Ask HN: Need freelance front-end work to pay college loans while I job-hunt

[greyhat]

Hi HN,

I'm a recent CS graduate and several year HN member currently looking for a job at a startup, but it's slow going. My college loans are eating up my savings, and I would love to be able to do some freelance work to help cover those and improve my skills and experience.

I have no problem with very small or one-off projects. If something is worth $10 or $20 for you not to mess with, shoot me an email.

Pricing: For HN members, cheap, and payable on satisfactory delivery. Seriously, you send me a project and a price, and it will probably work for me.

Contact: brianfarr@gmail.com

Here are some services I can offer:

* Convert a design to markup: Got a great Photoshop design or other image and need it converted to clean, valid, and semantic markup? Let me do that while you work on your product.

* Customized a purchased theme: You found that great design on ThemeForest but you need to make some changes and incorporate your logo and branding? No problem. Armed with a text editor and Firebug, I can get this done quickly.

* Basic CMS or Wordpress Theme: Want a basic theme from your design or markup so you can use a content management system and update quickly? No problem. We're not talking about creating an Engadget style superblog or infinitely customizable theme here, just your design and the ability to use an edit box to update your site.

* Fix small problems on web pages: Got some tweaks, bug fixes, and cross browser problems you've been meaning to take care of? Let me wear out the refresh button and fix them for you. I have plenty of HTML, CSS, and scripting experience to figure out what's going wrong and how to correct it.

* Website proofing and reviewing: Get a fresh set of eyes on your marketing and copy, get help distilling your message.

* Web application testing: You're probably getting tired of using it and you're totally acclimated to it anyways. Have someone else try it out, see if anything breaks, give usability feedback, etc.

* Something crazy you just thought of: I have lots of other skills too, so let me know!

Thanks for reading, and don't hesitate to email me ( brianfarr@gmail.com ) with any questions!

[twog]

Do you have a portfolio I can check out? I might have some work I can send your way.

[greyhat → twog]

No formal portfolio at the moment, but I finished http://kristenbasham.com/ for a photographer friend this summer, and I'm working on a winery website on WordPress ( http://winetree.farrspace.com/ ), which will be finished as soon as they send me the rest of the initial content =)

I have previously done things as simple as a 3 page static website for my aunt's music company, to as complex as a PHP & database driven weblog for myself with users and music sections, and a "static site" CMS for a city government, along with design and content.

[xekul]

Do you have any experience creating Drupal themes?

[greyhat → xekul]

No, but I think I could learn. How complex of a project did you have in mind?

[xekul → greyhat]

Creating a Drupal theme might be complicated if you haven't done it before, but tweaking the CSS might be right up your alley. I'll send you an e-mail with a link to my site to get your thoughts.

[suyash]

What's your linkedin ?

[greyhat → suyash]

My linked-in doesn't really have anything related to my web experience, but here it is nonetheless: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/brian-farr/30/b67/b61