of the Front-End friends of mine clear well above $100k/year working for established companies and startups in a 100% remote basis. The best way to get into that realm is networking; the adage that the most important way to get where you want to go is through networking is true, as is the adage that a good percentage of the good jobs are never even posted.
But as for the bottom-of-the-market, I started back in '97 doing those types of small websites, and there's been hardly any appetite for freelancers in terms of being able to make a sustainable living of it. If you're going to go this route, you need to land profitable fish with a real need and actual money to pay you with.
[1] https://www.accessibilityassociation.org/certification