My advice is that if you’re not a designer don’t try to be one. When it comes to freelancing you’re fighting a loosing battle and here is why. The freelance market is riddled with low paying jobs for creating simple, one off-sites which can be made by a designer using something like Wordpress. That is the wrong market to be targeting if you’re a programmer. The real market is in full time or contract jobs maintaing existing websites that run on complex CMS platforms which require continuous change to meet new business needs. That is not something a designer or twelve year old with a little HTML and CSS knowledge can do. There is a lot of work to be had in maintaining software. Especially, maintaining systems built on open source platforms that require constant changes to meet new demands.