It was the winter of 2001-2002. I was living right here in Happy Camp – a tiny town of about 1200 souls in the middle of the Klamath National Forest, about 70 miles from the rest of civilization. I desperately wanted to work from my home so I could be there with my two youngest children who were 11 and 12 at the time. I didn’t have a clue as to how I should earn money as a stay-at-home mom, but felt I had to do something to supplement our income.

A friend nearby, Judy, called one day and told me a workshop on starting a small business was about to be offered in our town. She worried that the event would be canceled if enough people didn’t show up.

Wanting to be a good friend, and slightly intrigued by the topic, I volunteered. “I’ll do it, Judy; I’ll go with you.” I thought it was a one or two day workshop.

The following evening at 6 pm I sat in the classroom – a small portable room behind the local elementary school. It was there I discovered I’d just volunteered for a nine-week video-conferenced class offered by College of the Siskiyous in Weed California – a college about 100 miles away. The instructor, Chris, was an employee of JEDI – the Jefferson Economic Development Institute.

Nine weeks! That was a lot more than I’d bargained for. And the class met twice weekly!

I weighed my options. Should I spend so many hours away from home, commit myself to the effort needed for success in a college class, and totally dedicate myself to it? Or should I flake out and go back to my quiet uninvolved life?

Besides Judy and I, there was one other student – a newcomer to town who wanted to open a clothing distribution website. Judy’s business was writing – she already had a part time job writing columns for a county-wide newspaper. And as for me – I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew I needed to do something. Silently I decided to take the class along with Judy and our new acquaintance, Erik.

The class involved learning all the steps for writing a business plan including cash flow projections and other simple accounting procedures. But I didn’t know that then. We started at the beginning – with simple goal setting.

We were joined via video-conferencing to students in three other Siskiyou County locations. There were about six students in Yreka (population about 7000) and maybe twenty at the main campus in Weed (a much smaller town near Mt. Shasta). And in a tiny town in the north-west corner of our county, Tulelake, there were three other students. Many of the students had businesses already. Others had definite plans about what they wanted to do. And a few were like me: clueless, but willing.

I survived the nine weeks! I got through the class and at the end we were given certificates with our business names on them. I still was unsure what business idea to pursue but the instructor was so enthusiastic with my idea of a web design business, she put “KlamathDesign.Com” on the certificate. And that did it for me. Since she thought I could create a successful web design business, I decided to do it.

I purchased this domain name, and struggled to come up with a site design. I redesigned it three times before I was satisfied. And before I could officially open the business, I got a call from a local business owner who wanted to hire me for her site maintenance projects!

I’m convinced that almost anyone with web design skills can learn to offer their talents to the public. This blog will reveal all the lessons I learned in my journey to becoming a well-paid web designer. I will not only tell you what worked well for me, I’ll reveal my most painful and frustrating mistakes.

If you’re considering a career in web design, this will be a journey worth taking. And if you want to read this blog to glean the web design business tips I have to share, you’re welcome here as well. And as for you who just want to laugh at all my mistakes, go ahead. I’m writing this blog for entertainment as well as for sharing what I’ve learned.

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More stories of my start-up web design business efforts will appear here in days to come.

I’d been in business as a web designer for several years when the other web designer came to town. When I saw his sign up on the local bulletin board, I was surprised, and thought it might be good to have someone to compare notes with. Maybe this was someone I could learn something from, I reasoned. Maybe it was someone I could share contracts with if my work load got too heavy. My mind was open to all of this.

I was also a bit distressed. I was struggling to find enough work to keep me busy in our tiny, isolated town of 1200 people. Most of my jobs came from local people. Naturally I thought this would cut into my business prospects. Because he had a sign up, I put one up too, just in case some people in our town didn’t already know about my amazing low prices and my eight years experience and all the cool things I could do.

I met the new designer, and liked him and his girlfriend. They seemed like good spirited, big-city refugees. The new president of the Chamber of Commerce had already taken to him too, and wanted to take my job working for the Chamber away from me and give it to him. She arranged a contract with him to host a website for one of our big local events. I already had the contract to develop the site, so I did it and put it on his server.

I asked him where his hosting site was – I wanted to look at it. He told me his domain name but the site wasn’t up yet. I waited a few weeks and looked, and there was a terrible mess. The most obvious thing was that this person didn’t know anything about building a website. He didn’t even know how to form the tag to get contact email. It looked like two styles of pre-made templates jumbled together on some of the pages. It was clear he had nothing to teach me, and plenty to learn.

