24 Getting Started Right
Can I handle uncertainty or financial instability?
Even if you land a regular retainer as a freelancer, there’s a lot
more uncertainty and fewer guarantees. Your income will vary
(sometimes wildly) from month to month. Your work won’t provide
benefits like insurance, and you are responsible for determining
your own tax implications and setting aside tax payments year-
round. Freelancers have to be comfortable with a lot of these
financial uncertainties (though job security is often not guaranteed
anywhere). If you have a family or lifestyle that depends on stability,
you might favor a regular paycheck.
Whatever your answers to those questions are, don’t be afraid
to think outside the box. Sometimes the best solution to your
personal goals won’t be an either-or choice, but rather it will be a
hybrid... or something entirely different! Kriesi, one of ThemeFor-
est’s top authors, sums it up when he was asked about his most
surprising lesson in web design:
“
You can make money with almost anything as long as
it is 1) well crafted and 2) solves a problem.
Selling stock designs and themes was definitely
nothing I would have ever come up with on my own.
But during the last 3 years I have made a good living
out of it. and along the way I’ve seen even stranger
could easily access their profile and financial information whenever
they were logged in.
The common challenge we always face with our marketplaces is
getting what I have designed to work consistently across all of the
networked sites, but the leaner version of this header easily adapted
to each site’s individual brand and color scheme.
We won’t be redesigning all the marketplaces all at once, but piece
by piece works much better for us as a team when there is a lot of
design work to be done.
”
