As I keep accumulating more years of experience as a freelance website designer, I seem to get a better feel for what I’m doing. I’m constantly learning new things, and I have built a respectable body of knowledge from the projects I’ve worked on. This wasn’t always the case. Sometimes I wish that I could write a letter into the past and tell my former self all the tricks I’ve discovered (and am currently discovering) that cut down on the headaches of the web design business. Some of these tips are technical, others relate to marketing, and some involve interacting with the people who sign the checks.

photo credit: foundphotoslj

I can’t write a letter to a younger version of Clay. With this blog, though, I have an opportunity to write to entrepreneurs in the same place I was a few years ago and maybe help them sidestep a few “learning experiences”.

I don’t mean to make this sound completely altruistic because I anticipate benefiting from writing for this site, as well. There’s been a few times in my life where I’ve had to make the same mistake a couple of times before it finally sank in. When I repeat a mistake over and over again, I figure it’s because I’m not thoroughly examining how my actions are causing it and what I could be doing differently. I expect writing about these experiences will force me to analyze my slips in more detail and think critically about how they could be avoided.

My experience is the main source of posts on this site, but I’m not necessarily restricting material to that. If you’ve learned a lesson that you think would be useful to freelance web designers and programmers, I’d love to hear about it.