What web developer tools do you need? You’ll need at least one web hosting account for beta testing a site before final delivery. A laptop computer is a handy item for carrying to a client location and modeling a web site. For your laptop, you’ll want to download and install local server software such as Wampserver in order to demonstrate the sites you are working on without installing to a hosting account.

Be ready for billing. It is important to be in the position to bill and collect payment when the job is finished. Have your invoices ready to go and have a business bank account ready for deposits. If you will also accept credit cards for payment, make sure you have a merchant account already established. Microsoft Excel is a great program for this purpose. It’s cheap and very easy to use. You don’t need to buy more expensive accounting packages that will take you months to learn it. You should setup a template in Excel and use it for all clients.

Decide upon an organization strategy. You’ll want to keep a file on every one of your clients and keep copies web site source code in a safe place. The biggest reason for this is so that you can find what is needed quickly when the situation arises. Being disorganized is a time waster. You also need to back up your files at least once per week to a external hard drive. This will ensure minimum chance of losing important data. You can also back up on DVDs for permanent archieving.

How will you support what you deliver? Are you going to offer maintenance plans for your clients in the event they need changes or some other issue arises? Being a freelance web developer in london you need to be flexible, that means you could offer a couple of types of plans. The first could be a plan where maintenance is paid at a discounted price on a per issue basis or another type where a monthly fee is paid in return for a pre-determined number of maintenance calls.

So as you can see, there are more to it than just building pretty websites in front of a computer!