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Be very careful :suspect:

Once you devalue your product or mechandise (or time)

You will NEVER be able to put your prices up:mad:

Be very clear about how many websites you will design and make the recipient aware that it is a brochure on your part.

Switch off free mode asap - set a target for doing so:thumbsup:

Good luck

Are you a designer or developer?

A bit of both really - I have experience in software engineering and web design.

Free websites - good luck ! :|

Yeah, and cheers for lowering the bar for the rest of us. People working for free are what makes it so hard to get a decent living from freelancing.

But yeah, good luck with the free websites.

Everyone has to start somewhere, without a portfolio, its difficult to get any work.

Tried contacting local charities?

I don't think it is fair to say achorste is lowering the bar for others, mr_chris. Everyone has to start somewhere in freelancing, building up a portfolio before pitching for paying clients.:nono:

Achorste, Keep doing what you are doing and i'm sure your business will be a big success. :)

Actually, this is a serious issue.

One of my other hats is in film making, and it's incredible how many people will do work for nothing. It means that a lot of professionals in the field are expected to wrk for 'expenses plus DVD' on small budget film projects. Of course, you can't live on expenses and a DVD from a project that may have taken up several weeks of your time, and so people end up never making teh transition from doing this to being a full time professional, because when they DO start to charge there is always another person willing to get their break in the business for 'expense plus DVD' and there are always film companies willing to exploit this pool of free labour.

One thing to watch is your terms and conditions. If you do something for free, will you continue supporting it? If there is back end development involved (databases, etc.) will the bugs that appear in a few weeks time be fixed? You've offered a free service, and it could be argued that the use of a site so constructed in your portfolio accounts for the consideration required for a contract to be valid under contract law.

Another issue is not to expect any paid gigs to come from free work. It rarely happens - people will use a free resource and say that when paid work turns up the originator of the free work will get teh job. In 20 odd years of IT freelancing, consulting and contracting I think I've experienced this once! :)

I have to say that I've often created 'hobby' sites and programs when I've needed a portfolio. That way I can create sites or applications that stretch my abilities.

BTW - source code on the site looks very nice and clean - that DOES impress me. The clients won't give a monkeys but it's so nice for me to see a new web site that isn't created with Deamweaver and Front Page bloat.

Best of luck,

Joe

This is why I won't work for free (well, unless it's a poster for my mum to put up at her church, but then they fed and clothed me for so long *and* paid for most of my edumacation that it'd be a bit unfair to charge :hihi: ).

Have you thought the free part through from a simple costs angle? What about hosting and things? Do you pay for all that? Set a page limit and a certain number of updates that they can get for free, and then charge, say, £10 a page for anything extra. Also, make sure you don't hand the reigns over to them - these are sites you're creating for them, so really you own them.

If they want the site all to themselves, charge a modest "release fee". If they've got an entire site and all the access details for a small amount of money they can't really complain!

Oh, and I'd look at cross browser compatability - your code breaks in Firefox (but is, as Joe said, nice and clean!).

I don't think it is fair to say achorste is lowering the bar for others, mr_chris. Everyone has to start somewhere in freelancing, building up a portfolio before pitching for paying clients.:nono:

Achorste, Keep doing what you are doing and i'm sure your business will be a big success. :)
Fully agree with this.
My first website was designed by another forum member who wanted to build his portfolio up.
He was new to freelance web design and needed to start somewhere.

He built my site for free and it took off which I was greatful for.

Since then he has gone on to being a partner in a web design firm, buying out his partners share of the business and going it alone. Commands a very good fee for web design and development services and has a base in New York as well as Sheffield.

He regularly travels and works in New York with clients from both sides of the pond.
All this within 3 years which I think is a great achievement.

Joe, very good advice :)

I've been considering creating some 'dummy' applications (ie online booking applications etc for fictional companies) - do these actually hold any weight when 'bidding' for jobs?

BTW - source code on the site looks very nice and clean - that DOES impress me. The clients won't give a monkeys but it's so nice for me to see a new web site that isn't created with Deamweaver and Front Page bloat.

It doesn't seem to display correctly in firefox though, very clean layout. However it seems to lack any graphics and gives an air of a downloaded template adapted to your means. By no means a bad thing as someone of the best layouts are from templates, but it might be nice to create yourself a graphical logo.

You also don't go into detail on what you are offering and what your specific skills are? Just pure HTML? Or can you write some scripts, offer a content management system, or maybe even embed some java in somewhere?