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Some Recent Thoughts...
Juicy Tidbits Without the "Tech Speak"
A compilation of ramblings about everything from HubSpot CMS development to data architecture, integrations and all the tech stuff you never knew you needed to know.
memeify the blog!
Blogs Listing - UPDATE 2024 (Jordan)
7 HubSpot CMS Developer Interview Questions to Ask: Part 1
When it comes to HubSpot CMS developer interviews - here are the questions you should be asking:
HubSpot CMS Development Tips: Mega Mistakes with Mega Menus
Mega menus are a great way to help your website visitors find what they need, but be sure you don't make these mistakes:
HubSpot CMS Development Trends: Mega Menus are Here to Stay
When it comes to HubSpot CMS development trends, mega menus are here to stay. Here's why:
Website Bounce Rate: 6 Things Sending People Away from Your Website
A high website bounce rate will tell you a lot about conversion opportunities. Here are 6 things that could be sending people away from your website:
Website Quality Assurance: You Need QA in HubSpot CMS Development
Website quality assurance matters! Here's why you can't afford NOT to have a QA process in HubSpot CMS Development projects.
It's Time to Leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS
WordPress has served us well for a long time, but it's time to switch to HubSpot CMS - here's why:
Growth-Driven Design: Why Your Website is Kinda Like Pokemon
Growth-Driven Design allows for a constant evolution of your website - much like pokemon. Learn more about the continuous improvement model...
HubSpot CMS Development Quality Assurance: Why We Love Pastel
When it comes to HubSpot CMS Development quality assurance, Pastel is the an amazing tool to make your life easier...
Agencies Should Pay More for Web Development Outsourcing
You get what you pay for. Here's the case for why you should invest a little more in HubSpot web development outsourcing.
When it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer partner agency for a development project, it is important to hire an experienced professional that is going to create a beautiful, functional website, application or module they are willing to support.
You might be wondering - where the best HubSpot CMS developers are hiding?
You might be wondering - how can you make sure you’re working with the best developer?
As HubSpot CMS developers, we have been working within HubSpot CMS since shortly after launch and we have compiled a list of questions that you can ask during the vetting process to ensure that you end up with the best developer to suit your individual business needs.
Here are 6 preliminary questions you will want to ask your HubSpot developer during the interview process to qualify them for the job:
When it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer partner agency for a development project, it is important to hire an experienced professional that is going to create a beautiful, functional website, application or module they are willing to support.
You might be wondering - where the best HubSpot CMS developers are hiding?
You might be wondering - how can you make sure you’re working with the best developer?
As HubSpot CMS developers, we have been working within HubSpot CMS since shortly after launch and we have compiled a list of questions that you can ask during the vetting process to ensure that you end up with the best developer to suit your individual business needs.
Here are 6 preliminary questions you will want to ask your HubSpot developer during the interview process to qualify them for the job:
Who will the architect be in this project?
\nIn many agencies, there can be a large disconnect between the sales rep and the development team. This can mean big issues when it comes to scoping and developing new projects on a client’s behalf. If you are not interfacing with the development team, you will want to take time to understand who is architecting your project and how the salesperson or account manager will be interacting with the rest of the team to ensure that your brand and project vision are communicated seamlessly to them.
![\"8\"](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/8.png\")
\n
You do not want to be playing a game of telephone between a sales rep, account manager, project manager and developer unless they have a really comprehensive, seamless project flow.
Will we get to meet the project architect during the kickoff meeting?
\n
This is one of the most critical aspects of project planning. You need to get to know the person who will be architecting your website and ideally that means meeting with them prior to the start of the project.
If you are unable to meet with them, an extremely detailed plan must be in place to give the architect information about your brand mission, services, vision for the website or project, the buyer journey and goals of the project. Meeting with the lead designer or developer in charge of your project is a critical aspect to ensure that you are getting what you ask for.
Can you provide some examples of work you've completed in HubSpot CMS?
\n
Any experienced developer will have a considerable amount of projects to share with you.
They will be able to provide a list of the projects they have completed and run down the complexities of the design and how they implemented the projects.
They will be able to explain how the back end works for the users that will be updating the website and give examples of how they made it easy for the marketer to implement the design elements on the back end.
Tell us about the challenges you've encountered with these projects in HubSpot; how did you overcome them?
\n
Good developers put out quality projects. Great developers complete projects that other developers say cannot be done. There are always challenges when it comes to implementing designs, bridging integrations and adding features in HubSpot CMS, but the key in vetting the developer for your next project is understanding how they overcame the challenges they were faced with in the development process.
Great developers love a challenge and they are usually willing to brag about how they used their brain and coding skills to overcome them. Ask the question to get to know how your developers think and approach complex problems. While not all developers will have case studies at their disposal if you are working with them directly, a qualified agency will have an arsenal of case studies and white papers to showcase their skills.
Have you worked with businesses like ours before?
\n
Industry experience, while helpful, is not the most important thing when it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer, but it does help. Knowing that a developer understands the intricacies of your industry or business can be beneficial, especially if there are regulations and legal requirements associated with your business.
It never hurts to ask if a developer has experience working with other businesses of your type. They may be able to give you more valuable feedback when it comes to what works and doesn’t work relating to the project that you are discussing.
Are you modifying a theme you worked with before, is this a template or are you working from scratch?
\n
A custom website is very expensive. Customizing templates or themes can be a great way for your developer to keep your costs down. You will want to know what is happening, though and they should not oversell what they are doing.
If they are modifying a template or theme, you will want to ask follow up questions about website bloat. Coding on top of an existing website theme design can bog down your website - an experienced developer will be aware of potential problems and let you know how they intend to handle them in advance.
How will the design process work?
\n
Your design is critical to the success of your HubSpot CMS project. It should balance aesthetics and function. Analysis should be done to determine how it compliments the journey your buyers are on when they find your website.
\n
![\"9\"](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/9.png\")
Your developer or agency should have a comprehensive process for how to handle design and it should include a lot of feedback from you. You will want to deliver your branded fonts, colors, style guidelines and information about your products and services. If you have notalready done so, your agency may engage in the development of your buyer personas to help you understand the buyer journey and how it fits into your offerings and goals.
While each agency’s design process is different, any process that does not involve getting all of this information prior to establishing a design - isn’t worth vetting, in our opinion.
These are just a few of the questions you should lead with when vetting a HubSpot CMS agency or development partner. You are likely investing thousands of dollars into this project in the hopes that it will yield leads, greater revenue, or better efficiency among your employees - asking the right questions during the interview process is critical to your success.
Got any to add to the list? Drop them in the comments and be sure to check out Part 2 for more HubSpot CMS developer interview questions to ask.
\n
","rss_summary":"
When it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer partner agency for a development project, it is important to hire an experienced professional that is going to create a beautiful, functional website, application or module they are willing to support.
You might be wondering - where the best HubSpot CMS developers are hiding?
You might be wondering - how can you make sure you’re working with the best developer?
As HubSpot CMS developers, we have been working within HubSpot CMS since shortly after launch and we have compiled a list of questions that you can ask during the vetting process to ensure that you end up with the best developer to suit your individual business needs.
Here are 6 preliminary questions you will want to ask your HubSpot developer during the interview process to qualify them for the job:
When it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer partner agency for a development project, it is important to hire an experienced professional that is going to create a beautiful, functional website, application or module they are willing to support.
You might be wondering - where the best HubSpot CMS developers are hiding?
You might be wondering - how can you make sure you’re working with the best developer?
As HubSpot CMS developers, we have been working within HubSpot CMS since shortly after launch and we have compiled a list of questions that you can ask during the vetting process to ensure that you end up with the best developer to suit your individual business needs.
Here are 6 preliminary questions you will want to ask your HubSpot developer during the interview process to qualify them for the job:
Who will the architect be in this project?
\nIn many agencies, there can be a large disconnect between the sales rep and the development team. This can mean big issues when it comes to scoping and developing new projects on a client’s behalf. If you are not interfacing with the development team, you will want to take time to understand who is architecting your project and how the salesperson or account manager will be interacting with the rest of the team to ensure that your brand and project vision are communicated seamlessly to them.
\n
You do not want to be playing a game of telephone between a sales rep, account manager, project manager and developer unless they have a really comprehensive, seamless project flow.
Will we get to meet the project architect during the kickoff meeting?
\n
This is one of the most critical aspects of project planning. You need to get to know the person who will be architecting your website and ideally that means meeting with them prior to the start of the project.
If you are unable to meet with them, an extremely detailed plan must be in place to give the architect information about your brand mission, services, vision for the website or project, the buyer journey and goals of the project. Meeting with the lead designer or developer in charge of your project is a critical aspect to ensure that you are getting what you ask for.
Can you provide some examples of work you've completed in HubSpot CMS?
\n
Any experienced developer will have a considerable amount of projects to share with you.
They will be able to provide a list of the projects they have completed and run down the complexities of the design and how they implemented the projects.
They will be able to explain how the back end works for the users that will be updating the website and give examples of how they made it easy for the marketer to implement the design elements on the back end.
Tell us about the challenges you've encountered with these projects in HubSpot; how did you overcome them?
\n
Good developers put out quality projects. Great developers complete projects that other developers say cannot be done. There are always challenges when it comes to implementing designs, bridging integrations and adding features in HubSpot CMS, but the key in vetting the developer for your next project is understanding how they overcame the challenges they were faced with in the development process.
Great developers love a challenge and they are usually willing to brag about how they used their brain and coding skills to overcome them. Ask the question to get to know how your developers think and approach complex problems. While not all developers will have case studies at their disposal if you are working with them directly, a qualified agency will have an arsenal of case studies and white papers to showcase their skills.
Have you worked with businesses like ours before?
\n
Industry experience, while helpful, is not the most important thing when it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer, but it does help. Knowing that a developer understands the intricacies of your industry or business can be beneficial, especially if there are regulations and legal requirements associated with your business.
