I thought it might be interesting to hear some business stories and learn a little more about the people behind the site design and what motivated (and continues to motivate) you in the business.

I'm curious to hear how you got started, how long ago, how far you've grown from then (technically and financially), and how much reality deviated from your expectations. If you could start over, what would you do differently?

How many of you are like myself, a freelancer who writes sites in their spare time--"testing the waters" to see if a long-term alternative to the 9-5 grind is feasible? Who in this group has broken out of that phase to expand to have a staff of designers working for them? What was your big break?

I've been a member of this forum off-and-on for some time now and have always used it as a mechanism for getting free support. I still think it's one of the most useful places for tapping into an active, helpful community of like-minded designers but the other day I thought that it might be nice to see who is willing to share their stories.

Maybe to break the ice I will put a little bit out there about my gig:
I'm 31 years old, married, and have a little boy on the way (end of Feb, could be leap-day!). I live in Enfield, CT which is between Hartford and Springfield, MA.

I've tinkered with computers since the age of 7 when my uncle introduced me to the Apple IIGS. Ever since then I was hooked - I wrote my first game in BASIC a year or two later.

In my teen years I was a BBS enthusiast until the web engulfed that whole subculture and took over life as we know it (who remembers how exciting it was to get the next fastest modem?).

With an entrepreneurial spirit, I started my first business with 2 other kids at about 17. It didn't go very far but it taught me a lot about how to handle customers and markets in general. With a number of start-ups since then, my latest venture, Trudeau Consulting LLC, is by far the most successful (but not quite enough to pay the bills--yet?).

Even though I had some html knowledge, I decided to begin my new design/consulting business based on a CMS. My decision was based on volume--crank out the sites as efficiently as possible, take a hit on the up-front design fees in order to maximize the longer-term hosting and maintenance fees.

I won't get into the up/downsides of going with a CMS (in my case DotNetNuke) vs. organic design. I'm sure that's a whole topic in itself, surely covered many times in this forum and every other in the universe (I would be curious though to learn how many of you started off one way and switched to the other, or wished you'd done it one way instead of the other).

My eventual target is to have a successful consulting and design business that is busy enough to allow me to achieve some of my longer-term financial goals. In addition to selling site design, I want to offer add-on services such as marketing and report writing training--maybe even a little software sales.

Anyways, I'm not looking for any advice or direction - just curious to see how some others are doing it.

I'm also 31, and live a little south of you in Manchester, CT. I don't have any kids, but my wife and I are really looking forward to taking that plunge sometime within the next three or four years. But we have our plans and are sticking to them: Save money, build a home, then make babies. From now until then, I'm going to do whatever it takes to earn a decent living at web design and then start the whole family ball rolling. So as you can see, I am entirely invested in my venture here. And I'm not at least a little relieved things are working out.

A philosophy major in college, I never thought I'd be designing websites for a living. It was just a hobbie at the time. I was supposed to be a writer, unraveling the complexities of our moral existence and saving the world from itself. But that's not what happened. I finished up my degree in the eternal and immediately began a career in the ethereal. It's been a little over a year since then and five years since I first began designing websites for friends and family; but it's been good.

Originally, I started out knowing absolutely nothing about web design, hosting 'clients' through Interland and using their 'click-and-edit' online site builder to put together websites until the company made their move to Web.com and doubled the price of their hosting packages. A buddy of mine for whom I'd already bult a site decided not to stay with the company and asked me if I could still do the work if he went to another hosts. In my naivete, I said 'yes'. But I had no idea what I was getting myself in to.

I couldn't find another service that allowed me to build sites like I used to; I quickly realized that if I was going to make it work, I needed to learn how to build a site in an editor. I'd only dabbled in HTML encoding prior to that and understood I would need to learn it, but I was hesitant because of how complicated it all seemed to be and sought editors that resembled what I'd worked with online. But there was nothing out there that matched what Interland was doing; thus, my fate was sealed. I couldn't let my friend down. I told him I could build a site, and that's what I was going to do.

But I knew I could do it. I never really doubted that, and actually looked forward to opening up a whole new theater of knowledge as I began to research editors (I felt like Neo for a while there. Everytime I figured out something new I imagined Morphius phoning in with good news about my destiny). Things happened fast after that. I think it was over a period of about two days that I went and leased some server space, bought a simple web editor, began researching the code style (along with CSS and JavaScript), and then wrote my first full page of HTML a week later. I've been driving myself crazy with it ever since.

