Remote App Developers Vs Freelancers: Whom Should You Hire?

For a CTO or CEO of a business, it is an important decision whether to hire a dedicated remote developer or freelancer for software development projects. To help you make an informed decision, let us look at advantages and disadvantages of hiring dedicated remote app developers vs freelancers. From project cost to management & control, there are many factors which you need to keep in mind while making this important business decision. Let’s take a look at some of the key factors below.

Factor To Consider For Hiring An App Developer

Size and duration of project:

If you have a small, one-off project to be developed, then you can hire a freelance developer as hiring a remote developer will be an overkill for small short duration of projects. Dedicated developer or Dedicated team hiring is recommended in case of mid to large scale or ongoing app development projects.

Project specifications:

You can hire a freelance developer if you have crystal clear project specifications and you just need someone to write a code for you. However, in most of the cases there is an additional technical guidance or expertise is sought and that’s where dedicated remote developers or team can be very helpful.

Cost and budget:

If you are working on small budget, low key project, you should focus on hiring a skilled freelancer. However, if a quality and timely delivery of the work is your first requirement then you should go with a dedicated remote developer or team.

Project criticality:

Working with freelancers for a mission-critical or business-critical projects are often found risky. There are chances that the freelances is not available during critical situations when you need him as he would be working on multiple projects at the same time. If you want a developer who is available and can constantly give you an update then you should opt for hiring a full-time remote developer.

Hiring A Freelance Developer: Pros & Cons

Freelance developers are available at comparatively lower cost but they usually do multiple projects at a time, which is a biggest risk factor for any business.

Pros:

Charges – In most cases, freelancers charge much lower hourly or daily rate than remote full-time developers or teams.

Easy to find – Freelancers are quite easy to find. There are so many platforms using which you can find freelancers; these platforms include UpWork, Guru, PeoplePerHour and other platforms. You just agree upon the cost and the terms and start the work.

Cons:

Reliability – As freelancers work on multiple projects as the same time, quality of work and timely delivery of the work may get compromised.

Communication – As we know that effective communication is key to project success and with freelancers, there are chances that they may not respond to you when you need them as they are not working only for your projects.

Quality – Every customer expects a quality product when you hire a developer for your projects. Most of the time quality is at a toss when you have freelancers working on your projects because of lack of technical skills, guidance and experience.

Why Should You Hire A Dedicated Developer or Team?

There are many advantages of hiring dedicated remote developer or team from top-notch web and mobile app development companies in India.

Expertise – Having an expert technical team working on your project will save you millions than having novice freelancer spoiling your whole project. It is important to consider developer’s expertise before hiring. Hiring dedicated developers from a reputed app development company means that you have a technically expert team developing a top-notch product for you as they have years of experience of working on software product development.

Quality & Commitment – A trusted app development company always has a quality assurance and quality control team who will ensure a quality product delivery for you.

Security – Data / Information security is important for every business. An established software development company always have data security policies in place where they sign Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) and Non-Competition Agreement (NCA) to protect Intellectual Property (IP) of your business or product.

Availability – Dedicated remote developer work full-time for your projects only and are available for communication via skype/email/slack/phone at your convenience and as per your business needs.

Maintenance & Support – A dedicated support team will take care of your application routine maintenance and critical support needs so you can sleep at night.

Conclusion

Hiring freelancers is very cost effective for small or short-term projects. The main concern is timely delivery and quality work. Usually freelancers work on multiple projects; if their project management or client management skills aren’t strong then they may not be able to deliver the project on-time. On the other hand, hiring a dedicated development team will ensure a smoother and successful project delivery and they are not so expensive.

Top 5 UX Tips To Improve Mobile App Design

Great UX and elegant UI is essential for the design of the mobile app. The importance of UX in mobile app design can’t be overlooked as more and more users are shifting to mobile apps. Let us share the top 5 UX Tips to improve mobile app design.

User Experience and User Interface one of the parameters that make an application engaging and easy to use. Some mobile apps which are designed without solid UX and UI may not be able to provide a great experience.

How User Experience Improves Mobile App Design?

User Experience focused on improving your user’s overall experience when they interact with your mobile application. The main objective of an excellent UX is to achieve optimal user experience. A user persona is one of the critical aspects to consider when your focus is on developing an app which provides a good user experience.

Top 5 Ux Tips To Improve Mobile App Design

Let us share some tips with which will allow you to improve the UX and design of your mobile application. You can also consider these tips as mobile UX design principles or mobile app design best practices.

1. Retain Uniformity

When you are designing a mobile application, you should define a standard for use of colors, typography, icons and image style as well. This will ensure a consistent experience across entire user journey. You should ensure that all elements are elegant yet simple.

2. Keep it Simple

Make toggling and navigation easy and simple for users. A new user who recently downloaded your application; should not go through a learning curve to use your game or application. You should identify touch-points which allow you to improve user interaction with your application.

Apple recommends that for UI design for mobile apps; the 44-pixel square is an appropriate size for a touch. You should build your application considering this aspect and make sure that while the user is tapping on any button, he or she must not hit another element.