It never hurts to ask if a developer has experience working with other businesses of your type. They may be able to give you more valuable feedback when it comes to what works and doesn’t work relating to the project that you are discussing.
Are you modifying a theme you worked with before, is this a template or are you working from scratch?
\n
A custom website is very expensive. Customizing templates or themes can be a great way for your developer to keep your costs down. You will want to know what is happening, though and they should not oversell what they are doing.
If they are modifying a template or theme, you will want to ask follow up questions about website bloat. Coding on top of an existing website theme design can bog down your website - an experienced developer will be aware of potential problems and let you know how they intend to handle them in advance.
How will the design process work?
\n
Your design is critical to the success of your HubSpot CMS project. It should balance aesthetics and function. Analysis should be done to determine how it compliments the journey your buyers are on when they find your website.
\n
Your developer or agency should have a comprehensive process for how to handle design and it should include a lot of feedback from you. You will want to deliver your branded fonts, colors, style guidelines and information about your products and services. If you have notalready done so, your agency may engage in the development of your buyer personas to help you understand the buyer journey and how it fits into your offerings and goals.
While each agency’s design process is different, any process that does not involve getting all of this information prior to establishing a design - isn’t worth vetting, in our opinion.
These are just a few of the questions you should lead with when vetting a HubSpot CMS agency or development partner. You are likely investing thousands of dollars into this project in the hopes that it will yield leads, greater revenue, or better efficiency among your employees - asking the right questions during the interview process is critical to your success.
Got any to add to the list? Drop them in the comments and be sure to check out Part 2 for more HubSpot CMS developer interview questions to ask.
\n
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When it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer partner agency for a development project, it is important to hire an experienced professional that is going to create a beautiful, functional website, application or module they are willing to support.
You might be wondering - where the best HubSpot CMS developers are hiding?
You might be wondering - how can you make sure you’re working with the best developer?
As HubSpot CMS developers, we have been working within HubSpot CMS since shortly after launch and we have compiled a list of questions that you can ask during the vetting process to ensure that you end up with the best developer to suit your individual business needs.
Here are 6 preliminary questions you will want to ask your HubSpot developer during the interview process to qualify them for the job:
Who will the architect be in this project?
\nIn many agencies, there can be a large disconnect between the sales rep and the development team. This can mean big issues when it comes to scoping and developing new projects on a client’s behalf. If you are not interfacing with the development team, you will want to take time to understand who is architecting your project and how the salesperson or account manager will be interacting with the rest of the team to ensure that your brand and project vision are communicated seamlessly to them.
\n
You do not want to be playing a game of telephone between a sales rep, account manager, project manager and developer unless they have a really comprehensive, seamless project flow.
Will we get to meet the project architect during the kickoff meeting?
\n
This is one of the most critical aspects of project planning. You need to get to know the person who will be architecting your website and ideally that means meeting with them prior to the start of the project.
If you are unable to meet with them, an extremely detailed plan must be in place to give the architect information about your brand mission, services, vision for the website or project, the buyer journey and goals of the project. Meeting with the lead designer or developer in charge of your project is a critical aspect to ensure that you are getting what you ask for.
Can you provide some examples of work you've completed in HubSpot CMS?
\n
Any experienced developer will have a considerable amount of projects to share with you.
They will be able to provide a list of the projects they have completed and run down the complexities of the design and how they implemented the projects.
They will be able to explain how the back end works for the users that will be updating the website and give examples of how they made it easy for the marketer to implement the design elements on the back end.
Tell us about the challenges you've encountered with these projects in HubSpot; how did you overcome them?
\n
Good developers put out quality projects. Great developers complete projects that other developers say cannot be done. There are always challenges when it comes to implementing designs, bridging integrations and adding features in HubSpot CMS, but the key in vetting the developer for your next project is understanding how they overcame the challenges they were faced with in the development process.
Great developers love a challenge and they are usually willing to brag about how they used their brain and coding skills to overcome them. Ask the question to get to know how your developers think and approach complex problems. While not all developers will have case studies at their disposal if you are working with them directly, a qualified agency will have an arsenal of case studies and white papers to showcase their skills.
Have you worked with businesses like ours before?
\n
Industry experience, while helpful, is not the most important thing when it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer, but it does help. Knowing that a developer understands the intricacies of your industry or business can be beneficial, especially if there are regulations and legal requirements associated with your business.
It never hurts to ask if a developer has experience working with other businesses of your type. They may be able to give you more valuable feedback when it comes to what works and doesn’t work relating to the project that you are discussing.
Are you modifying a theme you worked with before, is this a template or are you working from scratch?
\n
A custom website is very expensive. Customizing templates or themes can be a great way for your developer to keep your costs down. You will want to know what is happening, though and they should not oversell what they are doing.
If they are modifying a template or theme, you will want to ask follow up questions about website bloat. Coding on top of an existing website theme design can bog down your website - an experienced developer will be aware of potential problems and let you know how they intend to handle them in advance.
How will the design process work?
\n
Your design is critical to the success of your HubSpot CMS project. It should balance aesthetics and function. Analysis should be done to determine how it compliments the journey your buyers are on when they find your website.
\n
Your developer or agency should have a comprehensive process for how to handle design and it should include a lot of feedback from you. You will want to deliver your branded fonts, colors, style guidelines and information about your products and services. If you have notalready done so, your agency may engage in the development of your buyer personas to help you understand the buyer journey and how it fits into your offerings and goals.
While each agency’s design process is different, any process that does not involve getting all of this information prior to establishing a design - isn’t worth vetting, in our opinion.
These are just a few of the questions you should lead with when vetting a HubSpot CMS agency or development partner. You are likely investing thousands of dollars into this project in the hopes that it will yield leads, greater revenue, or better efficiency among your employees - asking the right questions during the interview process is critical to your success.
Got any to add to the list? Drop them in the comments and be sure to check out Part 2 for more HubSpot CMS developer interview questions to ask.
\n
","postBodyRss":"
When it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer partner agency for a development project, it is important to hire an experienced professional that is going to create a beautiful, functional website, application or module they are willing to support.
You might be wondering - where the best HubSpot CMS developers are hiding?
You might be wondering - how can you make sure you’re working with the best developer?
As HubSpot CMS developers, we have been working within HubSpot CMS since shortly after launch and we have compiled a list of questions that you can ask during the vetting process to ensure that you end up with the best developer to suit your individual business needs.
Here are 6 preliminary questions you will want to ask your HubSpot developer during the interview process to qualify them for the job:
Who will the architect be in this project?
\nIn many agencies, there can be a large disconnect between the sales rep and the development team. This can mean big issues when it comes to scoping and developing new projects on a client’s behalf. If you are not interfacing with the development team, you will want to take time to understand who is architecting your project and how the salesperson or account manager will be interacting with the rest of the team to ensure that your brand and project vision are communicated seamlessly to them.
\n
You do not want to be playing a game of telephone between a sales rep, account manager, project manager and developer unless they have a really comprehensive, seamless project flow.
Will we get to meet the project architect during the kickoff meeting?
\n
This is one of the most critical aspects of project planning. You need to get to know the person who will be architecting your website and ideally that means meeting with them prior to the start of the project.
If you are unable to meet with them, an extremely detailed plan must be in place to give the architect information about your brand mission, services, vision for the website or project, the buyer journey and goals of the project. Meeting with the lead designer or developer in charge of your project is a critical aspect to ensure that you are getting what you ask for.
Can you provide some examples of work you've completed in HubSpot CMS?
\n
Any experienced developer will have a considerable amount of projects to share with you.
They will be able to provide a list of the projects they have completed and run down the complexities of the design and how they implemented the projects.
They will be able to explain how the back end works for the users that will be updating the website and give examples of how they made it easy for the marketer to implement the design elements on the back end.
Tell us about the challenges you've encountered with these projects in HubSpot; how did you overcome them?
\n
Good developers put out quality projects. Great developers complete projects that other developers say cannot be done. There are always challenges when it comes to implementing designs, bridging integrations and adding features in HubSpot CMS, but the key in vetting the developer for your next project is understanding how they overcame the challenges they were faced with in the development process.
Great developers love a challenge and they are usually willing to brag about how they used their brain and coding skills to overcome them. Ask the question to get to know how your developers think and approach complex problems. While not all developers will have case studies at their disposal if you are working with them directly, a qualified agency will have an arsenal of case studies and white papers to showcase their skills.
Have you worked with businesses like ours before?
\n
Industry experience, while helpful, is not the most important thing when it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer, but it does help. Knowing that a developer understands the intricacies of your industry or business can be beneficial, especially if there are regulations and legal requirements associated with your business.
It never hurts to ask if a developer has experience working with other businesses of your type. They may be able to give you more valuable feedback when it comes to what works and doesn’t work relating to the project that you are discussing.
Are you modifying a theme you worked with before, is this a template or are you working from scratch?
\n
A custom website is very expensive. Customizing templates or themes can be a great way for your developer to keep your costs down. You will want to know what is happening, though and they should not oversell what they are doing.
If they are modifying a template or theme, you will want to ask follow up questions about website bloat. Coding on top of an existing website theme design can bog down your website - an experienced developer will be aware of potential problems and let you know how they intend to handle them in advance.
How will the design process work?
\n
Your design is critical to the success of your HubSpot CMS project. It should balance aesthetics and function. Analysis should be done to determine how it compliments the journey your buyers are on when they find your website.
\n
Your developer or agency should have a comprehensive process for how to handle design and it should include a lot of feedback from you. You will want to deliver your branded fonts, colors, style guidelines and information about your products and services. If you have notalready done so, your agency may engage in the development of your buyer personas to help you understand the buyer journey and how it fits into your offerings and goals.
While each agency’s design process is different, any process that does not involve getting all of this information prior to establishing a design - isn’t worth vetting, in our opinion.
These are just a few of the questions you should lead with when vetting a HubSpot CMS agency or development partner. You are likely investing thousands of dollars into this project in the hopes that it will yield leads, greater revenue, or better efficiency among your employees - asking the right questions during the interview process is critical to your success.
