Consumers everywhere are paying attention to the ingredients that we are consuming and the potential negative effects those ingredients have. Consumers want to know the ingredients of their food, hair, skin, makeup, household, baby products and more. It has given rise to new businesses that use more natural ingredients and it forces older corporations to adapt by reevaluating the ingredients currently in their products. 

Benefits of Product Transparency

This movement doesn’t just benefit consumers, but also you as a business. If you are transparent about your ingredients, it will help you to build trust and loyalty with your consumer. According to a survey conducted by Ingredient Communications, 73% of consumers are willing to spend a higher retail price for ingredients they recognize and trust. When I shop, I will always buy the higher-priced item, if I know and can pronounce all of the ingredients. I will stick with a brand if it has earned my trust. 

If you are too embarrassed to showcase your ingredients, it may be time for you to revamp your products and use ingredients that are considered clean. According to Food Insider, global sales of clean-label products hit $165 billion in 2015 and is projected to reach $180 billion this year. Jump on board so you can get a piece of that pie. 

Online grocery sales are also predicted to be a $100 billion dollar industry by 2022 and will account for 20% of all grocery sales, according to the Food Marketing Institute. This means that your website and products need a strong online presence to ensure you’re capturing those online consumers. By listing all of the ingredients of your products on your website, you are improving your SEO keywords and becoming more visible to online consumers who are searching for products with those ingredients!

Displaying Ingredients on Your Website 

Add Ingredients to Your Product Page

The simple way for displaying ingredients on your consumer goods site is by creating a page for each of your products. You can have images of the product, descriptions, add-to-cart button, if they can buy online, and a section that lists all of your ingredients. Please be sure to make the ingredients really stand out and noticeable. 

One of our clients, Campbell Soup Company, does this really well on their Well-Yes website. They have a Featured Ingredients section highlighting key ingredients and nutrition information. This section also has eye-catching images of vegetables, beans, and peppers, which makes me feel as if I picked those from the garden and made the soup myself. If I scroll further down, their ingredients are prominently displayed, easy to read, and are all ingredients I recognize and trust. 

On the Pepperidge Farm site, we created this template for Campbell Soup Company to again showcase the ingredients of Goldfish Crackers. Who knew that Goldfish Crackers contained beets?!

Where Are Your Ingredients Sourced?

If you get your ingredients from local farmers or you source from other countries, it may be a great idea to create a web page showing where those ingredients come from. Are your ingredients fair-trade or sourced from another country? You can showcase the people and the culture that contribute to that product.

Are your ingredients sustainable or eco-friendly? Showcase the animals or environment you are saving and the great impact your products have. You can create a separate page or site with all of the information consumers may want to know about your ingredients and where it came from.

WebDevStudios worked with the Campbell Soup Company to build an informational website: What’s In My Food? Campbell’s is rightly proud of the food they make and understands that their consumers may have questions about the ingredients used in their products. We created a transparent website project with What’s In My Food? that gives you all of the information you need to know about your food and its ingredients. 

Control the Narrative

Some ingredients you use may have a bad reputation. Blogs, social media and other news outlets can ruin your brand if they release content that sheds a negative light on ingredients you’re using. The vegan brand, Impossible Burgers, received a lot of backlash for an ingredient they use, Heme, which gives the product its “bloody” look and iron-rich flavor. 

The news outlets scared me and I thought about not eating Impossible Burgers anymore, especially when I found out it was made in labs. Before giving up completely, I went to their website and was impressed by how Impossible Burgers took control of the narrative by thoroughly explaining that ingredient on their website.

They show exactly how it’s made in their labs, showcase how sustainable it is, and how it helps to save the environment. They are also transparent about the labs and scientists who create the product, which is a level of transparency I’ve never seen before! Equipped with both sides of the story, I was able to make a decision to keep supporting their products.

Nutritional Facts Panel Plugin

Campbell Soup Company is 151 years old and I am willing to bet they’ve lasted this long because they adjust with the times. We built a Nutritional Facts Panel Plugin in WordPress for their website that displays all of the nutritional facts for their products. In addition to viewing ingredients, consumers can also easily see the serving size, vitamins, minerals protein, sugars, etc. in their products. 

