126 Studios Blog

I have been doing web design for about seven years, with most of the time spent learning and discovering xHTML, CSS, JavaScript and the many other languages that you may find on the internet. I built 126Studios.Com as a placeholder for my own portfolio, with the chance to grow and offer more services such as web hosting. The idea spawned two years ago from my own imagination to start something that could have the possibility to grow into something much larger. I am still very, very small in terms of what I have done, and what I offer. As time passes, I would like to grow into a firm and have a staff of a reasonable size.

Through my experience, there are a few decisions that you are going to have to make on your journey. The first being, what do you want to offer. Meaning, do you want to offering hosting to all of your clients, or have that set up separately. I’ll break this down a little bit farther to, do you want to resell hosting and profit on it or not. This can go in two ways for you. If you do resell the space, you are going to have to be responsible for making sure the clients domain and service is running. Domain names only last for a certain amount of time before they expire. If you host, you have to handle this information. This does lead to more profit in the long term. If you don’t want to offer this, there is less responsibility and less to worry about-but less money is involved. Reseller hosting will run you at least $200.00 per year. Of course you could host others and this amount can become profitable-saying that you have a client or two. I charge at least $10 per month for hosting, meaning I make at least $120 per year. You can research what hosting will cost and you should discover an amount between $4-$25 per month-depending on what the hosting company will offer. I currently use Arvixe to host my sites, http://www.arvixe.com/ with the Reseller Option.

Regardless of your option, I suggest you find a way to track your clients contact and billing information. You may be able to find online solutions throughout the web, or you could just make an Excel/Access file and go that route as well. Keeping organized is a good thing to work with.

Personally, through experience finding a client is the most difficult part of being a Freelance Designer. You have to go out and find companies that do not already have web sites OR companies that have web sites that are not up-to-date or good looking.

Another issue is deciding what to charge. This was a major issue for me, and still is now. You are going to have to find a rate that is high enough for you, but not overly expensive for your client. Along this, I charge a project rate, and not hourly. Tracking hourly rates is way to much work and is hard to prove if questioned. I’d personally try to set a price that is close to a good rate and multiply that by the amount of hours worked (estimate). You may loose money in the short term, but that happens in this kind of work. Projects typically take me 30 hours, so I try to find an hourly rate and multiply. You may find that $15-$30 per hour fits based on what you are doing. A smaller project should be charged at a lower rate and a more difficult project should be charged at a higher rate.

As for taxes and the legalities, I have been told to not worry about this until after I have my Bachelors. This comes from family members, friends and other people who know how the tax and money world works. I honestly have not seeked professional advice in this category, so take it for what it’s worth. Professional advice may be more beneficial if you know someone that owns a business. You can always avoid this by accepted money as gifts and grants which do not count as income (I believe). This is something that I fully do not understand, so don’t quote me on the what I have stated for legalities. Since you are still small and not making large sums of money (thousands), you should be fine. But as I have said, I am not a legal/tax expert so what I have said comes only from what I’m told and have experienced.

Lastly, have a work contract ready. These are important and will help secure jobs as well as money prior to working, as well as during and after. I have attached an example for you to see and understand.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 20th, 2010 at 9:53 AM and is filed under Inside Look.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.