As far as doing 'real business' is concerned, however, this is the second year of my being filed with the town as 'self-employed', and I'm happy to say that I'm making money and that this is all I do now. I found that the key to success in this particular line of work is not in producing a high volume of sites and then collecting the monthly roll-over for hosting and maintenance. Though that would definitely work as well, competition is brutal, and work is sometimes tough to come by. What helped me achieve some level of success was landing a well-funded client who required my services weekly. They consistently pay their invoices within a reasonable, reliable amount of time, and love the work I do as well as the rock-bottom price I do it for, which affords me the necessary breathing room I need to experiment with other marketing strategies to help draw further employment. And that's about it. I'm currently busting my butt to set myself up just in case I lose my stronger clients (I'm a worst-case scenario planner), but I do believe < removed > is working for me.

So with all this out in the open, I'm really curious about your work and would like to know if you'd be interested in trading links. Here's the link to my < removed >. I give priority listings to local companies. The more local you are, the higher you're listed. And being that you're from Enfield, that'd basically put you at the top of the page.

All the best, friend,
The Lion.

David, you're obviously still new to this, but a word of advice (because I'm feeling in a rare generous mood today)...putting self-promoting anchor-text driven hyperlinks into a forum post will usually get the links removed as well as get you a warning...the first time. Second time, not so nice. Mods are pretty sharp around here, and there are a few sharp posters to help the mods out because we've seen the trick way too many times.

As far as my experience goes, what got me started in web design was university, although not the way they had planned. Going way back to 1996, when Netscape was still the dominant browser, the university gave us this assignment whereby we had to create a web page (not a site, a page). Being a university and operating under the premise that the slowest people needed time to complete things, we had three weeks to do the assignment. Since learning how to create a page took about an hour thanks to Dr. Joe over at www.htmlgoodies.com , I had the assignment finished in a class session. So...I did what most people couldn't do. I created a page with magenta Arial text on a mostly black background with a tiled rainbow dot cube thing that I had found. At the time, this was "cutting edge" and got me a 100% grade as well as a lot of oohs and aahs (keep in mind that this was 1996.)

When I quit university (I didn't drop out as such because I wasn't failing by any stretch of the imagination...I just learned things I wasn't supposed to learn and they pissed me off), I started messing around with them as a hobby off and on for a few years until I finally created a humor site in 1999. It ended up taking off to the point where some rating service that was big at the time (I forget which now) rated it the #1 humor site on the net. It was basically just me ranting, raving, making fun of stuff, putting 3-D animated gifs into pages for comedy value, that sort of thing.

In May of that year, I went back to a former employer looking for a job reference. He not only gave me the reference, but wanted help building out a project idea he had on the side. Basically, no one was really doing anything as such with the 'net at that time, and his idea was that he wanted to build a database-driven event site. It took me about a year (keep in mind that this was weekends, and along the way I became a de facto IT guy for him and also built a second site for a specific event) but on April 2, 2000 I was finally able to crack through the barrier of being able to read data from a database. I'd gone through crappy hosts, bad code snippets, things I didn't understand, and eventually stumbled my way to a solution.

From there, I just kept learning how to do things more efficiently and faster, and built some other stuff for the same client (again, weekends, plus a day during the week).

In 2002, the client's general manager's husband's company needed a site. I built one for the company that ended up putting both of us on the map. He told a few people, and on June 12, 2002, I was able to leave the part-time job I had to take on to supplement my income (making sure to flip the bird on the way out the door...****, that felt good) and work on things full-time.

From a technical standpoint, I'm 20-fold better than I was when I started, and continue to evolve. I see the stuff I did even a few years ago and I can see an evolutionary pattern. It's really quite something to see the pattern over a few years.

I did, for a year, have people working under me, but it **** nearly killed me emotionally and financially, and I'm only just getting to the point I was at financially now because of it. From a code standpoint, it took me over 2 years to fix the mess these guys made. Never again. This is the only thing that I would change as far as what I'd do again if I had to do it over; I'd have stayed indy and tried to adopt the model that I have now: one client that covers my expenses with room to spare, another two large ones, and a few small ones. I should also explain that I'm an odd hybrid of designer, computer geek, buyer, seller, and things I couldn't possibly explain...but it's just what people come to expect from me. I've always had this "last bastion of hope" thing going on for some strange reason.

From a financial standpoint, I make enough now to pay my bills and put extra money in my pocket. Then again, I don't have a lot of expenses and I intentionally keep things that way. Am I a millionaire? No, although I consider myself a rags-to-riches story in progress.