Got any to add to the list? Drop them in the comments and be sure to check out Part 2 for more HubSpot CMS developer interview questions to ask.
\n
","postEmailContent":"
When it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer partner agency for a development project, it is important to hire an experienced professional that is going to create a beautiful, functional website, application or module they are willing to support.
You might be wondering - where the best HubSpot CMS developers are hiding?
You might be wondering - how can you make sure you’re working with the best developer?
As HubSpot CMS developers, we have been working within HubSpot CMS since shortly after launch and we have compiled a list of questions that you can ask during the vetting process to ensure that you end up with the best developer to suit your individual business needs.
Here are 6 preliminary questions you will want to ask your HubSpot developer during the interview process to qualify them for the job:
When it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer partner agency for a development project, it is important to hire an experienced professional that is going to create a beautiful, functional website, application or module they are willing to support.
You might be wondering - where the best HubSpot CMS developers are hiding?
You might be wondering - how can you make sure you’re working with the best developer?
As HubSpot CMS developers, we have been working within HubSpot CMS since shortly after launch and we have compiled a list of questions that you can ask during the vetting process to ensure that you end up with the best developer to suit your individual business needs.
Here are 6 preliminary questions you will want to ask your HubSpot developer during the interview process to qualify them for the job:
When it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer partner agency for a development project, it is important to hire an experienced professional that is going to create a beautiful, functional website, application or module they are willing to support.
You might be wondering - where the best HubSpot CMS developers are hiding?
You might be wondering - how can you make sure you’re working with the best developer?
As HubSpot CMS developers, we have been working within HubSpot CMS since shortly after launch and we have compiled a list of questions that you can ask during the vetting process to ensure that you end up with the best developer to suit your individual business needs.
Here are 6 preliminary questions you will want to ask your HubSpot developer during the interview process to qualify them for the job:
When it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer partner agency for a development project, it is important to hire an experienced professional that is going to create a beautiful, functional website, application or module they are willing to support.
You might be wondering - where the best HubSpot CMS developers are hiding?
You might be wondering - how can you make sure you’re working with the best developer?
As HubSpot CMS developers, we have been working within HubSpot CMS since shortly after launch and we have compiled a list of questions that you can ask during the vetting process to ensure that you end up with the best developer to suit your individual business needs.
Here are 6 preliminary questions you will want to ask your HubSpot developer during the interview process to qualify them for the job:
When it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer partner agency for a development project, it is important to hire an experienced professional that is going to create a beautiful, functional website, application or module they are willing to support.
You might be wondering - where the best HubSpot CMS developers are hiding?
You might be wondering - how can you make sure you’re working with the best developer?
As HubSpot CMS developers, we have been working within HubSpot CMS since shortly after launch and we have compiled a list of questions that you can ask during the vetting process to ensure that you end up with the best developer to suit your individual business needs.
Here are 6 preliminary questions you will want to ask your HubSpot developer during the interview process to qualify them for the job:
When it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer partner agency for a development project, it is important to hire an experienced professional that is going to create a beautiful, functional website, application or module they are willing to support.
You might be wondering - where the best HubSpot CMS developers are hiding?
You might be wondering - how can you make sure you’re working with the best developer?
As HubSpot CMS developers, we have been working within HubSpot CMS since shortly after launch and we have compiled a list of questions that you can ask during the vetting process to ensure that you end up with the best developer to suit your individual business needs.
Here are 6 preliminary questions you will want to ask your HubSpot developer during the interview process to qualify them for the job:
Who will the architect be in this project?
\nIn many agencies, there can be a large disconnect between the sales rep and the development team. This can mean big issues when it comes to scoping and developing new projects on a client’s behalf. If you are not interfacing with the development team, you will want to take time to understand who is architecting your project and how the salesperson or account manager will be interacting with the rest of the team to ensure that your brand and project vision are communicated seamlessly to them.
\n
You do not want to be playing a game of telephone between a sales rep, account manager, project manager and developer unless they have a really comprehensive, seamless project flow.
Will we get to meet the project architect during the kickoff meeting?
\n
This is one of the most critical aspects of project planning. You need to get to know the person who will be architecting your website and ideally that means meeting with them prior to the start of the project.
If you are unable to meet with them, an extremely detailed plan must be in place to give the architect information about your brand mission, services, vision for the website or project, the buyer journey and goals of the project. Meeting with the lead designer or developer in charge of your project is a critical aspect to ensure that you are getting what you ask for.
Can you provide some examples of work you've completed in HubSpot CMS?
\n
Any experienced developer will have a considerable amount of projects to share with you.
They will be able to provide a list of the projects they have completed and run down the complexities of the design and how they implemented the projects.
They will be able to explain how the back end works for the users that will be updating the website and give examples of how they made it easy for the marketer to implement the design elements on the back end.
Tell us about the challenges you've encountered with these projects in HubSpot; how did you overcome them?
\n
Good developers put out quality projects. Great developers complete projects that other developers say cannot be done. There are always challenges when it comes to implementing designs, bridging integrations and adding features in HubSpot CMS, but the key in vetting the developer for your next project is understanding how they overcame the challenges they were faced with in the development process.
Great developers love a challenge and they are usually willing to brag about how they used their brain and coding skills to overcome them. Ask the question to get to know how your developers think and approach complex problems. While not all developers will have case studies at their disposal if you are working with them directly, a qualified agency will have an arsenal of case studies and white papers to showcase their skills.
Have you worked with businesses like ours before?
\n
Industry experience, while helpful, is not the most important thing when it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer, but it does help. Knowing that a developer understands the intricacies of your industry or business can be beneficial, especially if there are regulations and legal requirements associated with your business.
It never hurts to ask if a developer has experience working with other businesses of your type. They may be able to give you more valuable feedback when it comes to what works and doesn’t work relating to the project that you are discussing.
Are you modifying a theme you worked with before, is this a template or are you working from scratch?
\n
A custom website is very expensive. Customizing templates or themes can be a great way for your developer to keep your costs down. You will want to know what is happening, though and they should not oversell what they are doing.
If they are modifying a template or theme, you will want to ask follow up questions about website bloat. Coding on top of an existing website theme design can bog down your website - an experienced developer will be aware of potential problems and let you know how they intend to handle them in advance.
How will the design process work?
\n
Your design is critical to the success of your HubSpot CMS project. It should balance aesthetics and function. Analysis should be done to determine how it compliments the journey your buyers are on when they find your website.
\n
Your developer or agency should have a comprehensive process for how to handle design and it should include a lot of feedback from you. You will want to deliver your branded fonts, colors, style guidelines and information about your products and services. If you have notalready done so, your agency may engage in the development of your buyer personas to help you understand the buyer journey and how it fits into your offerings and goals.
While each agency’s design process is different, any process that does not involve getting all of this information prior to establishing a design - isn’t worth vetting, in our opinion.
These are just a few of the questions you should lead with when vetting a HubSpot CMS agency or development partner. You are likely investing thousands of dollars into this project in the hopes that it will yield leads, greater revenue, or better efficiency among your employees - asking the right questions during the interview process is critical to your success.
Got any to add to the list? Drop them in the comments and be sure to check out Part 2 for more HubSpot CMS developer interview questions to ask.
\n
","rssSummary":"
When it comes to hiring a HubSpot CMS developer partner agency for a development project, it is important to hire an experienced professional that is going to create a beautiful, functional website, application or module they are willing to support.
You might be wondering - where the best HubSpot CMS developers are hiding?
You might be wondering - how can you make sure you’re working with the best developer?
As HubSpot CMS developers, we have been working within HubSpot CMS since shortly after launch and we have compiled a list of questions that you can ask during the vetting process to ensure that you end up with the best developer to suit your individual business needs.
Here are 6 preliminary questions you will want to ask your HubSpot developer during the interview process to qualify them for the job:
We said it. When it comes to HubSpot CMS development, we think that mega menus are an excellent way to organize your navigation and pre-qualify your prospects on your website by putting the information in front of them that is most relevant to their interests.
\n\n
But not all mega menus are created equal. It’s important that you create a mega menu that’s strategic to the needs of your buyers, functional, usable and logical. While this can seem like a “no shit” statement, you’d be surprised how many times we’ve had clients approach us with a pretty design from their design team, only to find little to no research or thought was put into how the mega menu they’re requesting is structured. ![\"deckerdevs-megamenus\"](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/deckerdevs-megamenus.svg\")
Your website should be intentional. Manufacturers don’t put extra parts inside your vehicle or television that don’t function to make that machine work better and your website is no different. Every element of your website should be like a cog in a machine, working together to generate leads, further qualify existing leads or sell additional products and services to your existing customers. You should have a strategy session with your marketing agency or internal marketing department to break down buyer personas, aspects of the buyer journey, content and conversion opportunities. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, odds are good that you may be making one of these mega mistakes with your mega menus.
We said it. When it comes to HubSpot CMS development, we think that mega menus are an excellent way to organize your navigation and pre-qualify your prospects on your website by putting the information in front of them that is most relevant to their interests.
\n\n
But not all mega menus are created equal. It’s important that you create a mega menu that’s strategic to the needs of your buyers, functional, usable and logical. While this can seem like a “no shit” statement, you’d be surprised how many times we’ve had clients approach us with a pretty design from their design team, only to find little to no research or thought was put into how the mega menu they’re requesting is structured. Your website should be intentional. Manufacturers don’t put extra parts inside your vehicle or television that don’t function to make that machine work better and your website is no different. Every element of your website should be like a cog in a machine, working together to generate leads, further qualify existing leads or sell additional products and services to your existing customers. You should have a strategy session with your marketing agency or internal marketing department to break down buyer personas, aspects of the buyer journey, content and conversion opportunities. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, odds are good that you may be making one of these mega mistakes with your mega menus.
Not having a comprehensive strategy
\n
We know your web designer is amazing, but do they really understand your buyer persona? You should approach your graphic or web design team with a strategic plan that breaks down where prospects on your website may need to go and what their goals and needs are. In order to do that, you have to first create that plan.
