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How to start working on Elance.com. Quick guide for web designer.


Part 1.


Introduction


A brief story and some useful practical tips for beginning web designers of freelancers who do not know where to gain experience, try their hand and just earn some money. A lot of things are also fully applicable to the activities of programmers.

I will try to tell you about my two-month work experience (yes, yes, not a lot, but I'm a quick guy :) and knowledgeable people gave advice).

In general, elance.com is the largest and oldest player on the freelancing exchanges market, or rather not quite freelancing, but rather an outsourcing, as there are a lot of medium-sized companies represented on it and this elance differs, for example, from Russian freelance.ru And I think the beginner It will be very useful for a freelancer to work there and gain real experience, different from the experience in the Russian market, with its advantages and disadvantages. Maybe someone just became crowded on freelance.ru, because Onom designers like my hair on my ass, and there are few orders)
')
Then there are a lot of letters for those who have empty pockets and a great desire to work as a freelancer :)



Start. About how I came to such a life


After the sudden collapse of a small development company, where I was a manager and solved managerial and product-specific tasks, I was left completely without means of livelihood. I didn’t have a particular choice, I had to shake the old days and decide to switch to freelance as a web designer.

I must say that over the past 3 years I have designed quite a few (literally a few projects), but, nevertheless, the skill has grown (straight arms, they are like wine - over the years they only get better, even if you do nothing, occasionally wiping them from dust :) and I quickly collected a competitive portfolio, consulted with friends for a long time working at elance and went to register.

I also note that before that I had a short experience in completing freelancing orders, but this was never my main activity.

Skill


Briefly about who can find a job there and what skills he should have.

Everything will fit: design, layout, interface design, programming, English seo and copywriting.

Many are concerned about the question of English - of course, you need to know the language, but there are no special requirements for it, i.e. Many customers quite understand that they work with foreigners and English is not their native language.
Basically it is written communication through the site itself or email. Even chat occurs rarely, voice communication is not practiced at all or very rarely (for a long work experience of friends). So the average level of English obtained in the university + lingua will be enough.

check in


It's simple - go to elance.com and spend 5 minutes. Initially, you can try the free-version, but working with it will not work - you can only throw a couple of bids for small projects for “practice”. So it is better paid, $ 10 per month, payment by credit card.

Description, profile


After registration, you need to fill out the service provider's profile (personal information) and contact information. Immediately I would advise you not to enter your phone - otherwise one of the customers is smart enough to call you at night :)

Another important point - in the description, immediately indicate that you are an individual, this is quite an important nuance for many small orders and increases your competitiveness with respect to companies.

You don’t need to write to all the boring texts that “we are a super company with great experience and successful solutions of problems in various areas,” better concentrate the client’s attention on your specialization (about that) and specific advantages of working with you.

Insert a photo - I think a good move for more personalization.

Portfolio and specialization


Portfolio - IMHO, this is not the problem over which you should puzzle, even if you practically do not have your work and this should not interfere with your work.

Portfolio placement tips:



Total: Specialize! Specialization should be a red thread in your portfolio and profile. Web 2.0, UI, corporate design, what else ... Choose specific areas for yourself and work only on them. Being a jack of all trades is not profitable.

Competitors and participants



A lot of Indian offices, slightly diluted by representatives of other not very prosperous countries of Asia and Latin America (all together, they often try to disguise themselves as American or Canadian companies).

The portfolio is 95% complete template zvizdets, but the prices are appropriate. It’s almost impossible to compete with Indians, at least, even for me, with practically regional prices, it’s difficult.

Most companies are sad Indian shit :) - same type of govnopis, same type generic bids (applications for projects, with the same text for all projects) and the corresponding result of the work. Good customers understand this and therefore are looking for others other than these artists. This allows you to successfully fight for orders, while having higher rates and a relatively small number of reviews.

Customers and orders. Quantity and quality of orders



Basically the customer is shallow and stingy. They work as direct customers (some Texan pizzeria :)) and intermediary companies. A lot of inadequate, asking to make for <500 $ super online store or draw and roll up a mountain of pages for the web application. And leave you links to the most top examples and asked to do even better. I do not know who they hire there for that kind of money.

More or less attractive orders for me are in the range of $ 700-900. At the moment, it’s real for me to process a couple of such orders per month, spending 4-5 hours a day for work. Accordingly, in a month it is somewhere around $ 1500. More - it is difficult, I hope gradually will go to a higher price level.
The most common way to get a decent payment is to switch to permanent cooperation with any of your good customers, perhaps bypassing the program (it’s almost like in family life - you want regular sex, get some kind of permanent :)

Many customers are poorly aware of what web design is and often in the “web-design” section they throw complex orders for website development with programming (starting from a simple feedback form and ending with serious projects).

