Designers

date posted 21st January 2002 22:51

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Hmmm... does it becone a bit of a worry when you start clasifying
people's skills in terms of User Friendly characters? :)

Most of the posts I've read on this list seem to indicate that there are
quite a number of freelance AJ type people about (please don't take
offence, by "AJ type people" I mean talented designers). Now I see
myself more of a Mike or Pitr type (System Admin/Programmer techie
type). So long as it's a Unix or Linux based solution, I can take a
client from having nothing to having a full Internet access
infrastructure with firewalls and a server farm (including building most
of the server machines), including the server-side code to pull web site
content from a database, but my site designs are plain ugly (or should
that just be "plain"?).

Until recently, I wasn't realy a freelancer as such, making use of
contracting agents to find short- to mid-term contracts sitting at
client sites doing Unix type stuff. That is basically a life of filling
staffing gaps while the client looks for a permie to do the job, which
has become rather difficult since many contractors have gone permanent
(IR35 and all that fun). So... I decided to have a look at freelancing
when my last client decided they didn't want to use contractors any
more.

Problem is, how does someone with my skill set get into the freelance
world? In the last three months, I've done a total of six days for one
client and THAT was purely because someone was calling around on the off
chance they may be able to find someone to call during their Unix guy's
week off. Fortunately they decided to ask me to build some servers for
them after the day of getting to know the machines they may call me
about, which gave me the other five days of work (they never actually
needed to call me during the week I was asked to cover). I'm no
marketing man, I simply have no idea how to find clients, especially as
most clients would only realy think of freelancers when they need web
design, not when they need someone to build and support servers for
them.

(And yes, I should take those Microsoft references off the web site
soon, my Microsoft guy went and found a "normal" job.)

--
Andy Kruger - Precise Network Systems
[EMAIL REMOVED] http://www.preciseic.com/


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