What does that look like? It looks like taking a deeper dive into their needs by exploring how they might answer the following questions:
- \n
- As this target buyer persona, what am I looking to get out of my experience with this company’s website?
As you probably know by now, the buyer’s journey has multiple stages. Regardless of where a prospect is at in their journey you need to make sure that you have information within your mega menu that caters to these different stages. Breaking down your resource topics or finding new ways to address pain points inside your navigation will go a long way towards catering to that experience. \n - Are there specifics to my industry that I need to know when considering these products and services?
Are there special regulations related to your products and services that mean certain industries must be treated in a special way?
Do you have a special certification relevant to the financial, health or government industries? (Bonus 3 for 1)
You’ll want to highlight your experience, because those prospects that find themselves in niche industries are often looking for partners that are experienced in those industries and the regulations associated with them. \n - What are the biggest symptoms of my pain and where can I find information relevant to resolving that pain?
This one is a slam dunk. Working with a well-qualified wordsmith will usually yield really amazing categories that you can place into your mega menu that really speak to your audience - find those most common pain points and work from there. \n - I fit into a specific role - is there content that I would want to see relevant to that role?
Industries are one thing, but don’t forget that organizing content by a persona’s role in the organization can be really useful too. Executives versus managers have very different perspectives and their concerns are often related but with very different focuses. \n - How can I find the information most relevant to me with minimal effort?
We operate in an ADD nation that is instant gratification. Keep this in mind when building your navigation and make sure the buyer’s bigger priorities are front and center in your navigation. Deep buyer persona research will help you unlock these insights. \n
Watch your language
\n
Using the right words is always essential when communicating with your prospects. When it comes to doing business, organizations seem to throw around jargon-heavy words related to their industry, products and services so much internally they don’t realize that their prospects have no idea what they’re talking about. Choosing the right words associated with a buyer's needs in your navigation is critical to the success of your mega menu. To determine what these are. Again, a talented wordsmith can help, but you’ll also want to do some buyer persona interviews with your target audience profiles. Incentivize your best customers or lost prospects to sit with you and understand their concerns, the words they’re using relative to your products and services and how they think.
There will be certain trigger words that help your buyers make their decisions, diagnose their pain points and better understand your offerings. Wherever possible, try to determine what those trigger words are so that you can compel your prospects to take action on your mega menu.
Are your buyers looking for specific solutions to their problems? Consider adding those problems and their solutions to your mega menu. If your products have specifically branded names that a brand new prospect may not be able to recognize, place them underneath a broader category, add an icon representing it or even consider adding a small description underneath, space allowing.
Your mega menu is hover dependent
\n
Hover-over menus in theory are believed by some to be faster and easier for users to navigate. However, when it comes to mega menus, it can be a little presumptuous to think you know how a user is going to move their mouse. The majority of users pause their mouse prior to making the decision to move to the content that they want. Pre-empting this with hover-over pop up navigation can be annoying to users. It gets worse when an organization assumes they can push their website prospects through hover tunnels that require a mouse to be moved slowly and carefully across other elements to reach the information that they are looking for. By not allowing a user to move their cursor the way they want without the menu closing, you’re creating frustration and extra work to get to the information they’re looking for, which is the opposite of your goal. We almost always advise our clients to go with menus that require click through, but many still opt for hover, since it’s what they’re accustomed to.
Hover-over items on the edge of a menu are more difficult to click, requiring more focus and potentially increasing frustration. While this can sometimes be remedied by adding extra space to the menu to avoid it closing if a prospect misses their mark, it usually doesn’t make the hover-over menu much more usable.
Hover-over menus also don’t take into account mobile devices, so the functionality cannot translate well for users moving between devices. Rather than using a hover-over mega menu, we recommend that clients stick to mega menus that activate upon being clicked - which is a clear user intention, saving time and keeping your website visitors happy.
You haven't considered images, buttons or logos
\n
Adding compelling images, icons or call to action buttons on your mega menus are a great way to add engagement and draw your user in while giving them context. Visual elements can help users quickly analyze information and understand more about the products, services and information that you’re offering inside your menu.
You didn't plan for mobile
\n
Have you taken the opportunity to look at your website traffic by device lately? Odds are very good that over the years the percentage of users viewing your website from mobile devices has increased significantly. We always develop our websites with a “mobile first” approach. That means that if a company or agency approaches us with a design in mind, one of our first questions will be - where’s the mobile design? In many instances mobile traffic is outpacing desktop traffic significantly.
If you haven’t taken the time to create a mobile design, be sure that your developer talks through how your mega menu will translate to mobile devices and that you settle on the functionality prior to beginning the project. An involved mobile mega menu may increase the cost of the project, so you need to be ready to pay a little more to convert your mega menu over to a user friendly design that works on mobile devices and achieves your original goals.
You're blocking critical conversion opportunities
\n
This goes without saying, but you don’t want your mega menu to deploy on landing pages. When it comes to pages that have very specific goals, like your resource downloads, webinar sign ups or other conversion opportunities, you’ll want to eliminate the navigation entirely or shift to a new format for those pages so that expanded mega menus don’t occupy the important conversion real estate that should be a prospect’s focus when they reach your landing page.
What’s the point of an amazing landing page if it’s only going to be covered up by a massive (hopefully not hover-over) mega menu? Take the time to do a little role play scenario and test your pages accordingly, not just inside your organization, but outside as well. Make sure that your designs make sense, don’t get in the way of the main focus of your website and offer expanded opportunities for conversion rather than covering them up.
We still think that mega menus are here to stay and for savvy organizations that are deep in resources and information for their website visitors, they’re quickly becoming an essential. Ask yourself what critical information is missing from your main website navigation and how a mega menu design could give your users exactly what they need. The right mega menu can increase the time a prospect spends on your website, may reduce your bounce rate and can even increase your visitor to lead conversions.
If you need help with your mega menu or you've been wanting to redesign it more intuitively to serve the needs of your website visitors, we can help.
\n
Tell us:
Do you prefer hover-over menus or click through menus?
Let us know in the comments!
","rss_summary":"We said it. When it comes to HubSpot CMS development, we think that mega menus are an excellent way to organize your navigation and pre-qualify your prospects on your website by putting the information in front of them that is most relevant to their interests.
\n\n
But not all mega menus are created equal. It’s important that you create a mega menu that’s strategic to the needs of your buyers, functional, usable and logical. While this can seem like a “no shit” statement, you’d be surprised how many times we’ve had clients approach us with a pretty design from their design team, only to find little to no research or thought was put into how the mega menu they’re requesting is structured. Your website should be intentional. Manufacturers don’t put extra parts inside your vehicle or television that don’t function to make that machine work better and your website is no different. Every element of your website should be like a cog in a machine, working together to generate leads, further qualify existing leads or sell additional products and services to your existing customers. You should have a strategy session with your marketing agency or internal marketing department to break down buyer personas, aspects of the buyer journey, content and conversion opportunities. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, odds are good that you may be making one of these mega mistakes with your mega menus.
We said it. When it comes to HubSpot CMS development, we think that mega menus are an excellent way to organize your navigation and pre-qualify your prospects on your website by putting the information in front of them that is most relevant to their interests.
\n\n
But not all mega menus are created equal. It’s important that you create a mega menu that’s strategic to the needs of your buyers, functional, usable and logical. While this can seem like a “no shit” statement, you’d be surprised how many times we’ve had clients approach us with a pretty design from their design team, only to find little to no research or thought was put into how the mega menu they’re requesting is structured. Your website should be intentional. Manufacturers don’t put extra parts inside your vehicle or television that don’t function to make that machine work better and your website is no different. Every element of your website should be like a cog in a machine, working together to generate leads, further qualify existing leads or sell additional products and services to your existing customers. You should have a strategy session with your marketing agency or internal marketing department to break down buyer personas, aspects of the buyer journey, content and conversion opportunities. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, odds are good that you may be making one of these mega mistakes with your mega menus.
Not having a comprehensive strategy
\n
We know your web designer is amazing, but do they really understand your buyer persona? You should approach your graphic or web design team with a strategic plan that breaks down where prospects on your website may need to go and what their goals and needs are. In order to do that, you have to first create that plan.
What does that look like? It looks like taking a deeper dive into their needs by exploring how they might answer the following questions:
- \n
- As this target buyer persona, what am I looking to get out of my experience with this company’s website?
As you probably know by now, the buyer’s journey has multiple stages. Regardless of where a prospect is at in their journey you need to make sure that you have information within your mega menu that caters to these different stages. Breaking down your resource topics or finding new ways to address pain points inside your navigation will go a long way towards catering to that experience. \n - Are there specifics to my industry that I need to know when considering these products and services?
Are there special regulations related to your products and services that mean certain industries must be treated in a special way?
Do you have a special certification relevant to the financial, health or government industries? (Bonus 3 for 1)
You’ll want to highlight your experience, because those prospects that find themselves in niche industries are often looking for partners that are experienced in those industries and the regulations associated with them. \n - What are the biggest symptoms of my pain and where can I find information relevant to resolving that pain?
This one is a slam dunk. Working with a well-qualified wordsmith will usually yield really amazing categories that you can place into your mega menu that really speak to your audience - find those most common pain points and work from there. \n - I fit into a specific role - is there content that I would want to see relevant to that role?
Industries are one thing, but don’t forget that organizing content by a persona’s role in the organization can be really useful too. Executives versus managers have very different perspectives and their concerns are often related but with very different focuses. \n - How can I find the information most relevant to me with minimal effort?
