Why You Need a Tough Boss

There’s a tough boss everywhere. We’ve seen them in the movies. We hear about them from our friends and we’ve been warned by our family to stay clear from them. They live, work and prosper amongst us. They’re not hard to miss and if you pay really close attention, you’ll know why they are worth imitating. 

I’ve read a bunch of really insightful leadership books and attended a number of those ‘become a better manager’ workshops. I’ve spent most of the last decade studying some of the world’s most influential bosses, each of them becoming extraordinary leaders who amassed fortunes, transformed businesses, and mentored hordes of ultra successful protégés. Experience has taught me how to put together a list of different types of bosses a person can become. I’ve worked with a few of them as well. There’s the micromanager, the abuser, the dictator and the complete utter idiot. I’ve also met bosses that can’t delegate and some that have egos that find it hard to trust their team and let go. These are all probably categorical examples of bad bosses. I have a different thought process. I believe that a boss that cannot get enough strength to lead his team into daily battles is not a leader at all. That’s what we call a coward boss. Amongst all the leadership books I’ve read, I have yet to discover one that describes the kind of boss I am.

I am a difficult boss. I know it. My team knows it. Other managers in other teams know it too. At the outset, my management style is confusing. To those that are used to dealing with the predefined types of bosses, I am an enigma. To anyone outside, I appear to fall in the bad boss category. But I believe that if you spend five minutes on a team like mine, it will become increasingly clear that I am not mean, not controlling, nor an idiot. I am simply difficult. 

Most people believe that ‘difficult’ is a word that has many connotations. Because of preconceived views, too many people often associate difficult bosses with being a bad boss. Let me clarify this misconception. A difficult boss does not abuse or speak obscenities at his team for personal joys. He is not obstreperous. He knows what is the right approach to delegate and knows how to trust the right people in his team. 

I believe that a difficult boss is not a bad boss at all. Infact, a difficult boss is the kind of manager that anyone would love to have and eventually grow into their position. A manager that is difficult pushes you to become the best version of yourself at work. It’s a style of leadership that works well.

I need you to understand that a difficult boss is not a bad boss. Neither is he a mean boss. I do not believe in showering praises on my team for mediocre work. Many people, including HR, say this is a terrible thing to do. But in my view, it’s not harsh. It’s simply pragmatic. Understand that a good boss values their employees most of all. They will say ‘please’ and ’thank-you’ and recognise efforts that they need for their team to succeed. As a difficult boss, I do these things too. I thank my barista for getting me my coffee and helping me get through the day. He’s a part of my team too. Why would I not appreciate my team? I do use social and subtle clues. But I am not about to go ahead and tell my team that they have done a fantastic job when they haven’t. Handing out praises for no pertinent reason benefits no-one. The team I work with has to earn sincere and enthusiastic appraisals. 

If you ask anyone on my team if they think I am mean, they will tell you no, but they will also have a story to share. I’m not that kind of boss that will excuse you from a meeting only if you are dead. I try to clear out my working stye and be as transparent as I can with the team as early as possible in their tenure with me. They understand what I am, and how they need to grow. In fact, they will tell you that I appraise them for projects I value a lot. It’s logical that we feel better knowing that your boss tells you that you’ve done a fantastic job when you’ve actually done a great job. 

I am a difficult boss and as a difficult boss, I am hard to please. However, just because you think I feel like this, it does not mean I am impossible to please. The primary reason why I demand so much from my team is that I want more for them to grow and eventually take better positions. Personally, I take great pride in being honored with the opportunity to progress and develop alongside them, professionally as well we personally. My approach is simple. If you push me up, I will take out my hand, pull you and take you up with me. That’s how great teams are made.

I am in no way a navy general or sergeant. I do not need to berate my team and force them to transcend their boundaries. However, the principles of my work ethic remain the same. In life, you do not get what you ask for. It’s how we eclipse ourselves in adversity that matters the most. I do not want my team to grow for my personal gain. That would make me a bad boss. Although, I do stand to benefit if my team excels, wanting more from my team is primarily about needing them to emerge better and stronger in everything we do together.