3. Focus On Faster Loading Speeds

Speed is an essential aspect of mobile user interface design principles. Users always wish to complete a task in the application in as early as possible. Thus, they prefer an application with a short loading time. Ideally, an application should launch within 3-5 seconds. The longer the loading time your app, the higher the chances of your user moving to another app.

4. Focus On Your Intended Audience

An application with built with a focus on UX and UI should keep in mind the target market. Your target audience should find the app valuable and should satisfy their needs.

You will need to conduct market research to create an app that meets the needs of your target audience. Market research will allow understanding user, and because of that, you can come up with an app that solves their problems.

5. UX for Business Point of View

UX plays a significant role in mobile application design and development. From a business point of view; UX focuses on user satisfaction and pleasure. It is important to consider user needs and provide users a satisfactory experience to build the brand value and reputation of your business. Great UX and great design can grab consumer attention and can generate more revenue from your company’s products. Hence UX and UI have become a significant part of today’s businesses.

UX deals with customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retaining customers. When you are dealing with UX, you are dealing with different people having different needs and mixed emotions.

Businesses which can create positive user experiences can achieve a large number of loyal customer base. We must not forget that; a satisfied customer becomes advocate of your brand. Brand which offer high levels of usability in their products and services are more likely to be recommended to user’s friends and family members.

We hope that this article will help you to understand importance of UX and UI design in Mobile Application Development. You must build the UX before UI to achieve a satisfactory customer experience. Building and following mobile app design guidelines will ensure that UX and UI are in-sync and work hand-in-hand to provide a great experience and ease of use to users of your mobile application.

Top 5 CRM Tools With Highest Users In 2019

Businesses have better chances of becoming more profitable and successful if they manage to build a strong relationship with customers. Customer Relationship Management tools utilize best practices, proven methods, and technology to help you manage customer relationships in a better way. To help you choose the right CRM, we have prepared a list of top CRM tools.

In this article, we will cover HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and 2 more CRMs selected from the top 10 CRM. Let us have a detailed look at the list and identify a CRM which suits your needs.

1. Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers multiple useful features, such as business intelligence, social insights, and many productivity features. It will help you do marketing smartly and sell your products and services effectively.

There are multiple benefits of deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Some of them are automation and marketing tools, various dashboards, close integration with other Microsoft apps, offline access, and easier integration with third-party systems. All these features make it one of the best CRM tools. You can deploy Dynamics CRM in the cloud, on-premises, or use a hybrid approach.

2. Salesforce CRM

100,000+ small and medium-sized enterprises are using Salesforce due to its pricing. Salesforce products are highly integrated with each other and come with very easy to use interface.

Salesforce CRM was built to boost productivity using refined retention strategies. It offers a wide range of functionalities, such as opportunity management, lead routing, which will allow you to streamline processes and monitor your progress. Besides, it tracks all customer details in one place to help you nurture more leads.

3. HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM is a powerful enterprise CRM. It keeps all your contacts in one centralised database. It integrates inbound marketing into CRM to keep your customer base growing. You can also configure automated email triggers based on the history of interactions.

It comes with multiple useful functionalities such as omnichannel marketing, predictive lead scoring, marketing automation, contacts reporting and revenue reporting. HubSpot CRM also has a free version with some limitations, but it is widely known as the best free CRM tool.

4. Zoho CRM

 Its a web-based CRM with customer-oriented functionalities such as sales pipeline management, workflow management, lead and contact management, account management and purchase control.

It can track sales, automate business tasks, and engage customers with various platforms. This CRM promises to convert leads and imports prospects from external sources such as webinars, and direct emails.

Opportunity Tracking tool shows the customer’s buying cycle, deal size, contact history, and competitor profile. You can use these details to create targeted marketing messages.

5. Freshsales

Freshsales is a single contact management system by the creators of Freshdesk. As the name suggests; one of its core strengths is into different stages of the sales process. Apart from capturing leads, it helps you to verify and nurture them using multiple communication channels.

Besides standard CRM functionalities, it offers advanced features such as affiliate management, email tracking, conversation tracking, and auto-dialers. It has an excellent reporting functionality to generate default reports and custom report on each contact, opportunity, and deal. It also offers 24/7 customer support via phone, email, and live chat.

12 Best Mobile Ad Networks To Monetize Mobile App Of Your Business

Your mobile app journey doesn’t end with the app development and launch. You need to start thinking about generating revenue by monetizing your mobile application. There are many mobile ad networks available on the internet. Let us check the best mobile ad networks to monetize mobile app for your business.

Mobile ad networks help app owners or app agencies to monetize their mobile apps by selling space in their apps via in-app advertisements. Before we move ahead, let us check the leading mobile ad network in the market today.

Popular ad networks to monetize mobile app of your business

• Google AdMob
• Chartboost
• Media.net
• Unity Ads
• Millennial Media
• Leadbolt
• InMobi
• Fyber
• AdColony
• StartApp
• Epom Apps

In this article, we will look at the most commonly used mobile ad networks out of the list above.

