"your skills will erode as you crank out an endless stream of cheap WordPress sites".
That is so right on the spot. That's exactly how I feel right now and I'm pretty sick of it. I decided to just stop freelancing (I'm still a student so I never really had a full-time job). Most cheap clients only want simple websites that take zero skill to make.
Sounds like you were targeting the wrong market. Pick the skills you want to sell and only sell them. If making cheap WP sites isn't what you want to do then don't do that.
I've been freelancing full time for 2 years. When I started I knew I had no interest in doing brochure type sites. I only market myself as a web app developer, and more recently only as a front end / JS dev. When people come to me with "my dad needs a website for his restaurant" I tell them that's not what I do and refer them to people who do that.
But that's easy money. Take that easy money, and in your spare time, build something you can sell, be it a theme or passion product. Soon the client work is icing on the cake, and you can take it or leave it.
So what's the sweet spot for projects as a single freelancer? Simple Wordpress sites are easy but unfulfilling. But most interesting projects are beyond the scope of a single developer.
I think you've got to be part of a larger group. The past few months I've found a couple of other guys with complimentary skill sets. We've been able to do some higher end work that we never could have managed individually. Up to now, we've just subcontracted to each other, but we are talking about forming a co-op of sorts.
I'm lucky enough to be a solo developer working on an interesting freelance project at the moment. Just a 4 week project but I'm working on data collation of various gambling APIs. The work is out there, we just need to work out how to find it.
Then again some people might not find that work interesting - you might prefer working on bigger projects. I think that successfully implementing large scale software projects is an interesting challenge in itself. It certainly presents problems I don't know how to solve :)
That's what I've seen from my experience. But I might have a limited perspective. Could you provide some examples of interesting freelance projects for a single developer?
I have a long term client where initially I took over maintenance of a Rails-written brochure site as their existing freelancer was moving on. From there the relationship developed and I now have built a suite of inter-related apps (and manage their own private network) for them (on a retainer so I have guaranteed income). The work isn't cutting edge but its much more interesting than churning out sites according to someone else's design.
To Jesse who emailed me; we had an outage with the EmberAds support system, so I lost your details - please mail me at ycombinator at madeofstone.net please.
This really comes down to confidence in your ability.
I wrote http://myanimcalcam.com by myself. This site is definitely more complex than a standard Wordpress install, but didn't require a team.
I also find adding features to existing sites a good source of "interesting" income. "I've got a website that does this but I need it to do this too" is a common problem I solve for my clients.
Also I'm not afraid of straying away from the "I built websites role" by producing in house systems for companies. A lot of these applications can be done by a single developer.
I took over development of a fairly large Drupal site with Ubercart and multiple external API tie-ins. It took the original team nearly 2 years to develop it for a rather large client. Now I'm the only developer working on it making some interesting and sometimes complicated changes. I find this to be an ideal client.
Any advice where to get started with that? I was hired as a WordPress dev a year ago out of college. I didn't go to school for it, HTML/CSS was just a hobby. Taught myself to develop fully responsive sites from scratch in WP. I'm just starting Udacity CS101 and learning Python. Django seems really neat, I started the DjangoBook.. not sure where to go from here. Appreciate any input!
Learning Python first is a good step. There are lots of good books for Python. I liked the book "Python Essential Reference", but there are many tutorial style books that might be better for you.
Once you have the basics of Python in hand, then you can move on to Django. Unfortunately, all of the books on Django are hopelessly out of date. I think the most recent is Django 1.1 in 2010 or so. That means that the examples in the books don't run without some minor changes. I got things to work by Googling problems, but it is frustrating. They are starting to update the DjangoBook to 1.4, but they are not there yet (I don't think).
The online Django documentation is good and up to date. There is a nice Tutorial in the docs that is up to date:
You might enjoy checking out Sinatra. It's a Ruby framework for building simple websites, and I've found that front-end developers can migrate to it without too much hassle. If you like it, you can then play around with Ruby on Rails (which is a far trickier beast). But if you're enjoying Python or Django, then don't feel like you need to switch. Work on projects that are fun for you and that help you learn new skills.
Thanks for the advice. I am really interested in RoR, but I have heard it is tricky as you say. I may just stick with Python until I feel comfortable with it.
That is so right on the spot. That's exactly how I feel right now and I'm pretty sick of it. I decided to just stop freelancing (I'm still a student so I never really had a full-time job). Most cheap clients only want simple websites that take zero skill to make.