With the increase in online shopping, this feature helps consumers to see important information you typically can only see if you’re holding the physical product in the store. One challenge of this feature is ensuring the panel stays compliant with FDA Regulations; so that means it needs to be regularly updated when there are changes. 

Conclusion

Society is no longer blindly consuming or purchasing products. Reading ingredients is critical to ensure that people are consuming products that are good for their health, prevents diseases, do not trigger allergies and are eco-friendly. For some people, it’s also important that the product be sustainable, fair-trade, cruelty-free or vegan. Don’t neglect the importance of displaying ingredients on your consumer goods website. Use this as an opportunity to show consumers you are aware and just as concerned about these issues.

Interested in a solution like this for your consumer goods website? Contact us!

The post Product Transparency: Displaying Ingredients on Your Consumer Goods Website appeared first on WebDevStudios.

I am a project manager because I love to watch projects unfold, and I simply love to check things off. When you check items off of your to-do list, small amounts of dopamine are released making you feel accomplished, motivated and blissful. It’s even more fun when the engineers do the actual work and you get to be the one to mark it off as complete. It’s rewarding and addicting.

In reality, project management is a lot of work and way more complex. You have to manage budgets, timelines, teams, clients and stakeholders. You have to mitigate risks, communicate, and problem solve. So whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned project manager, you should always perfect your craft. Let’s look at some books, online courses, and other project manager resources you can use to improve your project management skills.

Leaders Aren’t Born, They are Made

Leadership is an important quality for project managers to have. As a project manager, you will manage a team. It’s your primary job to lead your project to completion and success. Knowing how to manage your team is critical to ensuring your projects run smoothly, complete on time, and stay within budget.

As the saying goes, leaders are not born, they are made. If you feel that you lack leadership skills or need more training, then read books that can help you develop and hone your skills. Our project management team read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team together. I love that this book doesn’t focus on giving you tips on how to be a better leader, which would be ineffective. You can work on being your best self all day long but if your team is dysfunctional, you still won’t succeed. Instead, this book helps you to analyze your entire team and find where your team is not functioning. It then gives you a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome this dysfunction and build an effective team.

Project Management Classes and Courses

Whether you’re a seasoned project manager or a newbie, we can all benefit from taking online courses to keep our skills sharp. I didn’t go to school for project management nor did I get any particular certifications in project management. My experience came from my previous job where I inadvertently did a lot of project management.

You, too may, have a lot of project management experience without even realizing it. Before I applied to be an official project manager though, I took a couple of online project management courses. Our project management team also has completed some online courses together.

Here are a few I would recommend:

1. Scrum Basics

Every project manager should know the basics of Agile and Scrum methodologies. Even though WebDevStudios isn’t fully agile, we have used this style on many different projects. So, it’s useful to know. 

2. Project Management: Technical Projects

If you were a project manager in another industry and are now looking to transition to technology or WordPress, this is a great course for you. Technology has unique challenges that you will want to be prepared for.

3. Project Management Foundations: Risk

Every project has risks. Risks can completely derail your project and ruin your budget. This course is a must-have in your bucket of project manager resources.

4. Communicating with Confidence

We can all benefit from improving our communication skills. As a project manager, you not only have to communicate with your engineers and team, but also clients and stakeholders. You have to be able to communicate effectively and confidently.

Coding Basics

If you want to be a WordPress project manager or other technical project manager, I would recommend learning the system or CRM that you will be managing. If you’ve never created a WordPress site or used it before, then it will all seem foreign to you and it will be difficult to grasp. I say the best way to learn a new system is to use it.

Try building your own site so that you can see firsthand how all of the components work together. You’ll get a better understanding of what the backend versus the frontend teams does. You’ll be able to speak more confidently to the client about what your team is building. Also, you will be able to communicate the clients’ needs to your team as well.

I am always less connected to a project when I don’t really know what is going on or what is being built. Take for example the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. It took me a while to understand what that plugin does and how it is used. I didn’t really understand it fully until I had used on a site I was building. Now I feel like I have a better grasp on that plugin and can speak more confidently when I have to talk about it.

Here is a course on Digital Literacy, which will cover everything from basics on how computers and the internet works, basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You even get to build your own webpage and program applications. 

