Starting Career

[Sryinex]

I know this has probably been said many times, but anywho a bit of a information on myself:

I'm 18 from Los Angeles California, almost recovered from a severe shattered ankle injury that happened in June. I was scheduled to attend college but that quickly changed when I shattered my ankle. Since then I was thinking, and if you know me you would know that I took the "easy" way through school and life and the whole school "thing" wasn't for me. I could pass but never excel if I found no interest in the subject. I am pretty big into computers but more specifically Web Design and Development. I had owned previous Design tutorial sites before now and made minimal income from them (~1,000$ over 2 year span). I have been exploring options of home based career and business.

I realize this is the problem with most people who want to blog or create online content, but I am having trouble finding that special something that would make a future in Web Design and Blogging profitable enough to live off. I was thinking combining a Design/Blog site in one having the main blog have something to do with design and development and then having the usual tutorials on another part of the website. But basically I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about this and I can't figure out what I can offer, or what I can give that would make me different.

I'd also like to have this site be part portfolio so I may freelance on the side to create another steam of income along with housing to side web projects.

But I'm really having trouble finding what about web design and development I could write about that people would really find interesting and helpful in their venture to becoming a good web designer themselves. It wouldn't even have to just be web design, but any graphical design or development concepts.

So if anybody could maybe toss an idea out there or at least a direction to turn to to find that niche would be much appreciated.

Thank you all for your help.

[ahimel]

This being totally not my area of expertise, I can't give you any specific direction. But some general advice:

I'd try just writing about it. Write about thoughts as they come to you. Jot down things that might be interesting. Try to write at least a post a day.

It'll take a while, but especially if you can have friends/family/colleagues review it, you'll start to get a feel for what your proposed audience likes, and what things you're best at.

I think this is one of those places where Steve's ready-fire-aim approach is probably best.

Good luck.

Amanda

PS -- what is your proposed audience? Is it professional web designers, or is it web-design novices like me? If you want to go to Computer Guides -- Home, you can see the website we've put together for our business from a standard package. It sucks -- I know it does -- but I don't know specifically what to do in order to fix it. If you want to write to noobs (or think you might want to write to noobs) then feel free to use our site as an idea generator. Figure out why it sucks, figure out the general rule that was broken to make it suck, and then write a post explaining that rule, why it's true, and what to do in order to use it.