FREELANCING TECHNOLOGIES

When pursuing independent freelancing customers you’ll in the early stages be working
with small to medium clients such as…

- Local restaurant needing website with restaurant info

- Photographer/Artist Bio/Portfolio Page
- Other small businesses need a basic web application

There are generally several categories of tools that appropriate for a particular client.

Hosted CMS (Content Management System)

A content management system often manages the full stack of a web application using
a visual GUI. They have a user dashboard where users can manage their data and
usually have customizable themes to manage how the page appears. Some of the most
popular hosted CMS solutions include…

General Purpose:
- Squarespace
- Wordpress.com
- Wix
- Webflow

E-Commerce:
- Shopify
- BigCommerce

These solutions are often robust enough to allow someone to get something up and
running with no code so where a web development freelancer is typically needed is in:

- Creating Custom Themes

- Search Engine Optimization

Self-Hosted CMS

These are platforms that you can use but you have to host yourself so usually on top of
the design work the services you provide the client is install, setup and maintenance of
hosting.
Popular CMS’s:
- Wordpress (Powers over 50% of websites)
- Drupal
- Joomla

Most CMS platforms have rich plugin libraries to extend their functionality and creating
plugins for their ecosystems can be a business model onto itself. All the main CMS
platforms are built on the PHP programming language so knowledge of PHP can be a
lucrative skill in the world of freelancing.

Another avenue is to target the world of online education by learning about the world of
Learnings Management Systems (LMS’s), the most popular being moodle along with
some popular LMS plugins on wordpress.

Hosted Headless CMS

The problem in modern times with a CMS is that it intricately binds the backend and
frontend of your application so the frontend is rendered by the server on every request
which can give a slower clunkier feel. Headless CMSs are a new category of CMS that
provide the easy to use dashboard for managing data by delivering the data via an API
so you can build the frontend using your favorite modern framework like React, Angular,
Svelte or Vue.

The beauty of a Headless CMS is:

- You don’t have to build a custom backend server
- You can use modern frontend frameworks for fast responsive UI
- The api allows you to reuse the API for mobile applications
- Hosting the frontend can cheap or free with netlify since it is separate from the
database and backend

Popular Headless CMS Solutions include:

- Contentful
- Wordpress.com (wordpress has a built in API you can use)
- ButterCMS
- GraphCMS (provides a graphQL api of CMS data)
Self-Hosted Headless CMS Solutions

These solutions require setup and installations but give you more flexibility and
affordability to the high ticket prices of hosted solutions.

Popular self-hosted CMS Solutions

- Strapi (node/javascript based)
- KeystoneJS (node/javascript based)
- Cosmic
- Cockpit

Other Notable Tech for Freelancers

Stripe API and Components

Many freelance projects will make use of Stripe for processing payments so learning the
stripe API and how to use their component libraries for the different frontend
frameworks is a worthwhile investment of time.

JAM Stack and Netlify CMS

Statically generating your website vs sever or client side rendering provides some large
benefits in speed, security and cost. The JAM Stack ethos is about using Static Site
Generators (SSG) to pull data from different sources at build time and generate a static
website that can easily be deployed on places like Netlify.

Essentially, instead of…

- Customer going to a page then your server pulling data from your database and
render a template
- Customer loading up frontend application which makes API calls while it render
in the browser

You pre-render the website periodically using your favorite SSG… more secure, more
speed, better SEO.

* Netlify CMS is a unique CMS solution that helps give a basic GUI and CMS feel for
your client when using an SSG to generate your frontend pages.

Popular Static Site Generators

- Ghost
- Jekyll
 - NextJS (React)
- Gatsby (React)
- Gridsome (Vue)
- Nuxt (Vue)
- Scully (Angular)
- Sapper (Svelte)

Cross Platform Mobile Application Building

A lot of small clients may want mobile applications to go compliment their web
applications but can’t afford to hire a Kotlin Android developer and Swift iOS developer,
so being able to create basic cross platform mobile applications can be a great service
to add to your repertoire.

Popular tools for cross platform development

- React Native (Build Mobile Apps with React)
- NativeScript (Build mobile apps with Angular, Vue, or Svelte)
- Flutter (used to create mobile apps with the Dart language)
- Kivy (used to make mobile apps with python)
- RubyMotion (used to make mobile apps with Ruby)