I believe in the team I have today and I know that they are good, honourable people. I take great pride in knowing that their individual simplicity is what makes us great together. There are times when we will be filled with fear and anxiety. But there will be moments when we celebrate our achievements with pride, banter and trivial immaturity. 

When I see a team working in perfection to reach their potential, I am inspired to push myself along with them. Toughness is not incompatible with being a tough boss. I am a tough boss because I have high standards. I have high expectations for myself and I have high expectations from the people I manage. This is because I have high expectations of the work we do. 

Toughness is never perceived or rewarded equally. Being a tough boss means often having to strongly say no and that is a trait which is never judged fairly. I am a difficult boss. Anyone will tell you that. But, I am not a bad boss. If I was a bad boss, you would not be able to question it. 

How to Start your Own Freelance Social Media Marketing Business and Attract New Customers

There’s a lot being said about freelancers and the opportunities the internet has brought forward for them. Not only is it everything that almost every pundit says, but the fact that there’s nearly 3 billion social media users across the web means these so called opportunities are often undermined. Bigger companies just do not have the time or resources to take advantage of these platforms and hence it has given growth hackers a reason to get into the freelance business of social media marketing.

Getting started with your own freelance social media business requires you to endure a few broad steps. These often have to do a lot with developing your internal brand, polishing up your qualifications and portraying the correct credentials to attract clients.

Developing your Social Media Credentials

Social media has a lot to do with recognising what skills are required by clients that do not have the expertise to work on multiple social platforms. All they want is an omnichannel solution that maintains their branding standards. Your clients will already understand that you know how to handle accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. What they really want to know is if you are capable of living up to their expectations. This means that you need to be proficient in:

  • Writing grammatically correct posts and be fluent in the language they need.
  • Evaluating the market and studying the competition in which your clients intend to reach out to.
  • Building a strategy that works well in their favour as well as budgets.
  • Relating with the public on their level.
  • Using various tools and technologies and leveraging them to their advantage.

Once you are capable of showcasing that you have the skills they need, you will need to demo these aforementioned skills to them. This means that you will want to prepare a case study or a review document that outlines the work you have done. If you have the right industry experience and if you can pair it with additional technical qualifications, then you have managed to get half the job done. You can always get this certification on Udemy of Skillshare to help you get started. The best way to build this kind of credibility is to show how you have used your skills to work for your own social media profiles.

Promote your Freelance Social Media Business

If you don’t tell anyone you’re in this business, then no one is ever going to know. Print some business cards, meet people, share conversations whenever you can and tell them about your skills and how you help companies reach out to a better audience with social media marketing.

Look out for freelancer sites where you can list your services. There are a bunch of places around the web that have people looking out for freelancers to handle their social media business. You can check out Upwork, Elance or ODesk to help you get started.

One of the best ways to reach out to people with your business is to look out for profiles that are underdeveloped. Approach them and tell them what you can do. Remember to price your services accordingly. The last thing you want is to overcharge some SMB that is just starting up.

Build a Clientele that is Diverse

Most freelancers out there make a common mistake of looking out for big players to ensure they have a stable income. It’s great to have big brands as a part of your portfolio but don’t shun out the smaller players. You’ll be surprised at the number of smaller guys out there that are need help and are willing to stick around with you in the long run. Remember that smaller brands have the tendency to talk a lot to other small brands and collaboration is always on the table for them. It’s a great way to kill two birds with one stone here.

Additionally, with larger clients, freelance work is not stable and is most of the time unpredictable. Since you will not be entering into a contract with them, it means that you will get work only when they decided to run a campaign. Develop a network of diverse clients of all sizes and soon you will realise you will have contacts from every stream contributing to your bank.

