Can you work as a freelancer… for free?

Well, the title says it all. Can you? Simple answer, probably not. :)

The guide will lean heavily if not fall entirely towards a PC, I am not a Mac user so if people can pitch in with Mac equivalents then please do. Note that this only touches the surface, it does not in any way cover all areas and take into account every single consideration.

Story so far, the PC is ready, connected to the net and is protected from all the Internet nasties. Time to start developing..

I have broken down development into three main areas: Design, Development and databases. (The fact that they all begin with “D” is a coincidence)

Design: As a developer, you “may” not be heavily involved in designing sites and your only interaction is to slice and dice treatments. I say that loosely as I design sites as well as many of my colleagues. The widely accepted industry standard for design are Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator. Problem is that they ain’t cheap. There are free alternatives to both, for Photoshop there is the Gimp which I have used in the past and does a good enough job. I personally couldn’t get used to it, that is mostly down to being brought up on Photoshop and couldn’t be bothered to learn all over again. There is a version of the Gimp which can be described as the Gimp in Photoshop clothing. (http://plasticbugs.com/index.php?p=241) For Illustrator there is Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/) . I don’t have a need for Illustrator, but have heard good things about Inkscape. Both the Gimp and Inkscape are available for PC and Linux.

If you design and build in flash or need to open and edit fla files (flash source files) then you are out of luck. There are no free alternatives to flash.

Development: This includes everything from CSS to PHP to .Net programming. To list all free alternatives would require an article on its own. There are bloomin’ loads, and each have their plus and minus points. All I can do is list what I have used and liked. Lets begin with the main commercially available winners, for development the outright winner is Adobe Dreamweaver. It has support for the most widely used web languages. Dreamweaver has its critics, the biggest complaint is its consumption of resources. To edit a simple CSS file can consume around 100MB of memory. So what are the alternatives?

Aptana (http://www.aptana.com/download_all.php)

This I love, it is an open source editor for working with CSS, HTML and Javascript which tightly integrates with Firebug.

Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm)

Support for many, many languages. A general all purpose editor.

SharpDevelop (http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/)

What I use to develop .Net sites with, does everything I need. Includes syntax completion and highlighting.

Databases: Hands down, its MySQL.. don’t worry. Its free. Just install and you’re away.. almost. You need to manage your databases, there are free managers out there. Two I use are SqlYog Community Release (http://www.webyog.com/en/downloads.php) and PHPMYAdmin (http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/index.php). SqlYog is a desktop application whereas PHPMYAdmin Is a web application so requires more work to set up.

Other considerations: If you are planning a career as a freelance web developer then you will already have a PC and or a Mac with a nice posh monitor and a broadband connection so we won’t take those into consideration. Unless you need an upgrade then typically you can expect to spend around 600 to a grand on a setup which includes the tower, keyboard , mouse and monitor. There are far too many variations for me to go into, my reason for remaining vague.

Most likely, your PC came with XP installed.. or worse still, Vista. I haven’t used Vista yet for web development and don’t plan to for a long while. For now, stick with XP Professional. Chances are you will have XP Home, unfortunately XP Home doesn’t come with IIS (Microsoft’s web server) which you will need to serve ASP and ASP.Net sites. If you are feeling brave you can install IIS on XP Home by following this guide. (http://www.webthang.co.uk/tuts/tuts_server/iis_xph/pippo_xp.asp)

If you don’t need IIS and don’t plan to develop using MS technologies then there are countless free alternative OS’s to choose from. The most popular, and one I also use is Ubuntu. I am not a Linux guru so need one I can fumble my way around which Ubuntu is easy enough to do with. You can still serve ASP and ASP.Net pages from Ubuntu using Apache Web Server by installing
Sun Java System Active Server Pages for serving ASP pages and Apache Mono for .Net.

If you run XP, then you will need a layer of protection from Viruses and spyware. There are a few free applications out there, in most cases you won’t be able to use them as you would be using them in a commercial environment threfore breaking the EULA. You will have no choice but to purchase one, but which one? Well I would say one from any of these three, AVG, Avast or NOD32. Why these? They do a good job and don’t consume every ounce of processing power your computer has to offer. Unlike some other well known brands, *coughnortoncough*.

Then there are running costs, such as banking and general financial management. If you can manage your own accounts then that would help immensely, trust me though, DIY accountancy its a colossal ball-ache!

As in any profession, keeping costs as low as possible will always be a priority. With regards to working as a freelance developer, i do not believe it is possible to work purely off open source and free software alone. For example when working with design agencies you will be asked to create and supply a design either as a PSD or an AI file, both of which are formats for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator respectively. Open source alternatives may present themselves as suitable alternatives, but to what extent? Will they offer all the features and control that commercial applications have to offer, probably not. It is this which could leave you trailing behind.