1. Google AdMob

Source: TechCrunch

Google’s AdMob is one of the best and easy to use mobile ad network for mobile app monetization. Google gives you an advantage of having 40+ third-party ad networks which will help you to increase your earnings.

AdMob is less intrusive as compared to the other networks. it ensures flawless functionality and offers easier app integration. However, users have reported lower revenues. Hence, if you want to make higher revenues, you can also opt for other mobile networks such as Media.net.

• Minimum Payout: $100
• Supported format of Ads: Interstitial, Native, Banner, Video, Lightbox, Trueview
• Supported Platforms: Android, iOS and Unit
• 2. Media.net

2. Media.net

Source: Medianet

Media.net created display-to-search ad format which allowed monetization of display placements. Through this format for advertising, advertisers have seen high sales without the risk of having to buy cost per thousand impressions.

Due to the above reasons, Media.net is very popular among advertisers. This gives an immense opportunity to owners of mobile applications and mobile games to have their apps using media.net mobile ad network for app monetization. You can get higher revenues compared to other networks if you utilize media.net for the monetization of your application.

3. Chartboost

Source: Chartboost

If you are publisher of a mobile game then you should definitely try Chartboost to monetize your game better. Chartboost is a mobile-only ad platform which focuseson gamers. Game publishers choose Chartboost to keep a track of their user base. Game developers have access to the data generated by Chartboost. Integrating Chartboost SDK on your mobile game is quite easy. Chartboost allows you to control the ads the users of your game see.

If you are a new game developer then, this application can help you in enhancing brand image.This top-rated Mobile app advertising company has been used by about 300,000 games. Many businesses get high revenues by using appropriate strategies.

• Minimum Payout: $75
• Supported format of Ads: Native Ad, Interstitial and Video.
• Supported Platforms: iOS, Android, Unity and Amazon

4. Facebook Audience Network

Source: Pinterest

Facebook generates more than 80% revenue through advertisement. One of the major but not so known advertising aspect of Facebook is their mobile ad network. It offers monetization opportunities to game developers and app developers.

Facebook Audience Network allows advertisers to serve ads in the mobile apps using analytical and targeting tools of Facebook. Facebook’s says that they have more than 3 million global advertisers on their platform. However, they haven’t shared a list of advertisers.

• Minimum Payout: $100
• Supported format of Ads: Native Ads, Banners, and Interstitial
• Supported Platforms: Android, iOS

Choosing the right mobile ad network for your iOS app or your Android app is certainly a challenging task. In this article, we tried to provide you the important insights about some of the most popular and commonly used mobile ad networks to help you choose the one for y our business.

Is Laravel The Best PHP Framework ?

Thousands of websites get developed using PHP frameworks every day. However, only a handful of them has the capability to make a real business impact. A website needs simple navigation, useful features, and an appealing design to make the visitor stay on the website and increase the possibilities of them getting converted. While there are many PHP frameworks out in the market for developing great websites. Let us identify if Laravel is the best PHP framework or not?

Developers require a reusable and simple coding technique which makes the development process efficient. Laravel comes with these development capabilities high level of flexibility. It makes the development process efficient. It has the following technical advantages.

1. MVC and Object-Oriented Approach

Laravel follows MVC-based architectural pattern and expressive object-oriented syntax. Model-view-controller and object-oriented approach have come with their own advantages.

On the other hand, most developers are already familiar with MVC and object-oriented approach. This allows developers to work efficiently. Laravel also comes with built-in object-oriented libraries.

2. Authorization Techniques

In Laravel, implementing authentication and simple as it provides an organized way to access logic and control access. When it comes to Authorization, it comes with many functionalities such as hashing, password reset, protection against CSRF (Cross-site Request Forgery) attacks, and encryption.

3. Framework-Level Security

Laravel takes care of the security within its framework. It provides security features such as password hashing, encryption. In addition, the framework uses prepared SQL statements which give strong protection against SQL injection attacks.

4. Easy Database Migration

With Laravel framework, database migrations are very easy. If you keep your databases in migrations and seeds, you can easily migrate the changes into any other development machine.

5. Template Engine

Laravel comes with Blade Template Engine. It combines one or more templates with a data model to produce resulting views for improved performance. The template engine comes with control structures, conditional statements and loops, which are mapped to their PHP counterparts.

6. Artisan Command-Line Interface

Laravel has its own command-line interface called Artisan. Developers use this for publishing package assets, migrate databases, seeding and generating boilerplate code for new controllers and models.

7. Automatic Package Discovery

Laravel Automatic Package Discovery automatically detects which packages users want to install. Developers don’t have to set up any aliases or providers. Developers can also disable this feature. This feature makes Laravel one of the best PHP Framework.

Laravel Helps You Build Web Applications In A Simple And Efficient Way

All these features and technical capabilities of the framework make Laravel one of the best PHP framework. Laravel is suitable for web application development for small to enterprise-level business. Built-in functionalities, libraries and official packages allow developers to work with ease.