How to Structure your Digital Team Effectively

When you set forth to create a digital product, you will realise very early that this is a process that deserves multi-disciplinary action that blends creativity, engineering, support, compliance and business strategy.
Due to its complexity, large businesses and global brands undergo various transformations and they struggle when it come to figuring out how they need to structure their digital teams. To succeed, they need to ask themselves several questions that range from;
  • What is the right way to organise all the necessary roles and their responsibilities?
  • What part of the organisation should take up capable ownership?
  • How do we get every team member working together?
Ideally, the optimal structure of a digital team should vary from company to company. However, one effective way of making this approach would be to use a defining framework that would help identify 10 – 15 key roles of the project. These roles can be further divided into three conceptual teams – Digital Business, Digital Technology, and Extended Business. We shall take a look at what these define independently.
Digital Business Team
The Owner of the the digital business team has a vision that defines the key business and its objectives for the property. This includes target market segmentation and its objectives etc. This vision makes the final decision on the product to take proper direction.
Product Management teams own the product on a daily basis and ties up with other areas of the business to make sure that the value of this digital proposition is realised very early on in the product lifecycle. Product teams tare responsible for commissioning and reviewing research exercises to develop and build the roadmap for the company in terms of business vision and the ability to prioritise improvements and changes.
Program Management, not to be misunderstood for Product Management is responsible for the long term ownership of the product and making sure that all objectives are in place to achieve the roadmap desired by the product team. This can extend to budgeting and resource allocation that eventually comes together to maintain a good release schedule.
UI and UX teams are responsible for the overall look and feel of the product. This team maintains and develops a standard for the product where they outline the user flow and intended usage pattern for some time to come. These teams work with user testing initiatives as well as focus on quality assurance teams to ensure that new releases bring the product on par with the goals of the company.
Content Developers create non-marketing and non-campaign oriented material for the site/product. These include articles, instructions, FAQ and so on. Their primary job is to create content that is easy to understand and at the same time that is consistent with the brand or vision of the business.
Digital Technology Teams
Front End Development teams select the framework. They also define the code that will be deployed to the front of site thereby standardising technologies to be used. Tech teams here will also help contribute to writing code that will render in browsers. These languages extend to HTML, JS and Objective C etc. This kind of development drives requirements for back-end teams thereby ensuring that the best user experience can be implemented.
Back-End teams manage all the enterprise responsibilities including inventory, finances and content management systems. They are responsible for enforcing standards that protect the integrity of all systems a business relies on. These teams need to be scalable enough to ensure that they are able to implement new capabilities, features and tech requirements.

 

These teams have Data Developers that consistently monitor the health of databases, services and infrastructure architecture. The infrastructure built will be able to maintain the physical hardware used for applications and data processing. They also maintain disaster and business contingency programs, while at the same time being able to monitor the scalability and reliability of all physical infrastructure. These teams will also need to proactively monitor the security of the businesses tech requirements.

 

Quality Assurance, popularly known as QA, maintain standards for code in production and develop automated systems to test scripts that are based on the business’ contingency plan. These teams execute any integration and manifest testing scenarios such that there is a certain degree of quality that is being published. Team members here will also be responsible for monitoring key metrics that could identify potential problems. These are then manifested with documentation to the tech teams to carry out bug fixing or rollbacks. It should be kept in mind that although you may want a trained professional to carry out QA, it is everyone’s responsibility to ensure that quality is maintained across the board.
Extended Business Teams
Marketing teams are responsible for most key operations. They are the ones that develop campaigns and offers to drive traffic to the site. Their goal should be to focus on numbers while studying every detail through ongoing business analysis. They also manage subscriber lists, CRM systems and make first level reach-outs.
Within the marketing team, there is a Product and Pricing division that is setup to ensure that the responsibility of pricing is effectively measured and offered across all digital properties. In appropriation, they develop, merchandise or license anything sold on the website. They set all pricing and drive the overall requirements for aligning features with new products based on the company’s parameters.
Another essential team within extended business is that of Operations. They are the ones responsible for fulfilling the value proposition of the company. eCommerce sites have operational assistants to handle picking, packing and shipping. Digital video business have searching, vetting and uploading teams etc.
Business Development teams or BD is responsible for creating partnerships that help increase site visitors and help sales teams find a new stream of revenue. The focus here is to shift dynamics from traditional exhaustive channels of sales and introduce new ones where market research dives.
Customer Support is the aftermarket team that is responsible for sharing knowledge of the digital policies, platforms and solutions a business needs to provide. They assist customers with issues and help maintain track performance of satisfact levels.
While this structure may seem exhaustive, most teams differ from company to company. This means that if you have key roles in your business, you will need to create a list of well defined responsibilities that define these processes. Finally, you will need to see how they function together and tweak teams in the most effective manner that is beneficial for individuals as well as the business. The ultimate goal here is to ensure that digital business teams, digital technology teams and the extended business teams are all in sync and working effectively on the projects they are assigned.

