Whats the best way to set up selling web design from home?

Im a fireman and I have 4 days off a week and need something to do, as I have great knowledge in web design and computing from 3 years at uni and doing a few for my footy teams I thought designing web sites would be the best thing for me. Any help with how to get started?

Whats the best way to set up selling web design from home?
As a commercial web developer of over 10 years (Christ that sounds pompous!) I do have one or two suggestions; which are probably worth precisely what you're paying for them!





DON'T buy Front Page, you will never be taken seriously if you try to operate commercially using this program. I would advise you to go for Macromedia dreamweaver or even better Studio 8 (which has a whole suite of development programs in it).





Work out what your development process is, try to develop a set of procedures. What are the stages from when the customer contacts you to when you deliver to them? You are going to make mistakes (trust me on this) but gradually if you refine the process it will get better.





Customers are an absolute pain in the **** (honest). NAIL them down to exactly what you are going to produce for them. How many pages, who will supply images, site content, how will these be provided (are you expected to type in the information - fine for smaller sites but what if there are 30 or 40 pages). Customers will always try to add as the site progresses. My advice is to always be accommodating to quote extra for anything not in the specification. Even small sites can avalanche into time hungry monsters and as a web developer time in a very real sense is money.





Find a good hosting service, customers will often want web space and domain name registration (try http://www.123reg.co.uk).





Talk to customers, listen to what they want try to get your head into what they are trying to achieve and design to meet this. Be clear and honest with them. If they want to include a graphic and you don't think it looks good, tell them; they are employing your skills and expertise.





Put yourself in the visitors to the websites shoes. Is the site easy to navigate? Are the links always in the same place (not jumping about). Is the most sought after information on the first place / easily accessible?





Finally learn HTML. Don't rely on WYSIWYG editors to do all the coding. Sometimes you need to dip into the code and change it to make it work properly. HTML is not hard to learn there are plenty of on-line tutorials. It will pay handsome dividends in the future.





Hope this helps





Andy
Reply:Get some1 who wants to design it for u. The best people are the people in university that want work experience because they will do it for free!
Reply:go to nearest computer shop and by Microsoft Frontpage.it's a very populer web designing programme.and you need a graphic desing programme adobe photoshop and macromedia flash.you think they are too expensive go to page.google.com you can desing yor web site with prepared templates and layouts for free.


if you don't have a gmail account send a e-mail to me(admin.memonto@gmail.com)then i will send an invite to your mail...and you have a gmail account.
Reply:Do some research. Find out if there's anyone else doing the same thing locally and if so enquire to find out how well they're doing and how much they charge then beat their prices! Good luck!
Reply:just install macromedia dreamweaver
Reply:Set up a website saying what you can do, with links to contact you and a link to PayPal so people can pay you would be what I would suggest.