Web designer, front-end developer, UI expert, UX master, <CMS> developer. This title has been popping up a lot in our scene lately. Add additional points by prefixing the word “freelance” in front.

Thanks to the advancement of flexible open source Content Management System, like WordPress and Joomla (to name a few), it is becoming easier for a lot of people to gain initial momentum in web design ‘so-called’ movement. The abilities to create custom themes, assisted with huge amount of resources and tutorial – available for free in the world wide web – has reduced the effort needed for anyone to jump into the ‘cool’ bandwagon of web designers.

Designing for the web is not as easy as certain people think it is. Having a little knowledge in CSS might not be enough for us to craft the ‘web designer’ title in our one pager porfolio site. In fact, we should be afraid to use that title anywhere. By having only our own website redesigned for 10 times in the porfolio page doesn’t entitle us as a web designer, or any other title listed above. It is a shame that it has been widely used inappropriately without actually depicting the real value and the nature of the title itself. Freelance is not an excuse.

When the freelancers move out of the ‘freelance’ zone to a real working environment in a real company, there are a lot of things need to be re-evaluated.

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