To become a WordPress guru project manager extraordinaire specifically, I would recommend reading WordPress for Dummies, 8th Edition by our COO, Lisa Sabin-Wilson. Also, check out WordPress Professional Design and Development, 3rd Edition by our CEO, Brad Williams.  Trust me, reading these will give you the deepest understanding of WordPress as a project manager. You will come off as a guru and an expert.

Learning WordPress

I know at this point I am overloading you with resources. I want you to be the best project manager and rock your new career so I’m going to leave you with a few blog posts created by our expert team of engineers.

If you want to specialize in WordPress, there are some industry terminology you should be familiar with. The technology within the WordPress industry specifically is always evolving. The engineers have to learn this new technology in order to keep up and we as managers need to be familiar enough to manage projects that may use this technology.

AMP

Get to Know the Official AMP for WordPress Plugin (I just used this on a project so this is a good one to read! This is the new hot thing.)

WordPress Theme

Building a WordPress Theme: Things to Consider in 2019 (And Beyond)

Beaver Builder

Pace Foods Plus Beaver Builder Equals One Hot Website

Gutenberg

WebDevStudios, Gutenberg, and Planning for WordPress 5.0

React

Headless WordPress with React and NextJS (Part 1)

Advanced Custom Fields

Advanced Custom Fields Plugin

Alright, future project managers of the world, I think I’ve given you a lot to get started. Continue to read, practice, and find some more project manager resources that will help you in your new career. Good luck!

The post Want to Be a Project Manager? Check Out These Resources appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Content is King

With more than 1.6 billion websites on the internet, Google has to figure out how to rank them. There is no point in having a beautiful WordPress website if no one is going to see it. When a user searches for lawn services in Las Vegas, 37,000,000 results pop up. If you’re the new kid on the block and on the last pages, this potential customer will not find you.

Your next order of business, after you launch your WordPress website, is to start creating blog posts and quality content so that you can improve your ranking. Google takes hundreds of things into consideration when ranking your site, but content is still king.

It is very important that you write content your visitors love and publish consistently. Your rankings will suffer if Google recognizes that you’re not providing any value to your readers. Educate your readers and offer them helpful tips.

If you give, you will receive. Readers will view you as an expert in your field and will in turn support your business. You will improve your rankings if readers are spending large amounts of time on a page, scrolling down on the page, reading other content on your site, and returning to your site more than once.

Digital Marketing

Social Media

There isn’t a single business that can’t benefit from having a social media presence, which is another way to get people to your website. There are many platforms you can choose from: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and so on. You can build slowly over time or run paid campaigns to reach larger audiences faster.

Once you launch your WordPress website, research what platforms your competitors are on and start building your presence there. Sharing impactful content and posting frequency are key. You may need to hire a social media manager if you feel that you don’t have the time to properly maintain your channels.

Guest Blogging

Another way to get traffic to your site is by guest blogging. More established sites have lots of traffic and dedicated readers. After you launch your WordPress website, pitch offers to write a blog post for an established site as a guest blogger. You can then link back to your own website to help increase traffic. Be sure your content is high-quality and find sites within your industry. If you’re not an established blogger currently, you may have to start with smaller sites and build up to the larger ones.

Email Marketing

Would you believe that I have 35,000 emails in my Yahoo account? Even still, I do still read the newsletters sent to me from my favorite brands. Coupons galore!

Email marketing briefly became the stepchild of digital marketing as social media and paid advertisements started to become the preferred method to reach audiences. However, do not sleep on email marketing. You can see some great benefits if your messages are authentic and you send newsletters that focus on personal experiences and storytelling.

Continue to offer value in the form of eBooks, giveaways, sales and coupons. Mobile is now the preferred method to view emails, so you definitely want to make sure your newsletters are mobile-friendly. The ultimate goal is to get them back to your website.

Ongoing Maintenance

Our Director of Business Development, Jodie Riccelli, compared maintaining your website to getting regular oil changes for your car. It’s absolutely necessary that you maintain your car or you can end up with a blown engine, like me. I bought my first car at 18—a brand new Nissan Sentra. I didn’t get an oil change my first year, and my engine blew after going 10,000 miles over.

It is equally necessary that you plan for ongoing maintenance after your site has launched, which is why we highly recommend for you to transition to our Maintainn team once your site has launched. Maintainn will handle all of your site updates, monitor for security risks, back up your site, make changes to your site, if you need, and more.