Then I went back to look at one of the many signs he’d put up around town. To be honest, the signs he posted were quite attractive. They said something like this: “Don’t pay a web designer big money to do your site. I can help you do it yourself with the software I’ll give you free. Or have me do it – only $200 for four pages.” And of course he also advertised that he could do shopping carts, photo galleries, and hosting.

Now, seeing this all clearly, I was somewhere between rolling my eyes, snickering, and having my blood boil. He had no clue how to create a website but was advertising on every bulletin board in our town as if he had expert services to offer. At the same time he was telling people my services (based on eight years hard-earned experience) were worthless and overpriced!

I waited for his web hosting site to improve, but it continued to look like a mess for months. Meanwhile the site for the Chamber event which was hosted through his hosting service went down, “over bandwidth” time after time, and the Chamber president kept having to contact him to make arrangements to pay more to get more bandwidth.

I’m going to make some guesses here about this man who thought he could slide right into a career in web design without knowing much about it. It has been my experience that many people don’t have much respect for web designers. Either, like this man, they think anyone can do it with a WYSIWYG HTML editing software program, or they think that web design is far overpriced and we web designers are out to get them.

Fortunately there’s plenty of people who are willing to pay a fair price to an experienced designer to get their businesses represented on the web, and those who already have a web presence are often looking for new people to maintain their sites. So there’s plenty to keep us busy unless we happen to live in a tiny remote town, having to deal with small town politics from small town people.

That’s what happened to me. Though I was still getting design jobs, I got tired of the attitudes here and decided to do something else for money, so as of March 31, 2007, my web design business is closed. I now cook pizzas for a living. After being a stay-at-home mom, homeschooling parent, and work-at-home mom for 18 years, I am delighted to be able to work outside my home.

I still love web design as a hobby and can’t imagine my life without doing it. I decided to convert my former design site (this one) into a blog to help others wanting to get into the web design industry. I know enough about it to give some fair advice and let you dwell on the lessons of my experience.

If you’re just now learning about web design, what I hope this story has taught you is that if you’re going to get into this business, make sure you know what you’re doing first. Don’t think that anyone can do it without a lot of training and practice. There’s lots you need to know, and I encourage you to keep working at it until you’re proficient and capable before offering your services to the public.

Learning about web design never ends; that’s part of the beauty of this job. And no two designers have the exact same skill sets. You are developing your own unique styles and when they are perfected, the public will gather around your door, asking to be let in.

I’m offering royalty free stock nature photography on this website. These photos are intended to be used on websites only (personal or commercial). For any other photography use, email me for permission.

For those who use my nature photography on their websites, a link back to this site is requested, somewhere on your site. Also credit for the photographer would be appreciated. All these photos were done by me: Linda Martin of Happy Camp, California.

My nature photos such as the one on the left here are all linked to a much larger version of the same photo, so you can click on the picture, wait for the large free photo to download, and save it to your hard drive.

These nature photos are all taken here in the Klamath River Valley where I live. I’ve got a collection of nature photos of the Klamath River, Klamath National Forest, Klamath River Valley, Klamath River Highway, and other nearby places.

If you don’t see what you want and think I might be able to get it, feel free to ask – I might have just what you need in my nature photo collection.

If you need a free photo utility to crop the photo, I recommend IrfanView… a small, free photo utility that’s easy to use and quick to download. I’ve used IrfanView for years to crop or resize photos and also find it helpful for browsing through the many nature photos on my hard drive.

If you’ve browsed the web for long, I’m sure you’ve come across sites where, when you click on links, a new browser window opens. If you want an example try this link: Blog Top Sites.

This is done by adding the attribute, target=”_blank”, to the link anchor tag.

How do you feel about having a site designer choose to force you to open a new browser window?

Lots of people don’t like this at all, and in fact I’ve seen it featured in lists of the most annoying things people have seen in web design, along with animated graphics and being caught inside someone’s frames. Many if not most people do not like having a site force the opening of a new browser window. It is intrusive.

Now, with the tabbed browsing used in Firefox and Internet Explorer v.7, I too find it annoying because I like to keep all my sites opened in tabs, in one browser window.

There’s a simple way to get around these types of links. If you realize you’re at a site that is opening browser windows you don’t want, just right-click on the mouse, right over the link you want to explore, and choose “open in new tab”. Voila! No more browser windows opening!

This tip is also very helpful for sites that use frames and force you to stay inside their frames while you explore other sites they’ve linked to. About.Com does this, though it also gives an option to click to get rid of their frame at the top of the page, so it is much better than many other framed sites we’ve seen. In the future if you find you’re at a site that keeps a frame open on the new site you want to see, just hit your back-arrow, and then right-click on the link for the new site you want to see, choosing “open in new tab’.