First off, let me tell you a little about myself. I’ve provided a brief and somewhat self-promoting description of my better traits on the About page, but that doesn’t really tell you who I am.

I was born and raised in LaGrange, Georgia, home-schooled from kindergarten to graduation (with a 4.0 GPA) and largely self-taught from grade eight. I’ve always been an avid reader, often reading 40-60 books in a single month during the summer. This was a huge asset in my education, as I read everything I could get my hands on about any subject that interested me. In my younger years, this usually meant science, nature and adventure stories.

I live out in the woods, several miles from the nearest town, and I enjoy it. I always have, and spent most of my daylight hours outside in my youth. I would often even take my homework outside to complete. This lead to my love of nature, and interest in wilderness survival skills, which I practice at every opportunity. I’m a firm believer in the “Be Prepared” philosophy most commonly attributed to the Boy Scouts, and the contents of my pockets (and mind) represent this.

I got into web design and development not long after I ventured into learning photography—teaching myself, as usual. I had decided to venture into the then-foreign world of HTML and CSS to build myself a small personal site, and possibly showcase some of my photography. My neighbor and friend of some ten years heard of this and approached me with a job offer, knowing I could use employment and that I was a quick and willing learner. This job would consist of redesigning and maintaining the website of the outfitting company he owned, in addition to serving as photographer for workshops and events.

I enthusiastically agreed to redouble my efforts at furthering my education so as to acquire the skillset needed to do this, and in a matter of about two months reached a point where I felt comfortable with undertaking the project. The redesign was a great success, reducing the site loading times by more than half, eliminating most of the outdated use of frames, replacing dated image sets and overall updating the look and feel of the website. I also began to attend workshops and ropes courses as official photographer, and update the site’s photo gallery with the resulting photo sets.

In this period of time I also took on an administrator position at a major web forum that focuses on the subject of lucid dreaming, and with a few friends started up my own community forum, also focused on lucid dreaming. This provided me with valuable experience in community management, problem-solving, and in the case of my own project, what not to do. I have retained the administrator position, with a brief hiatus due to time constraints, and my own forum is still alive and in the early stages of a drastic re-imagining.

Already fairly proficient with Photoshop from my photography experience, I began to learn the ins and outs of using it for web design, as well as continuing to further my knowledge of XHTML and CSS. In my position as forum administrator I had to learn a bit of PHP, mostly just syntax, in order to keep the forum software running smoothly through theme changes and the like. I quickly discovered that PHP was just not my style, to put it simply.

Taking on freelance web design jobs was my next step, and one I was somewhat reluctant to undertake at first, for several reasons. First being my lack of transportation to meet local clients, still having to rely on my parents (lovely though they are) for a ride. I also knew that my business skills were not as good as they could be, and my tendency to be a bit of a pushover in person did not help my confidence. However, I felt like this was a step I would have to take soon, as it was the next logical progression of my abilities and learning process.

As with most things I tackle, I learned from doing. I learned—am still learning—from my mistakes and I am still pushing on through my early stages of freelancing. With my first real solid client besides my neighbor—a referral—I made all of the usual blunders. Not enough clarification of what the project would entail, project scope, pricing structure, no real solid information as to desired design elements, no contract, and most importantly, no confirmation of a set deadline.

In the end it all worked out though, and I was fairly pleased with the end result; a complete site, hosted, with few bells and whistles but functional. Valid, semantic markup, minimal but clean and quick-loading. Nothing spectacular, but a solid effort I felt. There were hiccups, but I owned up to my mistakes and not meeting the deadline that I had mistakenly assumed was flexible, worked out a way to make it up to the client that was satisfactory to both of us, and most importantly of all, I learned from my mistakes.

Looking back on this project gave me pause. I realized just how terribly prepared I had been, and resolved to solve this and better my business (and communication) skills. Going into freelancing I simply did not ken the sheer amount of work it would be. A freelance designer cannot be just a designer. He must also fill the role of salesperson, accountant, project manager, translator of tech jargon (both ways), customer support technician, secretary, and chef. Yes, chef. You need good healthy, nutritious food to work creatively!

Luckily for us aspiring freelancers, there are resources aplenty to study and peruse in order to gain some perspective, and get a better idea of how to get organized. After quite a bit of reading, research and studying of various freelance business blogs and books, I now have a drastically improved business plan, a much better idea of what questions to ask of potential and future clients, a more accurate assessment of my own value as a designer, and my head in the game, so to speak.

Of course without experience all of this is only theoretical, but I’m a firm believer that you can never have too much knowledge. Knowledge is preparation. To lack in knowledge is to be ill-prepared. Experience will come, and with it improved skills and planning. I look forward to this experience, relish the changes, and continue to learn from my mistakes and use this to improve my skills, services and self accordingly. I am constantly learning; in many ways this is my passion of passions.

I give back to the community where I can, by posting on various forums for web designers and developers, by writing blog posts, and by building semantically coded, well-designed, fast-loading websites.

I think I have erred from the realm of “brief” by now, so I’ll end this post here. If you’ve read it all, thanks for sticking with me through my ramblings, and I hope you come back. I promise future posts will be more interesting, more educational, and more concise!