Ooops, sorry I missed this (well kind of, I skimmed it).
Jesse,
Web design is fun, I started when I was twelve and have found it to be a very rewarding and useful skill. I was actually accredited by my city council for writing a school website back in the day, they were impressed at how young I was (as I mentioned, I was only twelve and still in middle school).
Back then in the lovely HTML 4.1 days, CSS was new and it was still widely acceptable to use tables for site layouts. Tables were simple and everyone loved them, but alas a little thing called IE made knowing exactly how anything would render impossible so the W3C people decided to make DIV’s and the whole world was never the same. Doctypes everywhere, browser specific hacks, IE6 sucking out loud, etc.
So I learned HTML the old way, then quickly started using CSS for simple things (mostly text and background colors), but over time I learned to use CSS for more complicated matters and eventually I even realized why DIV’s are at least somewhat good for layouts.
Then, actually more recently I finally bit the bullet and started learning JS. Long story short, I held out on JS for forever, only including pre-build scripts when the time called for them. I generally dislike JS, but at least with Chrome’s V8 engine things aren’t that bad (V8 compiles JS to much more efficient code most of the time, which makes the language somewhat reasonable).
Now for graphics design, this is basically Photoshop work plain and simple. Learning PS is more than just working with a program, like most things it involves being creative and the more you know the tool, and the longer you use it the better you get. So my advice, start as early as possible!
Now getting PS is a bit tricky, unlike Autodesk, Adobe charges even for the student versions of their programs. I wish they didn’t but oh well - they do. Many colleges have it on certain machines, and some schools offer discount programs. If all else fails, there is always a way, ask your friends to help, they can probably hook you up if you catch my drift.
Now charging people. Well this is tricky, I’ve done sites now that range from $150 to $20,000 (seriously). It all depends on the client, the project and how much work there is to be done, and how fickle they are about it.
My best advice is to regularly make them approve something, if you let them keep changing their mind all the time without pinning them down with milestones and layouts, etc - you are sure to have a bad time and have to do way more work. More work is equivalent to making less money, so every time they change their mind and you let it happen, it is effectively costly you bank and delaying the project.
Then there’s the legal side. I got screwed on a $500 project once, I did a super-high-res render (it was a 48" x 60" banner at 300 DPI) for a datacenter that was being built in my area. It was a simple job, take the Revit file, make it pretty and make a huge render in a crazy short amount of time.
Easy enough but after the work was done the guy simply paid me half, said that’s all he felt like doing and that was that. I was crazy angry, but I had to take it, I failed to get anything in writing beforehand and that was my mistake, simple as that - I messed up, he screwed me. Worse things have happened, valuable lessons learned. And of course I’ll never work for him again.
So yeah, project management is a big deal, knowing how to make the deal, how to pitch yourself and how to keep the client in line are all learned skills. Don’t get too caught up in it, just start out small with people you trust and try to be as professional as possible. Do good work and lean as much as you can.
One of the biggest problems I have had was my age. A lot of people wont turn to a teenager for web work or animation work, or any work for that matter. They think they need someone more qualified and that’s that. Best thing you can do is develop a portfolio and show them previous work. When they see stuff that looks good, they tend to warm up to the idea much faster.
And finally, try to always best yourself. If you have pride in your work it will show. It’s that simple.
I like to believe that this simple fact is why my animation work has been so popular, I just do my best and fiddle with things until everything looks right to me and if I don’t like the way it looks, I keep messing with it. It’s actually not that complicated. Most things aren’t once you get the jist of it.
…
Your site looks great. It needs a little layout work to really organize the content, and I noticed a few Javascript errors in Chrome’s Javascript debugger (see attachment), but otherwise it is really good.
You can get to Chrome’s JS console by hitting: ctrl + shift + J
Congrats on the site and good luck with any future endeavours! -Cody
I like Notepad++; I don’t like big code editors.