Working for free

There will be people who agree with this post and an equal amount who will disagree. However, so long as it helps out one person then it will have been a worthwhile exercise.

A couple of months ago, I went out seeking advice on how I should go about rewriting my CV and boosting my portfolio. Unfortunately this proved to be quite tricky because I’m sure like many of you, when you’re starting out in the web game, there just aren’t that many people who you can seek advice from. Thankfully, it didn’t really matter that I only had a select few people to turn to because the first person that I did speak to gave me a cracking piece of advice. The person in question was Mr. Bruce Lawson.

I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting Bruce twice but feels like I’ve known him a lot longer due to many emails about the HTML 5 Doctor. The fact that he was willing to give me advice even though we don’t really know eachother speaks volumes about the man. Anyway, enough praise, time to get on with the rest of this post…

One of the options we spoke about was working for free and why more people don’t do it. You might be reading that line again thinking I’m crazy, I know I did. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Let me explain

We all have to be realistic, it’s highly unlikely especially after just starting out that you are going to get the same amount of clients as leading industry experts such as Mark Boulton or Simon Collison. But by adopting this approach you will at least have these all important “real world” examples that future clients or employers are supposedly looking for.

To help give you some ideas here’s what I decided to do. I identified a few Scottish businesses with poor websites; I decided to choose one Scottish charity, one major Scottish business, one Scottish event and one mystery project. Upon each projects completion I’d would then contact the buisness in question and ask them if they would like to implement my new design. You could of course decide to go down a different route at this stage and charge the client if they decided to take you up on this offer, depending upon how much work you had done etc.

Of the four mentioned above so for I have launched one, Tweet in the Park. I’ll write more about this in my next blog post, if you are interested in finding out about more on this project then add me to your RSS.

As I outlined in the first paragraph, this won’t be for everyone and some people will just not be able to be in a position to do so but if you get a chance, even if it is just one site, I’d throughly recommend it. So far it’s proved to be a great experience. Let me know in the comment section below if you have ever contemplated doing something like this or indeed if you already have some published free work out there and what other people have thought about you for taking this line of action?