so you want to be a web designer?

Spending hours hammering a site into submission, to be valid code, yet look the same on IE6, 7, 8, FF, Opera, Safari, Flock, Netscape, Camino, and god forbid, AOL. Yeah, it’s what we do.

Dealing with slow paying clients, clueless clients, and the dreaded “I know how to make a web page” clients. Signing a contract with specifications for a web site, then having the client ask for more and more, and think that it was included in the original specification. Yup, all part of the profession.

Having a client send you chocolate. Having one send you an extra $100 in their payment, with a note saying “thanks for all the hard work”. One nice part of the career you have chosen. Rare, but nice.

Reading and reading and surfing and reading some more, just to stay on top of the “latest”. Learning to code properly, learning the latest CMS, learning scripting code. Learning to say no. Learning to set business hours for clients to contact you (you learn this early on, they WILL call at 11pm if you answer an email at that time.) And then… more reading. Blogs, tweets, books, pdfs, videos.

Advice? yeah… I’ll be dispensing some here on these pages, links, business advice for web designers, especially those noobs who are getting laid off from their jobs these days, and figure, “hey it’s not all that hard, I have a copy of frontpage or dreamweaver, let’s hang out a shingle!”. Yeah, you people.