Building a website to get freelance work?

[Cromulent]

I've been considering building a simple website to show my skills and get some freelance work, but I was wondering what people look for when it comes to hiring a freelancer? I've never freelanced before, but I have been building websites for a year or so.

What I want to concentrate on is frontend development so HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I want to make the website look amazing using all of the latest browser technologies. Of course, this would mean the site wouldn't work in older browsers, but I think that is fine for a portfolio website.

What do you have on your website to try and get freelance work?

 

[Cromulent]

Freelancing has nothing to do with how pretty your website is.

It's about marketing and selling yourself. For the market you'll be targetting doing front end only it's going to about prices and aftercare.

Get a nice clean website set up, one that is easy to navigate, prices and testimonials are important. All singing and dancing sites are completely worthless if 80% of the visitors can't see the site properly, you're also only going to be getting smaller businesses that are after small sites because you're not touching any backend stuff. Static sites only by the sounds of it.

You're going to want to sell the initial website design at a lower cost and then break even on web hosting space, domain name management, website maintenance, backing up and more importantly, future changes required. That's where the money is.

Thanks for the reply. I can also do backend stuff using Python, Node.js and PostgreSQL but I wanted to show my frontend skills and thought that doing a simple site for that would be useful. I'll see what I can up with in regards to the site and see if it looks reasonable.