Sk-etchbook

I just had a meeting with a business link rep to find out more about copyright, contracts, finance, tax, funding, training and finding/setting up associates so I can provide additional services. This was pretty informal, they have given me loads of documents to read and have referred me to another company to advise me about more about set up.

Last year I did a couple of websites for friends. This was a good learning experience in both client relations terms and design terms. Since then I have been approached by a few other people asking for similar sites to be made for them. This is very good and positive feedback as it assures me there is a market there for what I'm intending to provide. On top of this I have also been placing adds on free sites like gumtree to see what kind of response they receive, this also had positive results.

I haven't started on any of these projects yet as this summer has been spent focusing on getting a full site of my own up and running complete with a portfolio. I have also been working on producing ready made template sites as this is also a service I want to offer.

One of the reasons main reasons I chose web design was the freedom it gives you. I can potentially work from anywhere in the world as long as I have internet access. I have also been reassured on this front as I spent summer in Ibiza and was able to carry on communications with clients uninterrupted. Skype is now my best friend!

Anyhow from what feedback I've heard so far this is what I need to learn a little more about over the next year:

Galleries - CSS & Flash
Products & E-commerce
Shopping Baskets & Payment
CMS

Next year as well as aiming to improve my design & HTML/CSS skills I also want to get a reasonable grasp of:

Javascript
Actionscript 3
PHP