We operate in an ADD nation that is instant gratification. Keep this in mind when building your navigation and make sure the buyer’s bigger priorities are front and center in your navigation. Deep buyer persona research will help you unlock these insights. \n
Watch your language
\n
Using the right words is always essential when communicating with your prospects. When it comes to doing business, organizations seem to throw around jargon-heavy words related to their industry, products and services so much internally they don’t realize that their prospects have no idea what they’re talking about. Choosing the right words associated with a buyer's needs in your navigation is critical to the success of your mega menu. To determine what these are. Again, a talented wordsmith can help, but you’ll also want to do some buyer persona interviews with your target audience profiles. Incentivize your best customers or lost prospects to sit with you and understand their concerns, the words they’re using relative to your products and services and how they think.
There will be certain trigger words that help your buyers make their decisions, diagnose their pain points and better understand your offerings. Wherever possible, try to determine what those trigger words are so that you can compel your prospects to take action on your mega menu.
Are your buyers looking for specific solutions to their problems? Consider adding those problems and their solutions to your mega menu. If your products have specifically branded names that a brand new prospect may not be able to recognize, place them underneath a broader category, add an icon representing it or even consider adding a small description underneath, space allowing.
Your mega menu is hover dependent
\n
Hover-over menus in theory are believed by some to be faster and easier for users to navigate. However, when it comes to mega menus, it can be a little presumptuous to think you know how a user is going to move their mouse. The majority of users pause their mouse prior to making the decision to move to the content that they want. Pre-empting this with hover-over pop up navigation can be annoying to users. It gets worse when an organization assumes they can push their website prospects through hover tunnels that require a mouse to be moved slowly and carefully across other elements to reach the information that they are looking for. By not allowing a user to move their cursor the way they want without the menu closing, you’re creating frustration and extra work to get to the information they’re looking for, which is the opposite of your goal. We almost always advise our clients to go with menus that require click through, but many still opt for hover, since it’s what they’re accustomed to.
Hover-over items on the edge of a menu are more difficult to click, requiring more focus and potentially increasing frustration. While this can sometimes be remedied by adding extra space to the menu to avoid it closing if a prospect misses their mark, it usually doesn’t make the hover-over menu much more usable.
Hover-over menus also don’t take into account mobile devices, so the functionality cannot translate well for users moving between devices. Rather than using a hover-over mega menu, we recommend that clients stick to mega menus that activate upon being clicked - which is a clear user intention, saving time and keeping your website visitors happy.
You haven't considered images, buttons or logos
\n
Adding compelling images, icons or call to action buttons on your mega menus are a great way to add engagement and draw your user in while giving them context. Visual elements can help users quickly analyze information and understand more about the products, services and information that you’re offering inside your menu.
You didn't plan for mobile
\n
Have you taken the opportunity to look at your website traffic by device lately? Odds are very good that over the years the percentage of users viewing your website from mobile devices has increased significantly. We always develop our websites with a “mobile first” approach. That means that if a company or agency approaches us with a design in mind, one of our first questions will be - where’s the mobile design? In many instances mobile traffic is outpacing desktop traffic significantly.
If you haven’t taken the time to create a mobile design, be sure that your developer talks through how your mega menu will translate to mobile devices and that you settle on the functionality prior to beginning the project. An involved mobile mega menu may increase the cost of the project, so you need to be ready to pay a little more to convert your mega menu over to a user friendly design that works on mobile devices and achieves your original goals.
You're blocking critical conversion opportunities
\n
This goes without saying, but you don’t want your mega menu to deploy on landing pages. When it comes to pages that have very specific goals, like your resource downloads, webinar sign ups or other conversion opportunities, you’ll want to eliminate the navigation entirely or shift to a new format for those pages so that expanded mega menus don’t occupy the important conversion real estate that should be a prospect’s focus when they reach your landing page.
What’s the point of an amazing landing page if it’s only going to be covered up by a massive (hopefully not hover-over) mega menu? Take the time to do a little role play scenario and test your pages accordingly, not just inside your organization, but outside as well. Make sure that your designs make sense, don’t get in the way of the main focus of your website and offer expanded opportunities for conversion rather than covering them up.
We still think that mega menus are here to stay and for savvy organizations that are deep in resources and information for their website visitors, they’re quickly becoming an essential. Ask yourself what critical information is missing from your main website navigation and how a mega menu design could give your users exactly what they need. The right mega menu can increase the time a prospect spends on your website, may reduce your bounce rate and can even increase your visitor to lead conversions.
If you need help with your mega menu or you've been wanting to redesign it more intuitively to serve the needs of your website visitors, we can help.
\n
Tell us:
Do you prefer hover-over menus or click through menus?
Let us know in the comments!
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When it comes to HubSpot CMS development, we think that mega menus are an excellent way to organize your navigation and pre-qualify your prospects on your website by putting the information in front of them that is most relevant to their interests.
\n\n
But not all mega menus are created equal. It’s important that you create a mega menu that’s strategic to the needs of your buyers, functional, usable and logical. While this can seem like a “no shit” statement, you’d be surprised how many times we’ve had clients approach us with a pretty design from their design team, only to find little to no research or thought was put into how the mega menu they’re requesting is structured. Your website should be intentional. Manufacturers don’t put extra parts inside your vehicle or television that don’t function to make that machine work better and your website is no different. Every element of your website should be like a cog in a machine, working together to generate leads, further qualify existing leads or sell additional products and services to your existing customers. You should have a strategy session with your marketing agency or internal marketing department to break down buyer personas, aspects of the buyer journey, content and conversion opportunities. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, odds are good that you may be making one of these mega mistakes with your mega menus.
Not having a comprehensive strategy
\n
We know your web designer is amazing, but do they really understand your buyer persona? You should approach your graphic or web design team with a strategic plan that breaks down where prospects on your website may need to go and what their goals and needs are. In order to do that, you have to first create that plan.
What does that look like? It looks like taking a deeper dive into their needs by exploring how they might answer the following questions:
- \n
- As this target buyer persona, what am I looking to get out of my experience with this company’s website?
As you probably know by now, the buyer’s journey has multiple stages. Regardless of where a prospect is at in their journey you need to make sure that you have information within your mega menu that caters to these different stages. Breaking down your resource topics or finding new ways to address pain points inside your navigation will go a long way towards catering to that experience. \n - Are there specifics to my industry that I need to know when considering these products and services?
Are there special regulations related to your products and services that mean certain industries must be treated in a special way?
Do you have a special certification relevant to the financial, health or government industries? (Bonus 3 for 1)
You’ll want to highlight your experience, because those prospects that find themselves in niche industries are often looking for partners that are experienced in those industries and the regulations associated with them. \n - What are the biggest symptoms of my pain and where can I find information relevant to resolving that pain?
This one is a slam dunk. Working with a well-qualified wordsmith will usually yield really amazing categories that you can place into your mega menu that really speak to your audience - find those most common pain points and work from there. \n - I fit into a specific role - is there content that I would want to see relevant to that role?
Industries are one thing, but don’t forget that organizing content by a persona’s role in the organization can be really useful too. Executives versus managers have very different perspectives and their concerns are often related but with very different focuses. \n - How can I find the information most relevant to me with minimal effort?
We operate in an ADD nation that is instant gratification. Keep this in mind when building your navigation and make sure the buyer’s bigger priorities are front and center in your navigation. Deep buyer persona research will help you unlock these insights. \n
Watch your language
\n
Using the right words is always essential when communicating with your prospects. When it comes to doing business, organizations seem to throw around jargon-heavy words related to their industry, products and services so much internally they don’t realize that their prospects have no idea what they’re talking about. Choosing the right words associated with a buyer's needs in your navigation is critical to the success of your mega menu. To determine what these are. Again, a talented wordsmith can help, but you’ll also want to do some buyer persona interviews with your target audience profiles. Incentivize your best customers or lost prospects to sit with you and understand their concerns, the words they’re using relative to your products and services and how they think.
There will be certain trigger words that help your buyers make their decisions, diagnose their pain points and better understand your offerings. Wherever possible, try to determine what those trigger words are so that you can compel your prospects to take action on your mega menu.
Are your buyers looking for specific solutions to their problems? Consider adding those problems and their solutions to your mega menu. If your products have specifically branded names that a brand new prospect may not be able to recognize, place them underneath a broader category, add an icon representing it or even consider adding a small description underneath, space allowing.
Your mega menu is hover dependent
\n
Hover-over menus in theory are believed by some to be faster and easier for users to navigate. However, when it comes to mega menus, it can be a little presumptuous to think you know how a user is going to move their mouse. The majority of users pause their mouse prior to making the decision to move to the content that they want. Pre-empting this with hover-over pop up navigation can be annoying to users. It gets worse when an organization assumes they can push their website prospects through hover tunnels that require a mouse to be moved slowly and carefully across other elements to reach the information that they are looking for. By not allowing a user to move their cursor the way they want without the menu closing, you’re creating frustration and extra work to get to the information they’re looking for, which is the opposite of your goal. We almost always advise our clients to go with menus that require click through, but many still opt for hover, since it’s what they’re accustomed to.
Hover-over items on the edge of a menu are more difficult to click, requiring more focus and potentially increasing frustration. While this can sometimes be remedied by adding extra space to the menu to avoid it closing if a prospect misses their mark, it usually doesn’t make the hover-over menu much more usable.
Hover-over menus also don’t take into account mobile devices, so the functionality cannot translate well for users moving between devices. Rather than using a hover-over mega menu, we recommend that clients stick to mega menus that activate upon being clicked - which is a clear user intention, saving time and keeping your website visitors happy.
You haven't considered images, buttons or logos
\n
Adding compelling images, icons or call to action buttons on your mega menus are a great way to add engagement and draw your user in while giving them context. Visual elements can help users quickly analyze information and understand more about the products, services and information that you’re offering inside your menu.
You didn't plan for mobile
\n
Have you taken the opportunity to look at your website traffic by device lately? Odds are very good that over the years the percentage of users viewing your website from mobile devices has increased significantly. We always develop our websites with a “mobile first” approach. That means that if a company or agency approaches us with a design in mind, one of our first questions will be - where’s the mobile design? In many instances mobile traffic is outpacing desktop traffic significantly.
