If you are thinking about building or developing a freelance career, then there are many things that you are going to need to think about along the way. One of the most important, in all likelihood, is going to be your website. You need somewhere that you can direct people to online that hosts everything that people might need to know about you, shows off your services and skills, and acts as a contact portal.
So the question is: how can you ensure that your freelance career website is as good as you would hope?
Let’s take a look right now at some of the main things that you might want to think about along the way.
Decide On Your Brand
It’s really important that you think about your brand early on. The clearer you are on your brand, what it looks like and how it comes across, the more easily you can make this into a reality, and it’s something that is going to form an important part of your freelance website too, so it’s really important you are clear on it first and foremost.
The brand can be thought of as a personality, and it obviously makes sense for it to simply be a kind of version of your own actual personality, as that is often the best way to achieve this.
So think about the colors, themes and so on that would likely go into making your brand unique.
Once you are certain about those elements, you can start to incorporate them into a basic design for your website, and from there everything else is going to feel as though it’s falling into place.
Use a CMS
Most people these days make use of a Content Management System (CMS) for their website.
Having a good CMS is a great way of easing up the pressure a little and making the experience of running the website as easy as possible. Since it could be difficult to add later – you will need to manually add all of the customers you had acquired up to the point of launching your CMS – it’s best to get a CMS in place from the start.
There are many CMS options but bear in mind that these days you really don’t have to pay any money for them. The free ones are really good, and you should find that they are still going to be incredibly useful, so that is something to think about.
Design Your Main Pages
Now it’s time to think about the main pages that you are going to have on your website, including what kind of content they are going to have and how you are going to lay them out.
It’s good to start off with a basic sketch of each page, and from there you can essentially figure out how you are going to lay the page out, including what content goes where and so on.
Some elements are always likely to be important for such a webpage, such as a couple of images from a stock photos site to help illustrate what you’re writing about. And of course, the writing itself is going to need to be as strong as possible.
Take a look at some sites you like for inspiration, especially if you know the companies are successful.
Keep Your Audience In Mind
At all times, it’s really important to make sure that you keep your audience in mind as firmly as you can. This is essential because you are essentially advertising your services, and it is just wise to make sure that you know who will actually be likely to use those services. And of course, it means that you can design the web pages in particular as well as you would hope to when you know who is going to be looking at them.
Make sure that you have a good sense of who your audience is, and if you don’t, think about researching it.
Get the URL Right
A strong URL is important for SEO purposes as well as making sure that your branding is on point. If you are unsure about whether the URL is quite where it should be, then this is something that you might want to think about, because it’s likely going to make a huge difference to how you actually approach things. Get it to what you need it to be, however, and the whole website is going to benefit, which is obviously a great position to be in from the start.
