Some advice I have:
- If you're a designer, then you need to pair up with two good developers that tend to get along with each other. When one is busy, you could use the other one, and vice-versa. The relationship is mutual. You find leads, do the design, and then route the dev work to them. Or they find leads, send the design work to you, and then do the dev work to complete the project. You need developers who don't compete with each other, but work together. They could be two separate businesses -- they just need to get along and help each other more than compete with each other.
- Before you take the leap from your day job working in a cubicle or whatever, stay with that for awhile, instead, and get your passive income projects up, first. (Google on "freelance" +"passive income" or visit freelanceswitch.com and read the articles there to see what I'm talking about.) In general you need to be able to pay your rent or mortgage for about 2 to 3 months on this passive income profit, and then have your active freelancing income on top of that.
- Before you take the leap, bundle up everything you don't need and sell it piece by piece on eBay. You'll thank me later when you have emergency cash to draw from when you hit a bump in the road.
- Since you'll be working from home most of the time, if you don't need like that second or third car, sell it. You'll thank me later when you have that emergency cash.
- Got a detached garage? Heck, if you don't mind the noise, you could rent it out for bands to practice in there for additional side cash. Basically you need any kind of side cash you can get, such as a selling stuff from a garden or farm, or passive income stuff from the web, or anything -- to help you ride out the bumpy spots in your income until you get an established client base built up with repeat work.
- Got credit cards? Got balances on them? Then don't become a freelancer just yet. Serious -- you need to get rid of that credit card debt before you even consider the bumpy road of freelancing. Do whatever it takes. The Dave Ramsey Snowball Program. Debt consolidation. Second mortgage on the house to get the low interest debt consolidation. Call the creditors and tell them you want a settlement because you can no longer pay 25% interest. Anything. Just whatever it takes to pay off all these cards before you even think of freelancing.
- You need an awesome portfolio website. It could be as simple as explaining the kinds of things you can do and some sample templates. Later on, you'll want to put actual images of client websites that you've done, as long as they permit you to do so. As for a design theme, consider your competition on webcreme.com.
- If you're still using tables for formatting your sites, you need to start formatting with DIV, UL, LI, and CSS -- use tables only for grid data or perhaps a difficult web form.
- You need to impress your clients. I recommend you learn jQuery Javascript and get really, really good with it. Yeah, you're not the developer, but it will help you in the long run to know this, and it will help your web developers too.
- Find a "chopper" service on the web that converts your Photoshop site designs into chopped XHTML, CSS, and images. You can then add in your own jQuery (when you get the skill) and then feed it to your developers to finish. When you get the material back, learn from it so that you can start do to the XHTML and CSS work yourself without the need of a chopper.
- Keep trying free products on the web and getting used to theming them, such as FluxBB, ZenCart, WordPress, etc.
- Learn the importance of an MVC framework and object modeling. Not that you need to do this, but you need to have a grasp of what good developers think about, and how to have your developers turn out work that is not spaghetti code. Usually good projects will involve objects for DB, ORM, templates, data input and filtering, and then all the "meat" of the website will be in object models in like a "models" folder.
- As the designer, you're usually the person stuck with doing most of the sales work, the requirements assessment (business/project analysis), the risk assessment (gathering risks, necessary proofs of concept for a project), and drawing up a functional spec doc and usually a workflow chart (in Visio) describing what happens when people click on stuff, different states of the app, etc. So, if you don't know how to make a functional spec -- learn it. If you don't know how to use a workflow diagram tool like Visio, learn it. And read a book on project management and systems analysis. And every project has risks. These are things that a developer does not yet know how to do, or needs to learn some new concept first, or just may not work as planned. So, you need to make a risk assessment on those items and determine what your mitigation plans are for those risks, such as developing some proof of concept steps to run first before the project is even considered. As an example -- proximity search in the UK. If your developer needs to build proximity search in a website in the UK, for instance, such as finding car dealers close to one's house, he may need to learn the Pythagoras Theorem and use a proximity database with UK postal codes, northings, and eastings, and this takes a good bit of learning. So, before the project is agreed upon, expect that your developer prove he can do this before you agree to send the rest of the project to him.
- Install Ubuntu Linux on a separate PC and get used to using command line 'ssh', 'scp', and 'rsync'. The experience will pay off because Linux is what you'll find on the cheaper and yet more reliable web hosts.
- Get used to using MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Know at least how to install these and import/export tables. Most stuff runs by default with MySQL, although I think you'll find you get better performance on PostgreSQL. SQLite is for very tiny projects or when the client's web host doesn't support MySQL or PostgreSQL (which is rare).
- Read
Smashing Magazine religiously and try to keep up with the latest web trends. They make a lot of sense in that magazine. Another bookmark you should look at is freelanceswitch.com, as well as DevNet.
- Install ActiveCollab for managing projects, or some other project management tool. It makes a lot of sense. Another thing is an online invoicing tool.
- Expect that your developers will backup their stuff and/or use a CVS or SVN source code check-in system.
- Have patience with your developers. Unless you've been a developer, you may not realize how much work is required for a website to get off the ground. It may look easy to you, but there's a lot involved on many sites.
- I read recently where a guy said to avoid the adult entertainment industry. It's in demand if you're a web developer or web designer. Might sound like some great money, right? Wrong! The guy had one good piece of advice -- it's called extortion, and is a trap you can fall into if you mess with this industry.