If you haven’t taken the time to create a mobile design, be sure that your developer talks through how your mega menu will translate to mobile devices and that you settle on the functionality prior to beginning the project. An involved mobile mega menu may increase the cost of the project, so you need to be ready to pay a little more to convert your mega menu over to a user friendly design that works on mobile devices and achieves your original goals.
You're blocking critical conversion opportunities
\n
This goes without saying, but you don’t want your mega menu to deploy on landing pages. When it comes to pages that have very specific goals, like your resource downloads, webinar sign ups or other conversion opportunities, you’ll want to eliminate the navigation entirely or shift to a new format for those pages so that expanded mega menus don’t occupy the important conversion real estate that should be a prospect’s focus when they reach your landing page.
What’s the point of an amazing landing page if it’s only going to be covered up by a massive (hopefully not hover-over) mega menu? Take the time to do a little role play scenario and test your pages accordingly, not just inside your organization, but outside as well. Make sure that your designs make sense, don’t get in the way of the main focus of your website and offer expanded opportunities for conversion rather than covering them up.
We still think that mega menus are here to stay and for savvy organizations that are deep in resources and information for their website visitors, they’re quickly becoming an essential. Ask yourself what critical information is missing from your main website navigation and how a mega menu design could give your users exactly what they need. The right mega menu can increase the time a prospect spends on your website, may reduce your bounce rate and can even increase your visitor to lead conversions.
If you need help with your mega menu or you've been wanting to redesign it more intuitively to serve the needs of your website visitors, we can help.
\n
Tell us:
Do you prefer hover-over menus or click through menus?
Let us know in the comments!
","postBodyRss":"We said it. When it comes to HubSpot CMS development, we think that mega menus are an excellent way to organize your navigation and pre-qualify your prospects on your website by putting the information in front of them that is most relevant to their interests.
\n\n
But not all mega menus are created equal. It’s important that you create a mega menu that’s strategic to the needs of your buyers, functional, usable and logical. While this can seem like a “no shit” statement, you’d be surprised how many times we’ve had clients approach us with a pretty design from their design team, only to find little to no research or thought was put into how the mega menu they’re requesting is structured. Your website should be intentional. Manufacturers don’t put extra parts inside your vehicle or television that don’t function to make that machine work better and your website is no different. Every element of your website should be like a cog in a machine, working together to generate leads, further qualify existing leads or sell additional products and services to your existing customers. You should have a strategy session with your marketing agency or internal marketing department to break down buyer personas, aspects of the buyer journey, content and conversion opportunities. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, odds are good that you may be making one of these mega mistakes with your mega menus.
Not having a comprehensive strategy
\n
We know your web designer is amazing, but do they really understand your buyer persona? You should approach your graphic or web design team with a strategic plan that breaks down where prospects on your website may need to go and what their goals and needs are. In order to do that, you have to first create that plan.
What does that look like? It looks like taking a deeper dive into their needs by exploring how they might answer the following questions:
- \n
- As this target buyer persona, what am I looking to get out of my experience with this company’s website?
As you probably know by now, the buyer’s journey has multiple stages. Regardless of where a prospect is at in their journey you need to make sure that you have information within your mega menu that caters to these different stages. Breaking down your resource topics or finding new ways to address pain points inside your navigation will go a long way towards catering to that experience. \n - Are there specifics to my industry that I need to know when considering these products and services?
Are there special regulations related to your products and services that mean certain industries must be treated in a special way?
Do you have a special certification relevant to the financial, health or government industries? (Bonus 3 for 1)
You’ll want to highlight your experience, because those prospects that find themselves in niche industries are often looking for partners that are experienced in those industries and the regulations associated with them. \n - What are the biggest symptoms of my pain and where can I find information relevant to resolving that pain?
This one is a slam dunk. Working with a well-qualified wordsmith will usually yield really amazing categories that you can place into your mega menu that really speak to your audience - find those most common pain points and work from there. \n - I fit into a specific role - is there content that I would want to see relevant to that role?
Industries are one thing, but don’t forget that organizing content by a persona’s role in the organization can be really useful too. Executives versus managers have very different perspectives and their concerns are often related but with very different focuses. \n - How can I find the information most relevant to me with minimal effort?
We operate in an ADD nation that is instant gratification. Keep this in mind when building your navigation and make sure the buyer’s bigger priorities are front and center in your navigation. Deep buyer persona research will help you unlock these insights. \n
Watch your language
\n
Using the right words is always essential when communicating with your prospects. When it comes to doing business, organizations seem to throw around jargon-heavy words related to their industry, products and services so much internally they don’t realize that their prospects have no idea what they’re talking about. Choosing the right words associated with a buyer's needs in your navigation is critical to the success of your mega menu. To determine what these are. Again, a talented wordsmith can help, but you’ll also want to do some buyer persona interviews with your target audience profiles. Incentivize your best customers or lost prospects to sit with you and understand their concerns, the words they’re using relative to your products and services and how they think.
There will be certain trigger words that help your buyers make their decisions, diagnose their pain points and better understand your offerings. Wherever possible, try to determine what those trigger words are so that you can compel your prospects to take action on your mega menu.
Are your buyers looking for specific solutions to their problems? Consider adding those problems and their solutions to your mega menu. If your products have specifically branded names that a brand new prospect may not be able to recognize, place them underneath a broader category, add an icon representing it or even consider adding a small description underneath, space allowing.
Your mega menu is hover dependent
\n
Hover-over menus in theory are believed by some to be faster and easier for users to navigate. However, when it comes to mega menus, it can be a little presumptuous to think you know how a user is going to move their mouse. The majority of users pause their mouse prior to making the decision to move to the content that they want. Pre-empting this with hover-over pop up navigation can be annoying to users. It gets worse when an organization assumes they can push their website prospects through hover tunnels that require a mouse to be moved slowly and carefully across other elements to reach the information that they are looking for. By not allowing a user to move their cursor the way they want without the menu closing, you’re creating frustration and extra work to get to the information they’re looking for, which is the opposite of your goal. We almost always advise our clients to go with menus that require click through, but many still opt for hover, since it’s what they’re accustomed to.
Hover-over items on the edge of a menu are more difficult to click, requiring more focus and potentially increasing frustration. While this can sometimes be remedied by adding extra space to the menu to avoid it closing if a prospect misses their mark, it usually doesn’t make the hover-over menu much more usable.
Hover-over menus also don’t take into account mobile devices, so the functionality cannot translate well for users moving between devices. Rather than using a hover-over mega menu, we recommend that clients stick to mega menus that activate upon being clicked - which is a clear user intention, saving time and keeping your website visitors happy.
You haven't considered images, buttons or logos
\n
Adding compelling images, icons or call to action buttons on your mega menus are a great way to add engagement and draw your user in while giving them context. Visual elements can help users quickly analyze information and understand more about the products, services and information that you’re offering inside your menu.
You didn't plan for mobile
\n
Have you taken the opportunity to look at your website traffic by device lately? Odds are very good that over the years the percentage of users viewing your website from mobile devices has increased significantly. We always develop our websites with a “mobile first” approach. That means that if a company or agency approaches us with a design in mind, one of our first questions will be - where’s the mobile design? In many instances mobile traffic is outpacing desktop traffic significantly.
If you haven’t taken the time to create a mobile design, be sure that your developer talks through how your mega menu will translate to mobile devices and that you settle on the functionality prior to beginning the project. An involved mobile mega menu may increase the cost of the project, so you need to be ready to pay a little more to convert your mega menu over to a user friendly design that works on mobile devices and achieves your original goals.
You're blocking critical conversion opportunities
\n
This goes without saying, but you don’t want your mega menu to deploy on landing pages. When it comes to pages that have very specific goals, like your resource downloads, webinar sign ups or other conversion opportunities, you’ll want to eliminate the navigation entirely or shift to a new format for those pages so that expanded mega menus don’t occupy the important conversion real estate that should be a prospect’s focus when they reach your landing page.
What’s the point of an amazing landing page if it’s only going to be covered up by a massive (hopefully not hover-over) mega menu? Take the time to do a little role play scenario and test your pages accordingly, not just inside your organization, but outside as well. Make sure that your designs make sense, don’t get in the way of the main focus of your website and offer expanded opportunities for conversion rather than covering them up.
We still think that mega menus are here to stay and for savvy organizations that are deep in resources and information for their website visitors, they’re quickly becoming an essential. Ask yourself what critical information is missing from your main website navigation and how a mega menu design could give your users exactly what they need. The right mega menu can increase the time a prospect spends on your website, may reduce your bounce rate and can even increase your visitor to lead conversions.
If you need help with your mega menu or you've been wanting to redesign it more intuitively to serve the needs of your website visitors, we can help.
\n
Tell us:
Do you prefer hover-over menus or click through menus?
Let us know in the comments!
","postEmailContent":"We said it. When it comes to HubSpot CMS development, we think that mega menus are an excellent way to organize your navigation and pre-qualify your prospects on your website by putting the information in front of them that is most relevant to their interests.
\n\n
But not all mega menus are created equal. It’s important that you create a mega menu that’s strategic to the needs of your buyers, functional, usable and logical. While this can seem like a “no shit” statement, you’d be surprised how many times we’ve had clients approach us with a pretty design from their design team, only to find little to no research or thought was put into how the mega menu they’re requesting is structured.
Your website should be intentional. Manufacturers don’t put extra parts inside your vehicle or television that don’t function to make that machine work better and your website is no different. Every element of your website should be like a cog in a machine, working together to generate leads, further qualify existing leads or sell additional products and services to your existing customers. You should have a strategy session with your marketing agency or internal marketing department to break down buyer personas, aspects of the buyer journey, content and conversion opportunities. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, odds are good that you may be making one of these mega mistakes with your mega menus.
We said it. When it comes to HubSpot CMS development, we think that mega menus are an excellent way to organize your navigation and pre-qualify your prospects on your website by putting the information in front of them that is most relevant to their interests.