What’s the Best Time to Send out Marketing Emails?

When I get asked what’s the best time to send out marketing emails, I often get pulled back to the time when email was something we did only on laptops and desktops. My old ways never left me and I needed to take a step back and rethink my position on this. Marketers often hurriedly rush to decade-old conclusions that Tuesday through Thursday mornings between 0800 and 1000 is the ideal time to reach a user’s mailbox. It’s been common knowledge that users used to read emails in the morning so that they could get on with their day. However, as customers become more mobile, I’ve noticed that emails get opened at any hour, on any device. We’re going to take a look at some trends in the email industry that we’ve grown to know and how they can impact your next email campaign.

Adweek sent out an infographic a couple of months ago that tried to do justice to the Email Marketing Benchmark for open rates. It was based on Experian and it showed that across all industries, users are surprisingly active late at nights. This is primarily because of the mobile and tablet revolution that has changed the way we personally interact with computer devices. Unique open rates averaged from 21% between 2000hrs to 0000hrs and 17% between 0000hrs and 0400hrs. What’s more surprising is that this late night bunch of users are more likely to make a click-through decision. Open rates for these two groups were measured at 4.2% and 3.2% respectively.

Adweek also reported that revenue from email campaigns was the highest during the 2000hrs to the 0000hrs slot. This shouldn’t come at a surprise since now nearly 54% of all emails are read on mobile devices.  

In 2016, a Deloitte Mobile Consumer Survey found that 40% of mobile users check their phones and interact with it within five minutes of waking up each morning. Once their day is over, 30% of email consumers check their devices before going to sleep. Out of which, 50% check their devices between going to sleep and waking up in the morning. With consumers actively using their mobiles out of their standard 9-5 routines, testing your campaign sends outside conventional hours, not only makes sense but is essential.  

When we talk about which day of the week we should send out these emails, emails sent on Mondays have a higher ROI than the rest of the week. On the other hand, emails sent on Friday had a higher click-through rate. Ironically, Saturday and Sunday have the lowest volume rates but they boast of the highest CTRs I have ever seen. So even though it may seem that weekends are the right time to send out emails, statistics show that those that open them are more likely to engage with your campaign and eventually click on your call to action.  

It has been seen that lesser promotional email campaigns are scheduled for weekends. In turn, this has given competitors an opportunistic gateway to take advantage of an empty weekend mailbox. Experian’s email study found that users react and interact with emails more on weekends. The unique open rate for Saturday and Sunday amounts to 17% for both days which bumps it to be the highest percentage of the week. Now, before you get about sending all your emails for the weekend, I’d recommend that you first test out this theory for your own product by segregating a list you have. Split your users based on preferences and batch them into Group A and Group B. Send ‘A’ a set of marketing emails over the weekend and let ‘B’ look at the same email on Tuesday. Do not rely on a single case to give you results. Test it out a couple of weeks and then conjure up an inference. When I looked a little more closely at the Experian study, I found out that not only did 54% of emails open on mobile devices but this number seems to be on a rise.  

