With our world becoming more reliant on technology, it also makes the ability to run businesses, graphic designing, wesbite building, social media management and personal marketing increasingly easier and accessable for anyone. Professional or not, most people are now able to do these things themselves through releases of new software targeted to regular consumers to build their own web pages, graphic designs and social media prescences.
Below is a list of these programs and some advantages and disadvantages for your comparison:
- Squarespace – Squarespace is an online tool where you can create your own website for whatever purpose. The designing method includes simple drag and drop elements so there is no need to have any coding knowledge. Squarespace also includes premade tempates to cut the designing time down tremendously and give you a clear guide to adhere by to ensure a clean and accessible website design. Despite squarespace being extremely simple to use, customers have reported the software is more on the expensive side, customisation is limited and poor seo performance which will affect the traffic of your website.
- Canva – Canva is a website allowing you to make any sort of graphic design. It is a simple program that allows you to construct images for absolutely anything whether you need a flyer, a social media post, a worksheet or even just to edit a photo. Canva is free but they do have a lot of elements that you need to upgrade to their paid subscription to use. Canva is extremely easy to use and has many elemements, shapes and graphics to choose from. Although it’s effectiveness, it is better for a beginner designer as it lacks advanced custimisation options. With the free canva version you can only upload 5GB of data which can cause limitations if you do not pay fpr the subscription.
- Mailchimp – Mailchimp is a service created to aid you with your business’s email marketing. They help you curate personalised email marketing campiagns that can be sent out on a mass scale to help you reach your business goals. It can also provide you with analytics of your email engagment to determine what audience your campiagn is reaching. The downsides of mailchimp would be the limited access of their free program meaning you do need to pay to get decent features, and due to their wide range of customisations it can be quite difficult to use.
- Capcut – Capcut is a free video editiong software that businesses can use to create and edit promotional videos for their social media. Capcut is easy to use allowing you to select the clips you want and dragging them to the order you desire as well as adding sound effects, music, text, filters etc: The cons of capcut is its lack of advanced options for creation meaning it will definetely compare to something made professionally.
Whether you choose to use software yourself, or you hire a professional, it is whatever works best for you and your business needs. Keep in mind, when you pay for a professional, you are guaramteed to have quality work completed in a timely fashion and work that delivers results for your business as professionals will take into account what works online, what creates engagement and what will lead to sales.