Some numbers:
about 50 new projects are published per day in the “web-design” section
and still significantly more development projects (web development)

- as you can see the orders the horse has done) I hope his efforts will not be in vain for you too :)

What are the orders


The main problem for designers is that orders for large projects from which normal money can be obtained, as a rule, go along with programming. There are very few separate orders for serious design, UI, layout (those that suit me appear in the amount of 1-2 per week, and these are far from large). Basically, everyone needs small sites on wordpress and joomla with good quality and sample look.

In general, I am afraid that Russian web design may not be understood there :) but about this I will write a separate review article on the topic of comparing ours with American web design, with pictures.

In contrast to the Runet, there are a lot of various orders for the event. Here are a few areas that most often came across to me (perhaps it makes sense to specialize in them):



Among the demand cms there is a demand for Joomla, wordpress, less drupal
E-commerce: magento, oscommerce

Prices for work


Work, as elsewhere, is rated either by an hourly rate or a fixed amount for the project (almost everyone prefers to work with a fixed estimate).

My statistics on hourly payment:

From $ 5 / h (lively yoga, powered by the energy of the sun) to $ 20 / h (just high-level specialists or good companies). And, oddly enough, the rates for different technologies are almost the same. So a very good java and php-coder will cost $ 15-20 / h, despite the fact that in my region Javist gets 1.5 times more and higher. Another thing is that different technologies and specialization provide access to projects of different levels.

The majority of Hindus-private traders and very small desks are probably $ 10-12 / h.
Medium-sized companies - $ 15 / h (up to $ 20 / h).

I rate myself at $ 12 / h. I started with $ 9, but I had to explain the low price by the lack of reputation in the office, as many low prices are simply alarming and you should not lower it completely below the plinth. After a set of reviews I plan to raise to 15.

When evaluating, it is important to understand that these are not the hours that you “work in the office”; for simplicity, I suggest dividing 8 office rooms into two, we get 4 hours a day of active work + some more time for correspondence with customers and drawing up new bids. Otherwise I would receive 12 * 8 hours * 25 rubles. = $ 2,400 per month, but this is still far away.

Orders for the design of the layout is often <$ 500, sometimes $ 500-1000, very rarely over $ 1000. It should be noted that the chances of getting an expensive order are sometimes even more than cheap - Indians are not too willing to throw their generic bids into specific and more or less expensive orders, but they fly like shit to shit on the cheapest ones. Therefore, for example, a simple HTML maker or template designer without any zest will be difficult.

To my surprise I found that the price range of a large part of the Hindu bids (applications)
It makes up between a third and a half of the maximum project budget, which is very cheap. Few people throw a bid higher than the budget. I did it and it worked, but you need to clearly explain why you consider this price as the minimum acceptable price and what the customer will receive for it. Confidence and argumentation are important.

As a rule, my bid is 4/5 of the order budget (and sometimes 2/3 or higher than the established one). Well, I use pricing in stores (not 800, but $ 790. Not 650, but $ 645). The size of bids for average orders at the moment - 600-800.

But it is quite possible that you can earn good money without trying to get a large order, but on the contrary, working exclusively on small, but of the same type. For example, it is easy enough to assemble a portfolio for yourself and position yourself as a manufacturer of landing-pages or email templates, performing inexpensive orders in a couple of days ($ 200-300). Need to try.

I think that at the moment Moscow prices for design are higher. Even not so - in Russia the design of the site is paid much more attention, and lay a larger percentage of the project budget. Accordingly, greater demand for expensive colorful design from good specialists. Therefore, the event is more suitable either for the regions or for those who, due to the specifics of the design they produce and the projects they want, cannot find something interesting in Russia. Another thing is programmers - there are a lot of rather complicated, interesting and paid projects in the country, whereas we mainly have stamping govnosaytov small companies.

- It turned out quite a lot of text and in order not to cause an overload in the brain and pain in the fingers from scrolling the scroll, I decided to put the remaining text in Part 2. In continuation:

Making correct bids with examples
Project execution, business terms, reputation and feedback
Payment and withdrawal
Elance participation fee
and a couple of useful tips

ps:
My first post on Habré :) thanks to those who threw karma yesterday.
There may be minor inaccuracies (I think people with a lot of experience working on the Elans sit on the habr and they can correct me), but nevertheless this is my experience.

upd:
Published the second part of the article " Work on elance for beginners. Part 2 "

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/39870/

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