Freelancing from the very start of your development career is not a good idea. Beginners should first work in the office, gain experience, and upgrade their skills and knowledge under the guidance of senior colleagues. You need to go freelance when you feel that you are ready to work on your own when no questions and tasks cause serious difficulties. Freelance front end developer jobs mean the freedom and opportunity to work on interesting projects and make good money at the same time. But you should be sure that all this will come at once. First, you have to work, and not only on programming.
Choose a narrow niche or a general direction
This is what a specialist who goes into free-swimming should decide for themselves. Each of these solutions has its own advantages and disadvantages.
A narrow niche is an opportunity to find projects that are interesting for you, work in your favorite direction, and quickly develop a customer base that needs your skills. More often than not, narrow specialists receive higher pay.
A general direction offers a huge selection of projects, working with different topics and industries. But at the same time, this is a huge world-class competition, with lower rates. However, a well-experienced generalist will never be out of job, while a narrow professional can wait for the next niche project.
Select projects and clients
Be sure to negotiate and discuss front end developer interview questions before starting work on the project. If you notice that the client does not fully understand what they want or bargains for too long about the amount of remuneration, they may disappear and not respond to the message for several days, immediately dismiss this project, no matter how interesting it may seem to you. At the same time, you should not take on a lot of identical projects in a row. Firstly, it stops professional growth, and secondly, it leads to disappointment and burnout.
If you have taken care of a financial cushion in advance, at first you can work at a low price and earn a portfolio and reviews, if necessary. Further, in no case should you work for pennies, even if the financial situation is not very good. Thus, you devalue your work and the work of colleagues.
Work with clients
This will have to be learned in any case, whether you like it or not, whether you know how to conduct business negotiations or not. The ideal solution would be to draw up a standard contract or terms of cooperation for yourself. In order not to explain to the customer the long and tedious process of correspondence and negotiations when, to what extent, and for how much you perform certain tasks, just send them an agreement or terms of cooperation. It will be just fine if you receive the same document from the customer. This will make it easier for both of you during the negotiation stage before the project starts.
Set reasonable deadlines
Be sure to always take into account not only the net time of completing tasks. Let’s face it, if you’re a freelancer who works from home, it’s going to be hard to be as productive as you were at the office. Especially at first, until you eliminate or learn to ignore all distractions. Therefore, always put some time in reserve during the project execution period. If you do it earlier, it’s great, you won’t be on time, and you won’t twitch and worry about the broken deadline.