\n\n
But not all mega menus are created equal. It’s important that you create a mega menu that’s strategic to the needs of your buyers, functional, usable and logical. While this can seem like a “no shit” statement, you’d be surprised how many times we’ve had clients approach us with a pretty design from their design team, only to find little to no research or thought was put into how the mega menu they’re requesting is structured.
Your website should be intentional. Manufacturers don’t put extra parts inside your vehicle or television that don’t function to make that machine work better and your website is no different. Every element of your website should be like a cog in a machine, working together to generate leads, further qualify existing leads or sell additional products and services to your existing customers. You should have a strategy session with your marketing agency or internal marketing department to break down buyer personas, aspects of the buyer journey, content and conversion opportunities. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, odds are good that you may be making one of these mega mistakes with your mega menus.
We said it. When it comes to HubSpot CMS development, we think that mega menus are an excellent way to organize your navigation and pre-qualify your prospects on your website by putting the information in front of them that is most relevant to their interests.
\n\n
But not all mega menus are created equal. It’s important that you create a mega menu that’s strategic to the needs of your buyers, functional, usable and logical. While this can seem like a “no shit” statement, you’d be surprised how many times we’ve had clients approach us with a pretty design from their design team, only to find little to no research or thought was put into how the mega menu they’re requesting is structured.
Your website should be intentional. Manufacturers don’t put extra parts inside your vehicle or television that don’t function to make that machine work better and your website is no different. Every element of your website should be like a cog in a machine, working together to generate leads, further qualify existing leads or sell additional products and services to your existing customers. You should have a strategy session with your marketing agency or internal marketing department to break down buyer personas, aspects of the buyer journey, content and conversion opportunities. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, odds are good that you may be making one of these mega mistakes with your mega menus.
We said it. When it comes to HubSpot CMS development, we think that mega menus are an excellent way to organize your navigation and pre-qualify your prospects on your website by putting the information in front of them that is most relevant to their interests.
\n\n
But not all mega menus are created equal. It’s important that you create a mega menu that’s strategic to the needs of your buyers, functional, usable and logical. While this can seem like a “no shit” statement, you’d be surprised how many times we’ve had clients approach us with a pretty design from their design team, only to find little to no research or thought was put into how the mega menu they’re requesting is structured. Your website should be intentional. Manufacturers don’t put extra parts inside your vehicle or television that don’t function to make that machine work better and your website is no different. Every element of your website should be like a cog in a machine, working together to generate leads, further qualify existing leads or sell additional products and services to your existing customers. You should have a strategy session with your marketing agency or internal marketing department to break down buyer personas, aspects of the buyer journey, content and conversion opportunities. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, odds are good that you may be making one of these mega mistakes with your mega menus.
We said it. When it comes to HubSpot CMS development, we think that mega menus are an excellent way to organize your navigation and pre-qualify your prospects on your website by putting the information in front of them that is most relevant to their interests.
\n\n
But not all mega menus are created equal. It’s important that you create a mega menu that’s strategic to the needs of your buyers, functional, usable and logical. While this can seem like a “no shit” statement, you’d be surprised how many times we’ve had clients approach us with a pretty design from their design team, only to find little to no research or thought was put into how the mega menu they’re requesting is structured.
Your website should be intentional. Manufacturers don’t put extra parts inside your vehicle or television that don’t function to make that machine work better and your website is no different. Every element of your website should be like a cog in a machine, working together to generate leads, further qualify existing leads or sell additional products and services to your existing customers. You should have a strategy session with your marketing agency or internal marketing department to break down buyer personas, aspects of the buyer journey, content and conversion opportunities. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, odds are good that you may be making one of these mega mistakes with your mega menus.
We said it. When it comes to HubSpot CMS development, we think that mega menus are an excellent way to organize your navigation and pre-qualify your prospects on your website by putting the information in front of them that is most relevant to their interests.
\n\n
But not all mega menus are created equal. It’s important that you create a mega menu that’s strategic to the needs of your buyers, functional, usable and logical. While this can seem like a “no shit” statement, you’d be surprised how many times we’ve had clients approach us with a pretty design from their design team, only to find little to no research or thought was put into how the mega menu they’re requesting is structured. Your website should be intentional. Manufacturers don’t put extra parts inside your vehicle or television that don’t function to make that machine work better and your website is no different. Every element of your website should be like a cog in a machine, working together to generate leads, further qualify existing leads or sell additional products and services to your existing customers. You should have a strategy session with your marketing agency or internal marketing department to break down buyer personas, aspects of the buyer journey, content and conversion opportunities. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, odds are good that you may be making one of these mega mistakes with your mega menus.
Not having a comprehensive strategy
\n
We know your web designer is amazing, but do they really understand your buyer persona? You should approach your graphic or web design team with a strategic plan that breaks down where prospects on your website may need to go and what their goals and needs are. In order to do that, you have to first create that plan.
What does that look like? It looks like taking a deeper dive into their needs by exploring how they might answer the following questions:
- \n
- As this target buyer persona, what am I looking to get out of my experience with this company’s website?
As you probably know by now, the buyer’s journey has multiple stages. Regardless of where a prospect is at in their journey you need to make sure that you have information within your mega menu that caters to these different stages. Breaking down your resource topics or finding new ways to address pain points inside your navigation will go a long way towards catering to that experience. \n - Are there specifics to my industry that I need to know when considering these products and services?
Are there special regulations related to your products and services that mean certain industries must be treated in a special way?
Do you have a special certification relevant to the financial, health or government industries? (Bonus 3 for 1)
You’ll want to highlight your experience, because those prospects that find themselves in niche industries are often looking for partners that are experienced in those industries and the regulations associated with them. \n - What are the biggest symptoms of my pain and where can I find information relevant to resolving that pain?
This one is a slam dunk. Working with a well-qualified wordsmith will usually yield really amazing categories that you can place into your mega menu that really speak to your audience - find those most common pain points and work from there. \n - I fit into a specific role - is there content that I would want to see relevant to that role?
Industries are one thing, but don’t forget that organizing content by a persona’s role in the organization can be really useful too. Executives versus managers have very different perspectives and their concerns are often related but with very different focuses. \n - How can I find the information most relevant to me with minimal effort?
We operate in an ADD nation that is instant gratification. Keep this in mind when building your navigation and make sure the buyer’s bigger priorities are front and center in your navigation. Deep buyer persona research will help you unlock these insights. \n
Watch your language
\n
Using the right words is always essential when communicating with your prospects. When it comes to doing business, organizations seem to throw around jargon-heavy words related to their industry, products and services so much internally they don’t realize that their prospects have no idea what they’re talking about. Choosing the right words associated with a buyer's needs in your navigation is critical to the success of your mega menu. To determine what these are. Again, a talented wordsmith can help, but you’ll also want to do some buyer persona interviews with your target audience profiles. Incentivize your best customers or lost prospects to sit with you and understand their concerns, the words they’re using relative to your products and services and how they think.
There will be certain trigger words that help your buyers make their decisions, diagnose their pain points and better understand your offerings. Wherever possible, try to determine what those trigger words are so that you can compel your prospects to take action on your mega menu.
Are your buyers looking for specific solutions to their problems? Consider adding those problems and their solutions to your mega menu. If your products have specifically branded names that a brand new prospect may not be able to recognize, place them underneath a broader category, add an icon representing it or even consider adding a small description underneath, space allowing.
Your mega menu is hover dependent
\n
Hover-over menus in theory are believed by some to be faster and easier for users to navigate. However, when it comes to mega menus, it can be a little presumptuous to think you know how a user is going to move their mouse. The majority of users pause their mouse prior to making the decision to move to the content that they want. Pre-empting this with hover-over pop up navigation can be annoying to users. It gets worse when an organization assumes they can push their website prospects through hover tunnels that require a mouse to be moved slowly and carefully across other elements to reach the information that they are looking for. By not allowing a user to move their cursor the way they want without the menu closing, you’re creating frustration and extra work to get to the information they’re looking for, which is the opposite of your goal. We almost always advise our clients to go with menus that require click through, but many still opt for hover, since it’s what they’re accustomed to.
Hover-over items on the edge of a menu are more difficult to click, requiring more focus and potentially increasing frustration. While this can sometimes be remedied by adding extra space to the menu to avoid it closing if a prospect misses their mark, it usually doesn’t make the hover-over menu much more usable.
Hover-over menus also don’t take into account mobile devices, so the functionality cannot translate well for users moving between devices. Rather than using a hover-over mega menu, we recommend that clients stick to mega menus that activate upon being clicked - which is a clear user intention, saving time and keeping your website visitors happy.
You haven't considered images, buttons or logos
\n
Adding compelling images, icons or call to action buttons on your mega menus are a great way to add engagement and draw your user in while giving them context. Visual elements can help users quickly analyze information and understand more about the products, services and information that you’re offering inside your menu.
You didn't plan for mobile
\n
Have you taken the opportunity to look at your website traffic by device lately? Odds are very good that over the years the percentage of users viewing your website from mobile devices has increased significantly. We always develop our websites with a “mobile first” approach. That means that if a company or agency approaches us with a design in mind, one of our first questions will be - where’s the mobile design? In many instances mobile traffic is outpacing desktop traffic significantly.
If you haven’t taken the time to create a mobile design, be sure that your developer talks through how your mega menu will translate to mobile devices and that you settle on the functionality prior to beginning the project. An involved mobile mega menu may increase the cost of the project, so you need to be ready to pay a little more to convert your mega menu over to a user friendly design that works on mobile devices and achieves your original goals.
You're blocking critical conversion opportunities
\n
This goes without saying, but you don’t want your mega menu to deploy on landing pages. When it comes to pages that have very specific goals, like your resource downloads, webinar sign ups or other conversion opportunities, you’ll want to eliminate the navigation entirely or shift to a new format for those pages so that expanded mega menus don’t occupy the important conversion real estate that should be a prospect’s focus when they reach your landing page.
