Re: A late intro and a happy smile!

<<Helping people set up home pages is always good for experience and to build
confidence in yourself.

There are also non-profit groups that are looking for designers to help them
develop their site.  (No money but free experience. ;~)

Some of those opportunities are available from a list HWG has to offer.>>

Hello.  Fellow newbie commercial web designer here, figured I'd offer a few 
suggestions
HWG Jobs is a pretty good list.. at least every few days some sort of job 
offering (from contract work to long term full time) is sent out, but almost 
all of them require you to be at least a quasi-professional already to get 
them (ie, a lot of them require a few years of experience or a portfolio of 
previous sites), or require advanced programming skills beyond HTML (CGI, 
Perl, etc..).

As far as experience goes, it is true there are lots of organizations that 
would love a free web site designed.  They get a web site, you get another 
site in your portfolio.  I've recently begun to offer my services (gratis) to 
causes I would love to help anyways.  I'm currently desiging a site for a 
newly released book of one of my favorite authors.  I get to chalk up another 
site for my portfolio, and get to know one of my idols personally via 
discussion of the site!!  I've been putting together a plan to propose a free 
web site to a local magazine I like.

Another easy way to get experience is to just make web sites for things you 
are interested in, or things you have a bit of authority in, or clubs you are 
a part of, or whatever!  A friend of mine came up with a satirical 
organization a while back, and hey, what better way to spread membership than 
the web?  The site (http://members.tripod.com/~angumbdo/codtrousers.html) has 
since slowly progressed into a minor web empire.

Well anyways, that's my nickel.  Hope it helped people come up with a couple 
ideas..

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