/biz/ - Business and Finance

I don't do it for a living, but I occasionally freelance web dev for a bit of extra spending money.

What I tend to do is just contact either
>any local businesses that don't have a web presence
>and local OR online business that does have a web presence but it's clearly done by someone inexperienced or stupid

I send them an e-mail as well, since on the phone you aren't guaranteed to get to the person responsible for running the site and would just have to set up a face-to-face meeting anyway. Contacting by e-mail always gets to the right person because even if it doesn't directly go there the person who handles the e-mails will just Cc in r forward it to the person who it needs to go to.

That e-mail generally says who I am, why I'm contacting them, giving them a link to a portfolio of work and my contact details.

Pricing structure tends to be based on what the person wants, complexity wise. If it's just a straight up portfolio site or whatever you don't need much at all. Blogs are more complex and thus cost most. E-commerce sites too.

Pricing then tends to be based on how long I think the site would cost to make. More pages = more hours work designing and implementing, at my base rate of £15 an hour.

Standard sites take less than a day of work (but in reality a week of a few hours each day), and thus only a couple hundred is what I'd get from that. Blogs either require me integrating Wordpress or my own blog system, so they take a couple of days and cost more. Shop sites are similar.

It's your own call really, since you're freelance. That's just how I do it during the summer.