Delivered on my first freelance gig
A local, small business owner wanted to promote his courier logistics company through a website. I obtained this contact through a member of a local community (that I still help with their website maintenance services) that I volunteer for. So, it was good to see that my time volunteering paid off in the end.
The technical delivery wasn’t challenging which meant I could deploy the site in a couple of weeks. The final product was lack lustre, due to no original content except for one image taken with a smartphone. The client didn’t care about custom design and didn’t want to pay for it anyway. But I learned a lot about freelancing and project management in the process.
This was the first time I have taken a project from inception through to delivery and I was surprised - it wasn’t that hard technically, rather it required persistence and professionalism. The client was going through some personal issues, so I had to navigate that whilst keeping the project moving. He agreed to meet in-person, which meant I quickly produced a template for a quote or breakdown of pricing. I had to research what I was going to ask about the project, tease out requirements and establish expectations and deadline (it’s always ASAP!).
The only design aspect was to build on a custom logo based on prompts from the client, get feedback and iterate. The development consisted of WordPress due to speed of setup and limiting the amount of custom coding needed. Despite training as a developer for the best of 3 years, it was the turning point for me that I realised: clients don’t care what tech stack you use, they just want their website done to a high level and done quickly. So, it didn’t make sense to custom code anything and pass on that dependency to them. WordPress was the sensible solution because its admin UI is untuitive and you can accomplish a lot of the needs of a small business through it and the plugin ecosystem. For me working with clients like this, it’s risky to use a paid project as an excuse to try out a new CMS or tech stack, I wouldn’t be able to justify extra hours for the learning curve and I think there would be more mistakes in the end product.
The website uses shared, self-hosting to keep costs low as possible. I wrote some terms and conditions to protect myself from scope creep or extra, unbillable work. I did a handover email and offerred 3 rounds of revisions before I would charge per hour. I received minimal, constructive feedback apart from a thank you for work well done. This was in part due to a client who is not at all tech-savvy, and was short for time.
In any case, I still felt a sense of self-worth and confidence which I’ve never felt working as a employee full time. I think this is because as an employee, you’re rarely in charge of all stages of a project lifecycle, and any of your ideas that you want to implement, usually you have to get permission from others. It was liberating to be able to choose the technologies to get the job done, tell the client what the milestones are and the deadline.
At the start I was nervous and had imposter syndrome talking to the client, but as the conversation flows it’s really just that small, local business owners are looking for someone to abstract away digital problems and are happy to pay a small fee for someone to do it as time is more important for them. He is wasn’t interviewing me in as a prospective employee, nor assessing me on my technical knowledge.
What allowed me to follow through and calm my own nerves, was a transparent conversation with the other person telling them what technical skills I have, what problems I can solve for them, what I can’t do (and therefore need to learn on the job or omit from the contract), and how long I think I need to complete the project. As soon as I walked away from the meeting, I was hastily jotting down ideas to research, interpreting the meeting notes which I used an AI transcriber for, and preparing a gannt chart for project management. This is stuff I don’t have the enthusiasm to do as an employee.
Used income from freelance gig to pay for a Udemy course in WordPress custom theme development
I felt really good about purchasing this course because it has so much content that I’m only two thirds the way through and it has been updated with new paradigms and best practice despite the course being launched over five years ago. Moreover, I paid for it with the proceedings of the freelance side hustle I did. I consider it an investment and a great way to compare with drupal.
More volunteering
It’s a great way to meet people from different walks of life and you never know what opportunities and chance encounters they can lead to. Like I mentioned previously, I got my first paid gig through volunteering.
I helped out a small organisation campaigning for improved rights as a father- namely increasing the statutory paternity leave. I got to play around with penpot as an alternative to Figma and webflow: it was fully featured and the editor made it easy to implement styling and building markup.
That work has dried up as the founders don’t have the resources to progress on any marketing goals, web or app development.
I also volunteer for another organisation that is trying to open source public, transcribed records such as births, marriages and deaths. They have a very complex and inefficient website application and it’s a grind to be honest, to get any meaningful momentum going or push through a feature. For once though, I’m not the only volunteer developer - the main reason I joined because I wanted to learn from others and learn from an unfamiliar tech stack.
I’m still waiting to see if I can gain or leverage anything from this volunteering experience! Only time will tell.
Work based stuff worth mentioning
I took on more tasks outside my job remit which I wouldn’t normally do. This is perhaps because I feel I need to justify my salary and give more value back to the organisation beyond what I can offer from a developer point of view. I think considering one’s career, this is the right mentality to have. You can’t expect to be paid more (above inflation) to do the same work: it doesn’t demonstrate a growth mindset nor a staff member willing to be flexible around the company’s needs. Ultimately, I would love to find a way to return more commercial value back to our organisation, but our digital team really only facilitate other teams and their KPIs. We’re not a profit centre as such and we don’t have clients in the traditional sense.
We did however, finally deliver the redesign and redevelopment of our main drupal website which took around about a year. From staff as old as the furniture, they have been waiting 10 years for this to happen! Far longer than I have been there!
I’m satisfied with the end product, and I agree with the tighter rules and permissions we are enforcing to keep the content on-brand, SEO-friendly and web performant. However, I can’t shake the feeling that custom theming in-house (as opposed to contracting out to a web agency) was the right thing to do. I’m appreciative of the learning experiences and improvement in my technical skills, for that I am grateful. But having gone to a conference with other organisations in the non-profit sector, very few have their own developers. Moreover, in some interviews for a Drupal developer role, speaking about project delivery timeframes for producing a custom theme, one year to create a custom Drupal theme is a bit too long. I just wonder how far behind the curve I am in my competence and productivity. Now that we’ve finished with this project, I feel as a FE developer not in an agency, your value diminishes significantly after the theming work is done and you end up scrapping around for tasks, even job creation.
It’s made me rethink my long term career aspirations: I enjoy programming and take satisfaction from building things myself. But the market has been awful since I finished my apprenticeship post-pandemic, and I don’t think it will improve especially with AI code editors, AI prototyping website builder platforms etc.
I was lucky that my first client doesn’t know much about AI, and I have another freelance project ongoing where this client hasn’t yet realised she can use an AI website builder instead of paying me. These gigs are few and far between and not sustainable in my opinion - not even to supplement a full time salary. It won’t be long before local business owners automatically reach for low-cost AI solutions via intuitive UI, rather than take the risk of an unknown, local developer.
I’m reflecting on a lot this year, and what may come in 2026. It’s all very uncertain but one thing is for sure: I’m glad I didn’t stay inside the bubble of my full time job as I would have missed out on other skills and experiences. I’ve done a few side hustles, built a website (although yet to make a sale!) to generate income, tried to sell the idea through discord and reddit, researching and reading about the economy, money and business management. Honestly, this has been more enriching then coding in isolation and building contrived projects.
