Under the Hood
The story begins when I started working as a freelance developer and grabbed my first client. He(my client) wanted a Twitter management dashboard for his team, where the entire team could schedule the tweets, likes, retweets, and so on —basically, a portal to manage a single business Twitter account by multiple people.
I was surprised initially because building a dashboard is important! It was strange for me, especially for only one Twitter account 😁(feels weird). My initial thought at that time was to hire people or freelancers to manage the Twitter account. But I was totally wrong, and, in today’s story, we will discuss why the dashboard is so important and where I went wrong.
Getting Started
Dashboards are not only to monitor your website's usage or control unnecessary actions. Dashboards help to increase your business and open multiple business horizons. I will explain to you with a real example of how dashboards help companies and developers to run their businesses effectively.
What is Dashboard?
You can name it whatever you want, Dashboard, Admin Panel, Content Management or so on. The dashboard is an internal team portal that can manage all the business aspects in one go.
Why do we need a Dashboard?
For example, let's say you have a blogging website and to push the content to your website you need to first push it to our database or Content Management System. Now you can do this in 2 ways —
- Directly push the content to the database using API
- Or create a form to add the content to the database.
The choice will always be yours if you are the only one person and a developer then you probably don’t need a dashboard or admin panel and by simply using POST API you can push the content to your database.
But solution number 1 i.e. pushing data using API is not a scalable and feasible solution. It has its own cons such as—
- If your team size grows then access to your database is direct to developers' hands which might not be safe.
- Difficult to push content in the database if you have a non-developer in your team (which is a very obvious case).
I have tried both ways of adding content for the blogging website but solution one seems a bit frustrating and is not scalable at all. At this point in time, you need a dashboard. An admin panel to manage and push the content to the database. Let me explain the pros of having an admin panel —
- Easy to handle by the non-technical person (A non-technical person can work with databases without understanding the technical part at all).
- Less prone to high-risk situations.
- Scalable solution built for a longer period.
What can a Dashboard help to achieve?
Apart from technical high-risk and scalable leverages, the dashboard saves people hours in doing manual work. Ultimately, a single dashboard can save a lot of the company’s as well as your time. Let me explain with an example: your blogging website needs very frequent updates in a day — let’s say 2 times a day. You publish an article on your website. In that case, a single hosted/deployed dashboard can save you a lot of time instead of manually doing every update in the database or website.
At iHateReading, we have an admin panel that helps us to publish our articles, creatives and videos. We are even publishing our custom built-in repository on our website using our admin panel under the hood.
Dashboard in Frontend
A lot of people believe we need a dashboard to deal with databases only. But the dashboard comes out again out of the box by handling the frontend pillar among the 4 pillars of your product. One cool shit I’ve already covered in one of my stories, where we have shown how to develop a theme management system for your website.
Apart from managing themes from the dashboard, you can manage users' access to your website, such as paid users, unpaid users and so on. You can extend the controllability of your dashboard to whatever extent you feel so it is highly customisable and scalable.
The dashboard can help non-technical people to handle your website's content, themes, layouts and access. This is so powerful that without touching the code you can take control of the website UI.
At what point in time do you need a dashboard for your product?
The answer is very simple, whenever your team size starts growing, whenever you feel that most of the work is repeated in one or another way you should start thinking about a dashboard or admin panel to deal with this kind of work.
In our case for iHateReading, we developed our most minimum viable dashboard after 1 month of the product launch. Although I was working alone at that point in time, now that single dashboard saves me a lot of time and headaches. For every update to the website, I don’t need to open my codebase to make changes to the database or on the front-end side.
The choice will always be yours, you can start creating a dashboard for your product after a year also, it depends on product to product and person to person. But ultimately creating one dashboard can help you manage things easily before putting everything in cumbersome.
The answer is very simple, whenever your team size starts growing, whenever you feel that most of the work is repeated in one or another way you should start thinking about a dashboard or admin panel to deal with this kind of work.
In our case for iHateReading, we developed our most minimum viable dashboard after 1 month of the product launch. Although I was working alone at that point in time, now that single dashboard saves me a lot of time and headache. For every update to the website, I don’t need to open my codebase to make changes to the database or on the frontend side.
The choice will always be yours, you can start creating a dashboard for your product after a year also, it depends on product to product and person to person. But ultimately creating one dashboard can help you manage things easily before putting everything in cumbersome.
Conclusion
I will not stretch this story too much by bombarding too many pros about the dashboard. Slowly slowly, I will be giving a few more tips and tricks around the dashboard for your product by covering the few more important points in-depth such as how to create a dashboard, how and where to host a dashboard and how to give access to your dashboard and so on.
Until, next time, Have a good day, People and do not forget to subscribe 😁✌🏼.
Keep developing
Shrey
iHateReading
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