What's the one thing that attracts you to freelancing the most? Whether you're currently a freelancer or not, there's usually one thing that draws people towards the freelancing lifestyle and helps them overcome their fears and doubts.

If you're a full-time freelancer, I want to hear what you love most! If you're thinking about freelancing or only freelancing part-time, let's hear what you are looking forward to the most and what's motivating you to keep pursuing this career path!

Whether you're thinking about looking for your first freelancing project or have been freelancing full-time for years, we all have fears about being a freelancer. It's a major (and often unpredictable) career transition that involves a tremendous amount of risk.

There are so many reasons people hesitate to become freelancers or have fears about the future of their freelancing career.

What are some fears or hesitations you have about becoming a freelancer?

If you're a more experienced freelancer, what fears did you have to overcome when first starting out?

Bonus: how did you successfully overcome those fears? Would you have done anything differently?

Hey everyone! Since adding a free level of access to our community last week, we've had about 20 new members join! I wanted to take a minute and welcome you all to the community 🎉🍾🙌

So, if you're new here, complete your profile (name, photo, about, links, etc) and introduce yourself in the Introductions area! Member introductions usually get quite a few replies, so this is a great way to meet people and make the most out of our community.

While the free tier has limited access, you can still ask any question, about any topic in the General Discussions area, share Goals & Wins (personal or professional achievements), Plug Your Work (share your portfolio website or a specific project you completed for a client).

Thanks again for joining and we're excited to have you here!

Have you ever experienced the frustration of having to reach all the way to the top right corner of your phone to hit that hamburger menu icon every time you want to navigate to a new page on a mobile website?

It's one of my least favorite things about navigating the web on a phone. Sure, placing the hamburger menu icon on the top right is easy from a design and development perspective and for the most part, it has become the established convention.

But it's a hassle for mobile users, especially as mobile screen sizes have increased significantly in recent years. So it got me thinking about alternative solutions.

On my personal website, company website, and The Freelance Institute website, the mobile navigation is fixed to the bottom of the page as you scroll. Each page is a single click away and there's no awkward stretching involved. The navigation sits right where your thumb rests naturally on your screen.



That frees up space for a primary call-to-action in the top right corner. While that CTA still requires the same awkward reach with your hand, it's worthwhile because you're only taking a single action where you know the outcome in advance (not repeatedly clicking on a menu icon to discover the options).

But there's one obvious drawback: you can only fit 4-5 items in the navigation.

So this is a great solution for small sites with relatively fixed pages, but it's not a scalable solution for larger and more complex websites.

So while I was working on my latest client website, I decided to explore an option that keeps the navigation fixed at the bottom of the screen, but allowed for more navigation items in the menu and doesn't require icons in order for it to look good. Here's what I came up with:



With this mobile navigation option, the user can easily access the menu whether they are right or left-handed. It's more clear because it's larger and has both an icon and a label. It allows for unlimited navigation items and can easily support nested navigation or even left/right swipe transitions within the navigation menu itself. Lastly, it makes the website feel more like a native app when paired with a smooth slide-up transition effect.

You can see the effect in action here: https://fraudfindr.com

I'd love to hear what you think about this UX!

I was chatting with my wife  Rachel  yesterday when she asked me a great question, "what motivates you?"

I hadn't thought about this in a while, so my initial response was my family, home, and career, but she asked me to dig deeper. "What really makes you tick? What makes you excited to get up each day?"

After thinking for a minute I said, "I guess I just love creating things and solving problems." I'm deeply motivated by creating things and solving problems. That's why I love designing and coding so much. It's also why I love home improvement projects, working on my car, fixing things, helping people, etc.

So I asked her the same question, "what motivates you?"

She said, "I love making people happy and helping others." Our friends here in TFI don't know this, but that's at the root of why Rachel is a fantastic customer service specialist and why she's a perfect community manager for TFI.

She loves makeup and skincare, but has a special interest in bridal because she gets to make brides look beautiful on their special day. She'll also be the first to go out of her way to extend kindness to others through her actions (bringing cookies to friends, driving out of her way to say hello to someone, etc) completely unprompted — it's just deeply rooted in her character.

This was a really thought-provoking conversation so I'm posing the same question to everyone here: what motivates you?