Career Change After 25 Years
Recently, my long time contract working for the Federal government came to an end. I spent almost three years prototyping Chatbots, Cloud computing, and Robotic Process Automation applications. I made a lot of money and I worked from home.
I didn’t relish the thought of a new job/contract search. My wife doesn’t drive anymore and has some health issues, pretty much requiring me to keep working from home. I spent over 25 years creating web applications for government and commercial businesses and another 10 years before that doing the same for the Federal government. I figured with all of that experience it wouldn’t be that difficult building a small business.
The first thing I discovered was that my ‘target’ audience wasn’t really in need of web applications but web sites and landing pages. I discovered that somewhere between 30 and 40% of all websites use WordPress. I never used WordPress.
I used HTML, CSS, and Javascript and a compiler called Svelte to make components. Svelte creates small, fast web sites; however, they take some time to make. WordPress web sites don’t take much time comparatively speaking.
My marketing experience was virtually non-existent so I checked out some freelancing sites, Upwork and Freelancer being the biggest. I thought I would use them for my marketing to get my business off the ground. Freelancer has very low pricing and, as a result, very low prices. Upwork has better pricing than Freelancer but they take a larger share of the money. I look at Freelancer but I rarely put in a bid.
I decided to go with Upwork since they cater to U.S. workers. The first thing I saw is that most of the jobs are for WordPress and the pricing for most is pretty low. The other thing is that most of the jobs are looking for portfolios and experience with WordPress. I had none.
I put up a couple of example sites for a portfolio. Something, but they had nothing to do with WordPress. I added some testimonials that I had acquired over the years.
I spent the next two months taking WordPress video courses and working on WordPress web sites for family businesses for free. I don’t need the money yet. I did get two small jobs on Upwork that weren’t related to WordPress. I made a net of $650 for the two months. I check Upwork and Freelancer two or three times a day looking for jobs.
I spent time setting up a local development environment for WordPress. Working on the host server is not good. My local environment lets me set up multiple, separate WordPress platforms to do work and testing. I guess I need to do a plug for LocalWP.com. I have no affiliation with them but they have a great platform.
I finished my business web site this morning and moved it to my hosting company. WordPress has plugins for everything. I was able to install a plugin for free that allowed me to export my site from my development environment and then import it to the host. I used several pieces of custom programming but everything moved with few issues. The issues were my fault.
I’m still working on a website for my daughter’s Spa and a legal site for my granddaughter’s law firm.
I’ll let you know how my journey progresses.
Rich
