Is Freelance Web Development Dead?
The freelance web development world is constantly evolving, but it’s far from being dead.
I started my career in web development back in 2009, but before then I started building sites for clients. The first website I built was for a shop that sold equipment to play padel tennis (very popular in Spain and Argentina). I built the site using Joomla and they would add products to sell and create content about championships, events, and things like that.
Joining the corporate world
In 2010 I stopped doing freelance work and got my first corporate job and stayed as an employee until 2015 when I decided to become a contractor. Technically, being a freelancer and a contractor are the same thing. You still need to raise invoices, collect VAT, pay your own taxes, and do some boring paperwork. But as a contractor, you get paid per day and they hire you for a period of time, generally 3 or 6 months. It’s well paid and less stressful, as you normally work 9 to 5.
Back to freelancing
In 2020, due to the economic effects caused by the pandemic, the company I was working for started to struggle and decided to let the contractors go. As there weren’t any more contracts available in the market, I decided to give freelancing a go.
In a period of 10 years since the last time I worked as a freelancer, I could notice how much the landscape has changed and things keep changing faster. What happened before in a year, it now happens in a month.
So what has changed?
Back in 2009 or 2010, you could make a living making websites for people, shops, and small companies. But that is not the case now.
With the boom of the “do it yourself” sites like Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, etc, clients that would normally hire you to build them a website started to gravitate towards these sites.
At the end of the day, business owners just want to add products, create content, etc themselves rather than relying on a freelancer to make constant changes and charge them for every change they make.
Because let’s be honest, it wasn’t an easy relationship. It was hard for the client to understand the amount of work involved in creating a website and hard for the freelancer to deal with some of the client’s requirements.
So the “do it yourself” sites took that pain away in exchange for a low monthly fee and allowing the clients to build a site in hours, not weeks or months.
How do I stay up to date?
If you want to stay up to date in the freelance web development world, you have two options:
- You can charge clients to set up their sites in Wix or Shopify. Although they can do it themselves, not everyone wants to do it and they would gladly pay someone to do it for them.
- You can specialise in a language, framework or CMS and offer your services to medium and big companies that have complex websites. This is where the money is now. Big companies will pay you well to maintain, update, and create new functionalities on their websites.
Focus on one thing and be very good at it. In my case, my main skill is Drupal and I’ve been doing it for a long time.
The IT sector is in constant change and one can feel like it’s hard to keep up. It will keep changing this fast for the years to come, so we, as developers, must try to think ahead about where we think the market is going.
If you are a freelance web developer, I would love to hear from you. Feel free to leave a comment, I will answer all of them.
👉 Find out more about me here: https://sergioguardiola.net 🔥