When you do try out this theory for yourself, make sure your call to actions are clear and crisp. Don’t forget that CTRs for mobile devices are lower than those of desktops, laptops or tablets. So make sure your email has links that are easy to navigate and use. What people do not realize is that email open rates also depends on the type of device users have. Studies show that tablet users are more likely to click on links inside emails outside of business hours. On the other hand, Desktop users are more likely to open emails during business hours. Use your email analytics software to track which users use what device to open mails and you should have more clarification on how to approach your campaigns. Finally, always remember that if a user isn’t able to read your email, he/she is not going to end up clicking on your CTA. So, make sure your email meets all standards of responsiveness that fits for most devices that your users have.  

If you see a dip in your open rates while testing out your user’s preferences, remember that there are other factors that also could be contributing to its decline. Here’s a list of things I’ve compiled that can help you with your campaign’s open and click-through rates.  

Test to see if your email renders well in multiple browsers along with different clients and service providers. Check out BrowserStack or Litmus to get an idea of how you can achieve this. Remember, optimize for responsiveness.

Review your email list to see how old it has become. Remember that your users are as old as your list. So if you have mature audiences that have grown with time, reach out to them in a segregated list. This plays a very crucial role in understanding what time you should send your next email campaign.

Rock that Subject Line with a CTA that’s hard to miss. Your email has one opportunity to shine and your subject line is where all that magic happens.

Watch Out for frequency. If you are sending too many emails once too often, slow it down. Play it cool by segmenting your lists so that your users don’t get pissed off.

Read Email Analytics and segment your users based on their personal preferences. There’s a lot to do here. Group your users based on what they like, don’t like, etc. Once you are able to group these lists based on educated decisions, you will know which group needs what kind of email and at what time.

UX Designers: You need to get up and start building your brand today!

Why do Indian cards have an OTP mechanism whereas cards in the States enable transactions with just a swipe? Why do people prefer the convenience of shopping at Myntra or Flipkart as compared to e-commerce portals of traditional retail outlets? Why is brick and mortar retail getting a paradigm shift to changing the buying behavior through experience stores, (Eg. Pepperfry, The Bombay Shirt Company)? These are all fundamental questions related to the varying user journeys of users in different markets and industries creating starkly different user experiences. In the highly competitive market where the user is spoilt for choice, only the products which ensure out-of-the-world user experience (or UX for short) survive and thrive.

A UX designer always tries to engineer the product aptly for the user so that she can capture the emotion of the user perfectly at every step and give the user a seamless experience of using the product. To capture a user’s behavior and effectively gain insights on the user’s feelings while interacting with the product, it is essential for every UX engineer to create a user journey, which acts as a blueprint for creating a seamless product always keeping the user in mind.

Creating a user journey always requires a few pre-requisites, such as the persona of the user, which is a detailed character sketch of the target group for your product; the business goal which the user journey wishes to achieve; the scenario in which the user tries to achieve the business goal; and the context, which is defined by the external agents and the environment of the user surrounding the scenario. A comprehensive user journey always sketches out every possible outcome due to a user-product interaction. Some salient features every user journey maps should have are as follows:

  • A title for the journey, which clearly states the end business goal
  • A persona sketch including a picture of the same
  • A series of progressive steps outlining every probable User Interaction or UI, an illustration of what happens at every UI interaction and the emotional state of the user persona at every step

A few tips should be kept in mind by the UX designer while defining the user journey for the product:

  • Always define a clear business goal and do thorough user research through surveys before creating a user journey so that you always have the end goal and how the user thinks in mind
  • Always do white-boarding and define every step using sticky notes to avoid making shabby user journeys without experimentation of various ideas. But in the meanwhile, try keeping the journey as simple as possible. Ideally, the best user journey should be linear in nature.
  • Try experimenting with new ideas and paths to get to the best possible user journey ensuring the best user experience.

