Independent Web Design artists

[mholloway]

Hey everyone. I've been considering moving forward as a professional web designer and working independently. As always, it's not easy getting started but I wondered if anyone has ever used guru.com or elance.com and actually won a bid? Elance charges $25 -$150 for membership per month (depending on how much work you get, then I think they take a slice off the top of the bid) and I think guru.com charges entirely on a per-project basis. Thanks! I look forward to hearing some feedback.

Regards,
Mark

[Craig R. Arko]

My experience with eLance is that if you are not a 'Select' member, it's probably not worth your while. I also found many of the bids being placed to be quite bogus, but I can't say I'm too surprised about that, as it's damn near impossible to get a well-defined project description in that kind of environment.

Never signed up with Guru; I'll have to take a look at them.

[hembeck]

Originally posted by mholloway
Hey everyone. I've been considering moving forward as a professional web designer and working independently. As always, it's not easy getting started but I wondered if anyone has ever used guru.com or elance.com and actually won a bid? Elance charges $25 -$150 for membership per month (depending on how much work you get, then I think they take a slice off the top of the bid) and I think guru.com charges entirely on a per-project basis. Thanks! I look forward to hearing some feedback.

Regards,
Mark

Hey Mark,

First off, it's rough out there, so best of luck. The key to any self-employment move, is to hang in there. Plus, advertise, advertise, advertise. Spread the word about yourself on any soapbox that you can. Which brings us to two possible arenas: Guru.com and Elance.com.

I've have tried both. I've stuck with Guru.com, because I feel the organization is there for the benefit of freelancers. I also like the tools that Guru.com provides, such as their simple billing tool. To cap it off, Guru.com if free. They charge extra for "value-added services" such as insurance.

Elance.com is much different beast. First off, you pay and pay a pretty hefty amount. (At least I found the amount to be so.) Like another poster noted here, Select membership is the only way to go. The reason being, that Select providers interact with Select buyers, and Select buyers are what I term, the real deal. These are companies that have real projects, that have real budgets, etc. Otherwise what you deal with are kids placing phoney projects, or individuals looking to add rollovers to their homepages, or shady businesses looking for want amounts to an enterprise class web tool of some sort, for under $50.

Plus, on Elance you have a lot of foreign sweatshops bidding on projects, particularly from India and Russia. They undercut your rates like crazy. In the end, you cannot realistically compete. Guru.com has not been plagued by this, yet.

Hope this helps.

fernando

[mholloway]

First of all, thanks for the replies.

I don't want to bore anyone with my history, but I want to make sure I have the right vision. In 1998/99 I worked for one of the major hotel/gaming properties in Las Vegas as a Network Administrator, but ended up as a "Web Designer" because my hobby impressed them (and the pay stayed the same! At the time it was all good). Since then, I continued to earn certifications (before they were worthless) for Microsoft and Cisco, and my last job was with Sprint working as a pre-sales engineer selling IP Telephony products. On January 10, 2002, I was laid off along with 6,000 other people. No fun..

I never severed my web design interests and continued to learn the mix of Macromedia and Adobe products. After all, I graduated college with a degree in Graphic Design and was a user of After Effects, Lightwave, Photoshop, and so on. I'm not sure how I went from graphics to technical engineering, but the money (ugh!) had a lot to do with it. The one thing I've learned - the better paying the techie job, the more likely you're going to live a short life with the company. If you know something that's hot in the industry, you have a lot of value, but as soon as something else comes along, you're scum. Sound harsh? It's the truth.

To sum up my thoughts, I honestly feel like I'm coming around full circle. After graduating, I became an award winning web designer (1998), MCSE, CCNA, a network engineer, and completed many RFP responses for multi-billion dollar companies. Now I want to take all of my experiences and use them synergistically to work as a professional web designer. I personally don't want to focus on the SQL and CGI bit as I consider myself a designer. Trying to be a jack of all trades can be bad thing some times. My biggest challenge is getting my name out there and winning business. I know the business is tough, but the standards of great web design keep going up and it should weed out those who don't have their hearts in it. My roommate, who is a friend I've known for about a year, just moved in last month and he does freelance web and video editing. Something that helps the dry moments is teaching. Right now he is doing an After Effects 5.5 training series for some company. I think they are paying him around $4,000 and he expects it to take a month to finish.

Take care everyone!

Regards,
Mark

[pcp_ip]

just adding my 2 cents...

I think you'll find freelance work more financially rewarding if you secure it yourself. elance and guru have projects that are going for ridiculous amounts.

Best of luck!