One of the most important reasons you need ongoing maintenance is security. A hacked site can compromise your customer’s data, which can lead to lawsuits, loss in money, lost trust in your brand, etc. Having regular monitoring, constant security scans, and a response team can save you from this.

Also, your theme, plugins and WordPress itself releases regular updates. You could update these yourself, but beware that sometimes updates can break your site. Having a team like Maintainn handle these updates and any of the issues that arise is highly recommended.

Technology

Plugins and new technology are constantly being released. The way consumers interact with your site evolves with technology. Once upon a time, a blog post would’ve been an advice column in a physical newspaper.

Previously, websites would just have a contact page and customers would fill out a form if they wanted to be contacted. Then they would have to wait for you to reply back via email. Now, you can add a chat icon that allows customers to chat with you in real time. Users grow accustomed to these new technology releases and may disregard your site if it doesn’t offer a similar experience.

If your site does not evolve with the times, you will get left behind. New technology can help to improve your workflow and user experience.

Time

Time is a resource we never seem to have enough of. All of these steps above are critical to ensure your site receives the attention it deserves. Follow these tips and you’ll be on your way to online success. If you lack time, consider hiring professionals in each of these areas to help take your site to another level. I am sure you would prefer to be running your actual business. Let the pros handle your website.

Contact us when you’re ready to launch your WordPress website!

The post 5 Things to Consider When You Launch Your WordPress Website appeared first on WebDevStudios.

I then realized that in my work life, as a Project Manager, I am responsible for keeping budgets and hitting goals. But, why am I not doing that as effectively in my own personal life?

I decided to take some of the tools and strategies that I use for work and apply them to my personal life. This year is going to be the year that we accomplish our goals. Are you ready to join me?

Project Management Tools to Organize Your Life

First, start off by picking a good project management tool. There are so many tools out there, so try different ones to see what works for you and your household. Make sure it’s easy enough for other members of your household to use. You can use these systems by yourself, but it’s also great to get your significant other and kids on a system so that your whole household stays organized.

Here are some ways you can use these systems to manage your everyday life:

• Home Buying
• Vacation Planning
• Wedding Planning
• Birthdays or Other Events
• Shopping Lists or Chores
• Bills
• Financial Planning and Budgeting
• Freelance Projects
• Extra Curricular Schedules

These are just a few ideas. This system can work for any goal you may have. Here are a few project management tools that work for my household.

Project Management Systems

Trello

I love Trello because it’s free and you can see your tasks displayed on a Kanban style board. You can create multiple lists within each Kanban board and color label each task. I love creating checklists within each task just so I can check the items off when they are complete. It is very satisfying, especially when the progress bar turns green after you complete all of the items (be sure to read to the end to find out why!).

FreedCamp

This tool is also free and displays tasks as a list or on a Kanban board. I love that this system has a section for discussions, which is useful for hashing out topics with your other family members. You can store important files that your family members can access as needed. FreedCamp also stores passwords, which is definitely handy if you are always trying to remind your significant other what their password is to their computer, email or Netflix. My mom isn’t tech savvy and she loves using this tool. Yes, even my mom has to adhere to my systems in 2019.

FamilyWall

This isn’t a Project Management tool that we use at work, but it is a cool management app that I implemented with my extended family. With this app, we have a wall to post updates, a gallery for pictures, a family calendar for events, contact book, and the ability to create shopping lists and to-dos. It is a great tool to keep your household or extended family connected and organized.

Other Systems

There are so many free and paid project management tools to choose from, like Basecamp, Asana, Jira, Avaza, etc. The key to accomplishing your goals is to pick a system that allows you to create milestone goals and tasks so that you can track your progress. Try them out and see what works best for you.

Set Your Milestone Goals & Tasks

Your milestone goal is a big goal you want to accomplish like buying a home, paying down debt, taking a vacation, building a savings account, or planning a wedding. Pick a few milestone goals that you want to tackle this year and enter these into your project management system of choice.

Once you have a milestone goal, you are going to want to break that milestone goal into smaller tasks. If your milestone is to plan a wedding, some smaller individual tasks could be:

• Pick a Venue
• Find a Destination for the Bachelor/Bachelorette Party
• Buy a Wedding Dress or Tuxedo
• Find a Caterer

Next, assign due dates to each task so that you can hold yourself accountable to complete that task on time.