So, a user journey is like a blueprint for every UX designer to communicate design decisions regarding the products to every stakeholder effectively as well as prioritize features of the product so as to reduce the negative emotional state of the user (confused/frustrated/angry) to the minimum and create a quality product. So start planning your UX team and user journey to make the next fantabulous product out there.

 

5 Essential SEO Tips for WordPress Beginners

WordPress is a super powerful blogging/website platform for every aspiring internet entrepreneur that does not want to limit his/her passion due to lack of technical knowledge. If you are an aspiring WordPress addict, you can build a fully functional website right from scratch by just dragging and dropping different elements using useful WordPress plug-ins like Visual Composer which is an easy plug and play tool that can visually aid you create masterful websites. This is precisely why WordPress powers around 25% of the internet!

As much as WordPress is a life-saving tool for a lot of entrepreneurs, it also becomes a nightmare for some because they think that the work involved in running a WordPress website ends with just making a site! The website needs to be taken care of and worked upon regularly so that Search Engine Optimization or SEO happens for it and it ranks on the first page of web searches. In this post, we discuss a few valuable tips for the entrepreneur starting out with WordPress:

  1. Sidebar Optimization: A lot of people make the mistake of adding a lot of aesthetic features to their sidebar on their website to such an extent that the actual user gets confused in finding the actual call-to-action (CTA) buttons. This can cause a hit on the SEO of your website and hence the sidebar should be optimized to have the most essential features only so that the CTA’s are highlighted to the user without causing confusion.

 

  1. Organize Media Library: The worst thing that can happen to a website having an amazing Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress is having an unorganized Media Library with content here and there which can’t be searched for easily. Creating one single folder for all your media makes it easy to search for any content uploaded on the website.

 

  1. Create Optimised Permalinks: Permalinks are the parts of the URL which follow the domain name. For example, abc.com/wordpress_article – here “wordpress_article” is the permalink, and it needs to be optimized so that it contains basic keywords to make the search engine spiders understand your URL better and rank it higher for the basic set of keywords which relate to your URL. For example, “abc.com/wordpress_beginners_article” is better than “abc.com/article_to_help_beginners_of_wordpress_to_optimize_their_website”.

 

  1. Create Titles and Descriptions: Every page has a title and a short description called metadata that shows up when the website-related keyword is searched on Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu etc. The title to your webpage should be optimized to give the best possible keyword-rich introduction to your website on the search engine and the metadata is the description which the user relates to the title provided for your webpage. Hence, a relevant copy for your title and metadata can work wonders for your website SEO, and this can be done without any lines of code for your WordPress website.

 

  1. Optimize Images: Uploading high-quality images can also work wonders for your website optimization. You can also optimize the images on your website by providing title tags and alternate texts for each and every image on your WordPress site. A title tag is a keyword-rich title that appears when you hover over an image on a website. Alternate text is the text displayed in the image placeholder before the image loads, which aptly describes the image using relevant keywords.

 

  1. Optimize the Landing Page and the Footer: The landing page is the first thing that every user sees when they land on your site and the footer is the common area that a user sees on every page at the bottom. These two elements need to be optimized minimally to include the most essential CTA buttons to provide the best experience to the users on your website.

So what are you waiting for! Implement these easy-to-execute steps on your WordPress website on your own and see the wonders it does for your website soon after that.

The Easy Way to Build a Social Network with Buddypress and WordPress for Free

Face-to-face gossip replaced by Facebook, reading the news replaced by Daily Rundowns on LinkedIn, friends communicating over emails replaced by WhatsApp chats and SnapChat, sharing artistic physical photo albums and catalogs replaced by Instagram and Pinterest respectively. It’s now time to build that social network using just two simple tools – WordPress and Buddypress.

