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Q. Can you be a Web developer from home?
A. Yes. As long as your significant other is very understanding.
Yes, you can work at home. It helps a lot to have a room set aside for this so that you can have all your computers and other facilities close at hand. If you think about it, let’s assume you are employing someone in an office to turn out Web sites for you. How much space will you give them to work in? A desk, big enough to have a decent sized screen, a powerful computer, some external bits, a printer and a scanner. That is all feasible for a home based outfit too. Adding MIDI and sound recording facilities does not take up a lot of extra room either. Having a ISDN or other high-speed link to the Internet just about completes the set-up apart from perhaps having a CD-ROM recorder to hand. All this lot fits nicely on a couple of largish desks.
Now, I think there are some significant advantages to working at home instead of being in an office with other people. For me, it means that an 8-hour day working in London becomes a 12-hour day working at home and I end up not feeling as tired at the end of it. In fact, it means that if necessary, I can concentrate on a piece of work for about 15 or 16 hours. I enjoy working like that. It means the flow of concentration is based on a task by task way of working. To work in a client office, means that I usually need to be breaking a job over two days with the attendant loss of concentration and momentum overnight. It’s also cheaper to work at home, its more ecological and you can have everything you need to hand and not just those few things you care to carry into work in your briefcase. Plus, there’s no politics. Of course there is a downside, there’s not much conversation or social life. Ideally, you need to form a working relationship with a group of other like-minded people or perhaps be sure to visit with the client or the other team members once a week. The other disadvantage is that because you are not in the office, you may not be considered for the next job, as you don’t so readily come to mind. Of course if you do such a good job that your clients are very pleased, you may well be called back for more. This is particularly likely if they make a lot of money out of the work you do. More about that in a while.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
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