Tip: Connect your project management system with your calendar app so that your due dates and tasks appear on your calendar. Check your tasks and calendar regularly so that you know what due dates are approaching.

Be sure to update your tasks with any notes on your progress and files that may be relevant to that task. Mark the task as complete when you have accomplished it.

As you get in the habit of checking off each task, you will notice that you are making progress towards your overall milestone goals! This is the most rewarding feeling.

Final Thoughts

The key to achieving our 2019 goals is to create a system where we can break our large goals into smaller achievable tasks. If the task is too large, it may take a while to accomplish and you will probably give up midway. Be sure to break your tasks into small short-term goals that you can achieve relatively quickly.

There is a certain high you get when you achieve something. According to this article at the Trello blog, Dopamine is released when we accomplish things or experience success. Checking things off a list releases small amounts of Dopamine. That pleasurable sensation helps to fuel us to want to check off more things. Pretty soon you will realize that you’ve accomplished the larger milestone goal!

I read a book years ago that had a huge impact on the way I accomplish my goals. It is called the The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson. Here is an excerpt that has really stuck with me.

“The difference between success and failure is not dramatic. In fact, the difference between success and failure is so subtle, so mundane, that most people miss it. They may not realize they have a philosophy, but they do, and it goes like this: What I do right now doesn’t really matter. It’s not hard to see how people come to this understanding of life. I don’t blame them. It’s completely understandable. It’s just not the truth. The truth is, what you do matters. What you do today matters. What you do every day matters.

Successful people are those who understand that the little choices they make matter, and because of that they choose to do things that seem to make no difference at all in the act of doing them, and they do them over and over and over until the compound effect kicks in. Those little things that will make you successful in life, that will secure your health, your happiness, your fulfillment, your dreams, are simple, subtle, mundane things that nobody will see, nobody will applaud, nobody will even notice.

They are those things that, at the time you do them, often feel like they make absolutely no difference. Things that are ridiculously easy to do—but just as easy not to do. Things that don’t seem to bring you any visible results—at first. Things that seem so insignificant, they couldn’t possibly matter. But they do. Things that, when you look at them as single occurrences, don’t seem like they’d have any impact at all—yet when compounded over time they add up to outrageous success.”

Cheers to accomplishing your personal goals in 2019!

The post Project Management Tools to Use in Your Personal Life appeared first on WebDevStudios.

We Perform a Client Discovery

Once you’ve gone through the discovery and design phase of the project life cycle, your Project Manager will begin preparing for the development phase. At this point, your Client Strategist has created your project plan and your budget is set. We then will take that project plan and will create individual tasks for the development team. We then work with the Lead Engineers to determine how many hours each task will take.

This step is critical for budget planning. We try to always assign tasks based on the developer’s skill set. If we know a developer is strong and fast in a particular area, then we want to make sure that developer gets that particular task. They will likely need less time so that saves precious hours that can be allocated elsewhere.

We also set aside hours for QA, calls, project management, and launch. These are items you may not realize add to the bottom line. We account for as much as possible so that there are no surprises later.

We Communicate to the Client Their Responsibilities

The best way you can help ensure the project stays on budget is to be as detailed as possible during this initial discovery phase. Let us know how the site should behave:

• What do you and your users expect?
• What are some pain points with your previous site?
• What functionality do you need?

User stories are not required but greatly help us during this phase. Vagueness and ambiguity in the project plan lead to budget risks down the line. One sentence can be interpreted in many different ways by the project manager, the engineer, or you. If you see any vague or ambiguous statements in the project plan, work with your Client Strategist to clarify before the project starts.

Being thorough and detailed initially will prevent us from having to use more time to redo a certain feature down the line if it doesn’t meet your expectations.

We Inform the Engineers of Your Budget

After we’ve broken the project into individual tasks and estimated hours, we schedule a kickoff call with the engineers. We go through the project plan budget to ensure the engineers are aware of what they are building and how much time they have to build it. It is at this time they can raise awareness if they think a particular task is going to take longer than anticipated. Knowing this ahead of time allows for us to shift more hours to that particular task.