What makes social media so powerful and influential? It is the strong network of people that it builds and the relevant information that it has on each and every user. Many times, we come across brilliant ideas for building a special social network but do not execute it just because we are hindered by the lack of technical acumen we have to build the product. But here, we will discuss how you can build a social networking app of your own without any prior coding knowledge!

BuddyPress, a free social networking site builder plugin that is available with WordPress is a life-saver when it comes to building social media sites from the scratch without prior technical experience. First and foremost, you should have a layout and the basic functionalities in terms of the engagement functions in your social media app as well as the website. Once clear, try choosing a BuddyPress theme that looks similar to the layouts for the website you had in mind complementing the app. Once you find the theme, you can customize it according to the layout you had in mind and voila! You have created a social media website using BuddyPress.

Some of the most popular themes to choose are:

Boss: Boss is a great theme to work with that is easy to integrate with some of the most renowned payment gateways like PayPal. Boss is also highly responsive in case of a mobile site to give a good viewing experience and can easily be converted into a native mobile app as well.

BuddyApp: BuddyApp is one of the most mobile optimized BuddyPress themes out there. This makes sense to use the maximum amount of crowd on social media (read around 90%) access it through their handheld devices or smartphones. Hence, BuddyApp is also a great option to go with.

Kleo: Kleo is highly responsive and is easy to build upon as it has visual composer which you can use to build the website block by block using a drag-and-drop technique.

Now, to convert a BuddyPress powered social media website into a compatible native app, one can use a powerful tool called Canvas by Mobiloud. It converts and configures all the UI elements of the BuddyPress site into a native app ready to be pushed to the Google Play Store as well as the Apple App Store.

So, what are you waiting for! Don’t let technical knowledge be a barrier between you and your dreams. Use the power of BuddyPress and Canvas to make your social network idea a reality.

Cost of Building a New Website

Ths is a common question that lingers in the head of every person looking to develop a website for their business. However, the question is quite vague in context. It’s almost like asking how much a phone would cost without deciding what features one is rooting for. Therefore, it’s mandatory to choose the features and requirements that best suit your cause before investing in a mobile phone. Similarly, when developing a website, it is compulsory to plot a layout that perfectly describes the purpose of the website being made.

The ‘numero uno’ step for venturing into website development is to get an experienced advisor on board to help you in making calculated and profitable decisions. Now, we come to the other vital part, ‘How to decide the price?’ Well, the first thing is to find out just how much you are willing to pay for the work. Therefore, make a budget keeping your requirements in mind. Be certain about what you want the website to convey to its followers.

Here’s a little cost estimate card released by Jimdo that should give you a fair idea of what you need to be spending on.

‘But, how do I finalize a budget?’ you ask. Well, these are the things you must keep in mind while planning the cost:

  • Time
  • Design Skills
  • Technical Skills
  • Money

If you have all these skills within you, you are good to go. However, most people lack either one of the skills, therefore, it is advisable to hire professional help to create a swanky website. When you approach professional website developers, they will offer you several development packages with varied rates.

Ask yourself, “What is worth my money?” The catch lies in this question. If you possess either of the above-mentioned skills you can cut down on the cost of development by using a ‘drag and drop website builder’.

A drag and drop website builder is a fully managed platform that handles all the technical and design challenges of website creation. Using a fully-hosted website is widely recommended as it consumes less time, has solutions to all design related problems, there is no need to learn how to code and mostly includes free templates, thus, reducing the cost. Extensively used drag and drop builders are, Weebly, Wix, and Squarespace.

Thus, if you are looking to develop a website for the first time or doesn’t have a high-flying budget then it’s advisable to go for one of the drag and drop builders. So, what you are waiting for? Find your compatible drag and drop mate and get set to go! If you have the juice to get a developer actively working on it, you can head over to freelancer and get a team under $20/hour to work for you.

Once you get the nitty gritties out of the way, you can focus on choosing a good web host like Hostgator or Godaddy to help you get started. Ideally, you should not be spending more than $25/year for web hosting and a domain name for your business.