By Bizna Brand Analyst

Many people handle blogs the way young men handle cars. It’s a well known fact that ladies prefer to be with men who drive BMWs as opposed to those who drive Subarus and, as a result, a lot of misguided men often try to purchase or lease cars that they can barely afford all in an attempt to look cool.

In much the same way, young bloggers often spend thousands of shillings to build a website hoping that the fancy logo and state of the art design will attract a lot of readers and keep them coming back. Unfortunately, this is just a waste of time. The good news is that, just like there are cars under 500,000 shillings that will attract Njeri and her friends, you can also get yourself a good looking blog that won’t bankrupt you and still get a lot of visitors. The trick is of course to know what features you should spend money on and what features you are better off implementing yourself or leaving out entirely.

Here are some important points to save you time and money.

The functionality and content ou deliver trump the design

The two main components of any website are its functionality and design. The functionality refers primarily to what visitors can do on your website—e.g read posts, share, sign up to a mailing list, view pictures and videos with ease, etc. The design is the general look and feel of the website. Most people think of the design before the functionality, which is a rookie mistake.

Take a look at Reddit for example or even Ghafla Kenya locally. These two websites have very basic designs but the millions of people who visit them don’t care about that. Of course I am not trying to imply that it doesn’t matter if our website looks like the drawings of a Kindergarten child, but if you are on a tight budget, building out the functionality of your blog should be your priority while the design can be implemented later when it’s really necessary. And I still insist: do not spend hundreds of shillings on your logo. Unless you want to run for president or start a political party, no one is going to really care what it looks like or how much text shadow was applied.

Learn (or Google) the basics of web development and WordPress so that you can fix small problems yourself

Websites get affected by a number of issues from time to time and by learning to fix them yourself, you can save yourself a lot of money and time. While there are technically advanced aspects of web development that only a professional tech guy would be able to work on, knowing the basics will arm you with enough knowledge to enable you make the right decisions on any small issues affecting your website. . Then you can proceed to hire a professional for the more complicated work. It’s not as hard as it might seem

WordPress is the world’s leading tool for building websites and its user friendly interface is perhaps the main reason why nearly 80 million websites have been built with it. The best thing about using WordPress is that you can become quite proficient at using it by just reading forums online. If your blog has a problem, just Google and you will come across good number of people explaining how to fix it

Develop a plan for your blog

Know exactly what you need so that you don’t keep on jumping to things that you see in other blogs. Knowing what you want in advance helps you save money because you can implement everything at once instead of having to keep going back to a designer and paying more in the process. Before you set out to talk to a web developer make sure you plan how you want your website to function. The best way to do this is to imagine that you are a visitor browsing through your website. What would you expect to see or do when you visit your website? Set up all the necessary functionality aspects early on so that you just focus on content production

Have a budget

Most web developers are willing to bargain so don’t just go with the amount they quote for you. Of course they will want to extract the highest amount from you, so unless you have a ‘mti ya pesa’ on your backyard, Inform the developer how much you are willing to spend. If the developer feels the amount you are offering is fair, game on. If not he will negotiate for a higher budget, and both of you can move on from there. Just don’t overpay. There’s always a better deal elsewhere.

There you have it peeps. Crucial tips to help you build and maintain a decent blog on a shoestring budget that will promote your business or whatever goal you have in mind.