[MrandMrs]

Hi all, my wife and I are both interested in starting our own small business working from home in either web development or software development.

We are looking at this as a longterm commitment (having no previous coding experience) and are more than willing to put in the hard work.

We believe this would give us the flexibility we want in our lives.

Obviously we want to make enough money to live off but our life isn't really centred around money so we can live off a fairly meger sum.

Don't worry we are not thinking about this as a 'get rich quick'.

At this point we feel that our ready made team could give us a small advantage over other freelances because essentially we only need a single income, and we should be able to make quick work of projects with double the manpower.

The problem is we are equally interested in both web and software and really can't decide which direction to go in. We hoped some of you guys could chime in with your experiences and this might help point us in a particular direction.

This post has been edited by MrandMrs: 06 May 2011 - 11:46 AM

[modi123_1]

If I may - why software development? If either of you have no prior experience of all the freelance jobs out there it seems an odd choice.

Is this something you are starting now-now, or "later after some classes"-now?

What country are you planning on starting this in?

Honestly I would say web development. If you are both showing up with no coding experience then web development would provide a better small market than say some three year massive mission critical application.

What exactly were you two doing for careers now? I am still trying to puzzle out this development choice!

[MrandMrs]

We both have a background as self-employed System Administrators supporting corporate server infrastructure. So we are capable of grasping technical concepts etc ...

We are based in the UK.

We both understand this will not be an overnight transformation and expect a long and steep learning curve ahead of us, including training from various sources.

[modi123_1]

Okay - that's a bit better. I wasn't sure if you were someone like a marketing and accounting match up or something.

I still say web design. CSS, PHP, MYSQL, (maybe a CRM like Drupal or what not), HTML, and ASP.NET for webforms. Of course there's the graphical part.

You can jump off pretty quick and cheap for any and all of those languages. It's best to install LAMP or XAMPP depending on the machines you are running. That sets up your environment. Microsoft is offering a 'Webmatrix' which is similar to XAMMP/LAMP.

What's your course of action? Just read a lot of books? Take classes at a community college or something online?