We Take Special Measures to Ensure the Project Is on Budget

The Project Management team monitors the hours being spent on tasks daily. When an engineer gets close to reaching their allocated time for a task, we will determine if the task is on budget. If that task is at risk of going over budget, we then see what ways we can make that time up. There may be a task that came under hours that balances the one that went over hours. Minor overages are expected, but if the overage is becoming severe and that particular feature turns out to be more complicated than expected, we will work with you to see if there are other areas of the site we can simplify.

WebDevStudios also adheres to coding practices that ensure we spend less time debugging during the QA phase.

We’re Open to New Requests

When I went shopping to prepare for my trip, I only thought I would be purchasing clothes. As I was leaving the mall, the guy at the kiosk asked if I wanted to also get my teeth whitened. This was not something I had planned for or expected but now knew I needed because… #birthdayselfies.

During the development process, you may discover new functionality that your website needs but we may not have accounted for it in the budget. This is expected. To make sure we stay on budget, let us know what that new functionality is and we will add it to a backlog. After development is complete, we will go through the backlog and complete new items if the budget allows. If we’ve exhausted the budget, we will work with you to increase the budget to account for those new things.

Final Thoughts

As I prepare to head back home to Las Vegas, I’ve come to some realizations about budgeting. I had an amazing and spontaneous trip! It did not go exactly as I had planned it, but I stayed committed to the budget I had set. Instead of wasting money on a hotel, I opted to stay with family and allocated more of my budget on front-of-the-line passes at Universal Studios and trying new restaurants.

The initial budget planning is key but so is managing that budget throughout the project life cycle. It requires commitment, diligence, flexibility, clear communication and the ability to handle unexpected situations. By using these steps above, we can reach our ultimate goal of delivering great websites on budget—just like I was able to enjoy a memorable birthday weekend while remaining within my own budget.

When you’re ready to have a website project delivered on time and completed on budget, contact us. We’d love to partner up!

The post Guide to Completing Website Projects on Budget appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Canva Highlights

• It’s economical. With the Canva for Work pro account, you will have access to over 300,000 free photos, illustrations, and templates. You also get access to millions of photos for just $1. Finding quality images is hard and can be expensive. This alone can save your projects time and money.
• It does the heavy lifting for you. You can magically resize designs, which ensures you are always using the right dimensions for projects or media outlets.
• It expands beyond digital. Also, you can download your designs to send to a local print shop or any online printing service. With Canva, you can export your design as a PDF at 300 dpi. Note, though, that you will have to make sure any images or assets you add to your design are high resolution.

Here are some tips to get you started with using Canva.

1. Set Up a Canva for Work Account

There are a couple of ways to set this up. If you want to manage those design assets, you can create new accounts for each brand under your main account. Keep in mind, every new account has its own monthly or annual subscription cost.

2. Set Up the Brand

This is my favorite part. With the Canva for Work account, you can upload custom fonts from a style guide. So, if you used a really cool font in the logo, you can upload that to Canva so that font can be utilized on other assets. You can also specify what fonts should be used as the heading, sub-heading or body text.

Next, you can set the color palette. Take all of the colors from the brand’s style guide and add them to Canva so they can be easily used.  It there are other designers or team members helping to manage the brand, this will ensure no one uses the wrong color on a graphic and that the brand’s look stays consistent.

Finally, upload logos. Here, I like to upload every possible version of the logo in all of its colors. Also, of course, make sure to upload the PNG versions with no background.

Now when you start a new project, the fonts, colors, and logos will be readily available for you to use.

3. Create Templates

Templates are great for the design-challenged. This powerful tool allows you to create a large variety of branded assets that can be reused and customized. Typically, your designer files aren’t editable by anyone unless they also have Adobe or some other expensive designer software. Now, you can empower anyone on your team to quickly create design assets that perfectly match the brand.

Canva editor is a really powerful tool. It has layering capabilities so you can easily create custom designs in Photoshop and add it to Canva in layers. Canva even allows you to have placeholder images so say if your template has an image with a filter, you can easily drop in a new image and retain any filters and text that are on top of that image.

Below is a quick screen grab of all of the different template options you will have at your disposal. Remember, once you add the brand’s colors, logos, and fonts, the templates will automatically incorporate those for you. So you can feel confident that whatever you create, it is in alignment with your beautiful brand. For more information on this tool, visit the Canva website.

The post Using Canva for Your Website Projects appeared first on WebDevStudios.

