Start freelancing
hello every one I was thinking to try freelancing as a frontend but I got some questions that I'd like anyone to answer or share their opinions and ways to improve of course,
1. if I want to provide frontend websites what hosting and domain providers should I choose for hosting I was thinking about netlify because they provide free hosting till your site gets a lot of traffic so I thought of it as an option and I'd like ur opinions for domain providers
2. SEO what is the best way to optimize sites for SEO if you have tips and sites like HTML tags and tutorials that are working I'd love to know more about
3. e-commerce as frontend should i be able to provide that? I've seen a person using Strip API and linked it with a site if there are more or other ways please let me know
4. pricing I'm still new to all of that so I don't know how to price anything tbh I don't want to be the person to ask for too much as I'd like to get started and get experience along the way so i can start with something low then grind my way up
5. how to find and offer people my service, I can't really use websites like Upwork and fivver and most American companies so what would you think are other ways to try to start as a newbie
sorry if that post is too long and I would love any feedback or other think that I missed or I can benefit from in my journey to start my career as a developer! also, thanks to everyone that helps people in the HELP channels you guys are the best
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Unknown User•2y ago
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@goosychan do you know any good groups and communities to find people that would benefit us
like facebook groups or community
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linkedin is a good way but i don't know where to find the people if you know what i mean i'm bad with people 😅
Freelancing is pretty much 90% people skills and 10% technical skills (I pulled those numbers out my 🍑). Good thing is it's a skill that you can get really good at!
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haha sounds fair and true
have you guys tried it and how did it go?
1. I use GitHub pages for static stuff, Vercel for Next.js, & Google's Cloud run for more escoteric servers.
2. Learn the Open Graph
meta definitions: https://ogp.me/
3. Should you be able to write the frontend to a commerce site including Stripe integration? I'd think so.
4. If you're a junior dev with no mentor, your code is likely to be a bit rough and it's fair to price that in. Estimate how long you think it will take you, multiply by two since estimates are almost always short, and then, maybe, $20 / hour.
5. I'd consider trying to find an open source project to contribute to. So much of programming is experience. Nine times out of ten I can solve a problem someone else is having because I've seen it before. As well as developing your portfolio, doing some FOSS work would also open you to reviews of your submissions which will help you learn.Open Graph protocol
The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph.
do you think github pages are good to sell to people ?
You can create a CNAME DNS record pointing to your GitHub pages domain & have the content come from any domain name you like.
Tried it twice, failed twice. First time didn't have a contract and the client lead me along for 3 months with endless revisions. 2nd time I had a contract, clear explanation of what I was going to do and what was in/out of scope, and client disregarded what we agreed upon in the contract and fired me. My advice for you is to make it as clear as possible exactly what you're going to do, what is in and out of scope for revisions/design, set up a solid contract, and make them pay some amount of money up front so they can't just walk out on you.
Learn from my mistakes please lol
sounds like solid advice lol i saw fireship made API and each day the client didn't pay it remove the body opacity till it goes to 0 lol
also how can i convinced people that frontend developer pages are better than wordpress ?
That's so funny
Custom design, SEO, clean code (better for maintainability/less bugs & security risks), accessibility
You really need to drive that stuff home because there really isn't a reason NOT to use a CMS for a simple landing page if you want to get something done quickly
They're free and reliable, and you can change the name, so what's the downside?
Actually, you're right. You could use it for prototypes & open source, but commercial use is prohibited: https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github-pages/about-github-pages#usage-limits
I'd say deploy to Vercel or Google's Firebase.
GitHub Docs
About GitHub Pages - GitHub Docs
what about netlify they are easy lol
I have also used and been happy with Netlify.
Vercel is comparably difficult, but also open source (they do Next.js) which is a big plus in my book.
Yup Netlify is super easy, problem is I think they only host frontend files right? Any backend logic they can't host iirc
Not 100% but i think i seen someone post API on there
Dunno. The app I deployed there was Hasura-backed, so it was a Vite-built static frontend. For most server stuff I use Google. Cloud Run is essentially free after Google's subsidies if you don't need access to persistent storage. (Though you do have to learn how to build Docker images.)
Good to know. I had a simple MySQL database on Google Cloud and it absolutely ate up my credits with only like 3 tables haha. I'll have to look into that
When spinning up a database if the load is light, you can pare the server down to 1vCPU with less than a GiB of RAM.
We use those to back the test instances for our pull requests, and running a dozen of them is like $5 / month.
I made a similar mistake on Amazon provisioning a Redis server & never got any warnings, just a $300 bill at the end of the month. (Which thankfully they forgave because there was no way I was paying it. 😸)
I find Google's billing to be more straightforward and comprehensible.
SQLwise, check out https://neon.tech It's Postgres running as serverless functions. Cheaper, more efficient, and, again, open source. They're still in developer preview, but it ought to be a game changer when released.
Neon — Serverless, Fault-Tolerant, Branchable Postgres
Postgres made for developers. Easy to Use, Scalable, Cost efficient solution for your next project.
Very nice, thank you so much for all this information!