Basically, I wouldn't change much about what it is that I have done or that I do now. I will be changing things in the future, but for obvious reasons I won't reveal all of my cards...yet.

I'm not among the people who had a computer since their childhood. My first interaction with a computer was at school at HSC level. I hated computer studies at that time. I didnt understand a **** about computer hardware and software. I almost failed in that subject if a friend didnt help me in the exams.

I went to University of Mauritius to have a degree in Electronics but after 2 years I left that course. I was not feeling right doing that. Then I shifted to a degree in Computer Science and Multimedia. Its then that I started feeling better. I had a passion to learn about creating websites, the graphics, the coding, etc...

After my degree, I've worked for several companies and acquired skills in photoshop, dreamweaver, flash. I started building websites and was happy about what i created. I would visit those websites several time daily. Then after one month, I realise that those websites were poorly build when I watched other websites. I kept on learning and learning on my own. I then joined a british-based company where they taught me how to hand-code my pages. At first that sounded rudiculous as dreamweaver allowed me to do things so easily visually. Little by little I started liking that hand-coding stuffs. I also learned php and mysql.

I was also working in freelance with other companies and developed around a hundred of quality websites. Many people were contacting me to do websites for them. I developed news portals, event galleries, image galleries, shopping carts, product showcases and CMS.

Soon after, i decided to work for my own. I created Sufixe Web Design with the help of my family. I now got my own sales/marketing team and development team. I deal mostly into project management and internet marketing.

I'm 27 year old, bachelor yet. My hobbies: photography and travel. I keep on learning new techniques in web design to keep abreast with latest technologies.

Hi,

I started in IT from college. I'd always had a natural leaning towards computers, having been programming 8-bit micros since I was 12. I was excelled in computer in school and went to college to get further computing qualifications. My intention was to collect the full set and get a matching degree. Unfortunately, the lure of a major company wanting to pay me (rather than getting in debt at University) a decent wage, meant that I went straight into working as a mainframe developer.

I'm still in development - now POS development - but specialise more in the service side of things.

I got into web development in 1999. We hadn't had the internet for very long at work (and I didn't have a PC at home), and I used to send round an email newsletter to selected friends with Science Fiction news on. One of these friends owned his own domain and webspace, and offered to convert these newsletters to HTML. I was even more curious and learnt HTML myself from an online tutorial.

In the end, I moved away from my friends server and worked on different sites.

It was only a few years ago, when I was looking at creating a website for a theatre company that I'm involved with, that I learnt PHP. Again, I learnt from an online tutorial, but backed it up with a good book as well. A chapter in that briefly mentioned MySQL - I had experience in SQL via IBM DB2 on the mainframe, so I learnt that quite easily.

From there, I continued to consume new languages and skills.

And that's about it. My day job is still in POS development, but I do web development in my spare time.

I wish everyone would give me a break already. Look at the date of my posts: They're all within a day or two of one another. No one got around to editing them. This 'was' one of my first forums, and I just copied what I thought everyone else was doing (not realizing what signatures were used for), but took it a step further by treating posts like essays in which I went about embedding links like one would referrences. I've already apologized AND read the rules here. I'm not trying to rub anyone the wrong way; so can we just forgive and forget it?

Edit what you need to coicide with forum policy. And, again, I apologize.

rgds,
The Lion.

My name is Chris I am 20 been designing and programming since I was 12. Started out of spite of a friend who was developing websites so I decided to do it.

First started designing with Homestead services, anyone remember them. LMAO!< lol. crazy things we do!.

I got heavy into php after 2 years into design wanted to get into automation. Tired of manually processing everything. lol!

I started my learning with PHPBB. which I love to this day!. I just downloaded the script loaded onto my pc unzipped it and started reading the code. Didn't know what I was reading but kept reading.

I loaded it onto my hosting account at the time, lunarpages. Put the database as instructed in phpbb and got it running as is.

ok, spent 6 months tearing it apart and learning how it works. I must give phpbb my thanks as their coding and their script layout and design taught me how to program.

from then on I start programming!

as of right now I am a freelance programming, dropped out of school at 18 and started working full time for my dads company which we started together in 2001. Boaze.com, inc.

Web design, marketing the works.

That is where I am, and still keep doing it for that is what I love doing! Designing and Programming (but mostly Programming).

Thanks everyone for playing along (I didn't get the post notification e-mail for some reason, else I would have replied sooner). I think the idea of getting one big, steady client is probably the most realistic business model for a freelancer and it was interesting to see some common threads.