So what’s the difference between a workcation and a vacation? Typically you have two weeks per year for vacation time. During this time, you should be relaxing and not working AT ALL. Most people actually feel guilty about taking vacations and will often check emails and work, which ultimately does more harm than good.

Vacation is your time off to relax and rejuvenate, so that you can return to work refreshed and more productive. I have a strict rule of no work and limited phone use on my vacations.

Workcations are trips you can take anywhere as long as you have wifi and can still do your work. You must be able to do your work. This is not the time to miss a client meeting because your friends want to go zip lining. You should be doing work as if you were in your office back at home.

Workcations aren’t meant to replace your vacations but should be taken in addition to your vacations. With proper planning, budgeting and scheduling, you can ideally take as many workcations as you want. Unlike vacations, you do have to work your normal set hours, communicate with your clients and team and quite possibly conduct meetings via Skype, Zoom or some other type of online meeting app.

As a former freelancer and now remote worker, I love taking mini-trips throughout the year. I recently took a workcation to Dubai from January 18-24. It took lots of planning. I also had major anxiety and nightmares over the loss of wifi, but it all worked out perfectly. Here are five tips that helped me to plan the ultimate workcation.

1. Create a Separate Workcation Budget

When assessing your annual budget, be sure to first set aside your budget for vacations or trips to be used during your paid time off. Workcations are not replacing your vacations. So, you don’t want to spend money budgeted for a vacation on your workcation. Does that make sense? Then budget for one or more workcations, whatever you can afford. Workcations can be costly; so, you want to plan and budget properly.

2. Choose the Right Location

When looking into locations for a workcation, there are several things to consider. Are you going to stay local or visit a nearby city? Are you going to take a road trip or fly to a different state, island or country? Are you traveling to visit friends or family? Your workcation can be anywhere near or far, as long as there’s wifi and you can properly communicate with your team or clients.

Also, you may not want to pick a location where you ultimately should be vacationing. There’s no need to waste money on flights or an expensive trip if you will not have the opportunity to really explore the destination.

Even so, a workcation can still be enjoyable. Last year, I took a workcation to Puerto Rico and worked on the rooftop of different hotels overlooking the water. Then I made sure to grab lunch at different local restaurants.

Another tip, try to extend your trip to include a full weekend, so that you have at least one or two days to explore and do activities.

3. Research and Convert Time Zones Ahead of Time

Timezone changes are going to be a huge factor when planning your workcation. For my workcation, I still had to be up working during our normal business hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST. Luckily in Dubai, those hours are 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. This was ideal, because I had the entire day to take tours and do activities with my friends. Then, I worked at night. I used a time zone converter to help calculate the difference prior to leaving for my trip.

While you’re choosing locations, be sure to check the times you will be required to be available to your team and clients. You want to make sure ahead of time that these are hours you feel comfortable working.

4. Plan your Travel

Traveling also took a lot of planning and research. I thought I would be able to use the plane’s wifi to work, but read reviews that wifi was slow and unstable on Emirates from LAX to Dubai. I couldn’t afford to not have wifi so I opted to fly between work. This had some interesting challenges. Let me illustrate this for you. I live on the West Coast so my normal hours of work are 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. PST. Here was my travel and work schedule from Wednesday to Friday:

Madness, right? Yes, and very exhausting, but so worth it.

5. Wifi and Communication

I’ve mentioned wifi above a few times, but it’s obviously really critical. In order to effectively take a workcation and continue to take them as you please, you have to be able to get your work done. Arrive at locations a few minutes before you start work and meetings to test your connection. The last thing you want is to miss meetings or that critical email because your internet was too slow or not working.

Also if you travel out of the country, you may not have cell phone service. Call your service provider and add an international package so that you can continue to make calls if needed. This can get pretty pricey so an affordable option would be to use Slack, Skype, Zoom or GoTo Meeting to chat and communicate with your team or clients. Remember, you still want to be dependable and responsive.

With these five tips, you should be well on your way to planning the ultimate workcation. It honestly doesn’t matter where you go, as long as you get from behind your desk once in awhile and experience new environments. Below are some photos of my recent trip to Dubai. I was also there on a Saturday and Sunday so I had plenty of time to do all of the tourist activities that I would have done if it was a vacation, without using any vacation time.

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