What’s the point of an amazing landing page if it’s only going to be covered up by a massive (hopefully not hover-over) mega menu? Take the time to do a little role play scenario and test your pages accordingly, not just inside your organization, but outside as well. Make sure that your designs make sense, don’t get in the way of the main focus of your website and offer expanded opportunities for conversion rather than covering them up.
We still think that mega menus are here to stay and for savvy organizations that are deep in resources and information for their website visitors, they’re quickly becoming an essential. Ask yourself what critical information is missing from your main website navigation and how a mega menu design could give your users exactly what they need. The right mega menu can increase the time a prospect spends on your website, may reduce your bounce rate and can even increase your visitor to lead conversions.
If you need help with your mega menu or you've been wanting to redesign it more intuitively to serve the needs of your website visitors, we can help.
\n
Tell us:
Do you prefer hover-over menus or click through menus?
Let us know in the comments!
","rssSummary":"We said it. When it comes to HubSpot CMS development, we think that mega menus are an excellent way to organize your navigation and pre-qualify your prospects on your website by putting the information in front of them that is most relevant to their interests.
\n\n
But not all mega menus are created equal. It’s important that you create a mega menu that’s strategic to the needs of your buyers, functional, usable and logical. While this can seem like a “no shit” statement, you’d be surprised how many times we’ve had clients approach us with a pretty design from their design team, only to find little to no research or thought was put into how the mega menu they’re requesting is structured. Your website should be intentional. Manufacturers don’t put extra parts inside your vehicle or television that don’t function to make that machine work better and your website is no different. Every element of your website should be like a cog in a machine, working together to generate leads, further qualify existing leads or sell additional products and services to your existing customers. You should have a strategy session with your marketing agency or internal marketing department to break down buyer personas, aspects of the buyer journey, content and conversion opportunities. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, odds are good that you may be making one of these mega mistakes with your mega menus.
When it comes to HubSpot CMS development trends, we’ve seen a lot of different requests over the years. Parallax scrolling animations, retro fonts, 3D visuals, augmented reality and more - web design trends the last few years have brought a lot of interesting features to websites. One feature that isn’t that new, stands out to us and seems to be a more popular request in our recent projects is a website mega menu. While mega menus have been around for many years, we’re just now seeing more adoption in businesses. For a very long time, confusing and difficult-to-navigate hover-over drop down menus dominated business websites. While it helped meet the needs for growing businesses with complex resources on their websites, it often came at the expense of user experience. The majority of the most valuable information remained inside individual web pages and there wasn’t much ability for users to parse through the information most relevant to them or gain a better understanding of what information was both relevant and available to them.
\n","post_body":"When it comes to HubSpot CMS development trends, we’ve seen a lot of different requests over the years. Parallax scrolling animations, retro fonts, 3D visuals, augmented reality and more - web design trends the last few years have brought a lot of interesting features to websites. One feature that isn’t that new, stands out to us and seems to be a more popular request in our recent projects is a website mega menu. While mega menus have been around for many years, we’re just now seeing more adoption in businesses. For a very long time, confusing and difficult-to-navigate hover-over drop down menus dominated business websites. While it helped meet the needs for growing businesses with complex resources on their websites, it often came at the expense of user experience. The majority of the most valuable information remained inside individual web pages and there wasn’t much ability for users to parse through the information most relevant to them or gain a better understanding of what information was both relevant and available to them.
\n\nWhat are mega menus?
\nMega menus are a more robust navigation menu that displays many different categories and options inside a 2D dropdown layout. Mega menus are the perfect way to enhance the user experience and place more central information in the hands of your users. Rather than guessing at what they’d like to see, your prospects can easily review a list of categories that apply to your goods and services. Segment your goods and services by industry or market to assist website visitors in better determining how your products apply to their business. The result? More organized navigation and resource centers that break down offerings by type or category.
Mega menus are one of the web development trends for HubSpot CMS that are here to stay. Here’s why we think that they’re a really valuable design trend that you should consider adding to your website.
They're more interactive
\nWhen it comes to time on page, you want to give your users options while still helping them move down the funnel in the buyer’s journey by delivering them the most relevant content. By adding a mega menu to your website, you can help your users get to the information that they need by using the categories, industries or products that you feature in your mega menu. This can help to better qualify your online prospects prior to them delving deep into your website and potentially reduces the number of steps required before they make a conversion decision.
\n![\"medical](\"https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/TT1G3MWicBrhOx65L_poaous323aN6jpP8V-JLUe5RJ7ZFhYsGVKUGL5MD9ZS0E9GS74vx_XhfdmDt2yI6a6CEBjo-mlrqfQisKVhq1XbnCoB1NcJ3-EAsPYC4XL4-OL9BkV2PTC8mHUF44QkDukwQ\")
Mega menus are used among a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, business services, e-commerce and more. Here’s a really great example of a mega menu that we partnered up with BS+Co to develop for Advanced Data Systems Corporation, a healthcare automation company. This mega menu is a great option that allows users to select a main navigation component where they can look at the solutions that are most relevant to them. The right section segments the users by industry so that they can learn more about how those solutions may work for their business specifically.
This allows users to easily access the solution that is most relevant to them without having to deal with the noise associated with the other elements of the navigation, which is a common complaint for mega menus that are very broad.
They're super easy to navigate
\nMany make claims that mega menus are not easy for users to navigate because of the additional display of information that isn’t relevant to that particular user. When a mega menu is poorly designed, it can be very overwhelming. However, when mega menus are broken down into categories and extraneous information is hidden from the user, it’s much more helpful.
Mega Menus are needed when there are too many sub categories in traditional drop down navigation. Mega Menus are a simpler way to manage multiple offerings and product categories. We can see this is particularly useful for business to consumer retail shops like online fashion retailers, home improvement stores and more.
Implementing mega menus helps avoid endless scrolling in their attempt to find the information they need about the topics that are most important to them. The days of scrolling to the bottom of a webpage to get to the information you need are gone, so long as you plant your mega menu properly.
Users get what they need
\n
Through the use of a mega menu, users can easily navigate between products that they want or explore services that are most relevant to them based on the content categories present in the navigation. The more quickly a user can find what they’re looking for, the greater the potential for converting faster into a lead, since the content they’re viewing out of the gate is more relevant to their interests.
Regular dropdown menus can often hide many user options, which requires users to recall information rather than it remaining in front of them. Mega menus show your users everything in one place for an at-a-glance review of the information they’re seeking.
It also shows relationships between products and services and allows you to target more specifically by topic, service, product type, industry or individual need.
Align your content with the buyer journey
\n
Mega menus allow you to target your content within your navigation based on the needs of your ideal buyer personas. If you are targeting specific industries or roles, have important information that’s relevant to them, want to elaborate on more specific services, or feature specific high-converting pages, this is a great opportunity to do so.
Breaking your content down by industry or most common problems based on role helps your users quickly navigate to content that they identify with. Highlighting pain points or industries can deliver relevant content more quickly than it would for a user just browsing solutions or services on your website. Think of this as a different type of content personalization.
![\"mega-menu-staffing\"](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/Imported_Blog_Media/mega-menu-staffing.jpg\")
Above you’ll see how a staffing agency has targeted their solutions section and highlighted those looking for executive team members. They’ve also broken down their other service offerings very clearly by needs and segments of their market.
It’s important to organize your mega menu properly if you’re exploring adding one to your website. There are many instances where agencies or businesses failed to do the appropriate amount of research on their buyers and the lack of planning created more conversion issues than it resolved.
By doing in-depth research on your buyers, their journey from awareness to consideration and then decision, and your high converting pages and popular resources, you can easily segment your content in your navigation to better serve your customers and get them to where they want to go.
Need some help implementing a mega menu on your website?
What do you think of mega menus? Share your favorites below in the comments.
When it comes to HubSpot CMS development trends, we’ve seen a lot of different requests over the years. Parallax scrolling animations, retro fonts, 3D visuals, augmented reality and more - web design trends the last few years have brought a lot of interesting features to websites. One feature that isn’t that new, stands out to us and seems to be a more popular request in our recent projects is a website mega menu. While mega menus have been around for many years, we’re just now seeing more adoption in businesses. For a very long time, confusing and difficult-to-navigate hover-over drop down menus dominated business websites. While it helped meet the needs for growing businesses with complex resources on their websites, it often came at the expense of user experience. The majority of the most valuable information remained inside individual web pages and there wasn’t much ability for users to parse through the information most relevant to them or gain a better understanding of what information was both relevant and available to them.
\n","rss_body":"When it comes to HubSpot CMS development trends, we’ve seen a lot of different requests over the years. Parallax scrolling animations, retro fonts, 3D visuals, augmented reality and more - web design trends the last few years have brought a lot of interesting features to websites. One feature that isn’t that new, stands out to us and seems to be a more popular request in our recent projects is a website mega menu. While mega menus have been around for many years, we’re just now seeing more adoption in businesses. For a very long time, confusing and difficult-to-navigate hover-over drop down menus dominated business websites. While it helped meet the needs for growing businesses with complex resources on their websites, it often came at the expense of user experience. The majority of the most valuable information remained inside individual web pages and there wasn’t much ability for users to parse through the information most relevant to them or gain a better understanding of what information was both relevant and available to them.
\n\nWhat are mega menus?
\nMega menus are a more robust navigation menu that displays many different categories and options inside a 2D dropdown layout. Mega menus are the perfect way to enhance the user experience and place more central information in the hands of your users. Rather than guessing at what they’d like to see, your prospects can easily review a list of categories that apply to your goods and services. Segment your goods and services by industry or market to assist website visitors in better determining how your products apply to their business. The result? More organized navigation and resource centers that break down offerings by type or category.
Mega menus are one of the web development trends for HubSpot CMS that are here to stay. Here’s why we think that they’re a really valuable design trend that you should consider adding to your website.
They're more interactive
\nWhen it comes to time on page, you want to give your users options while still helping them move down the funnel in the buyer’s journey by delivering them the most relevant content. By adding a mega menu to your website, you can help your users get to the information that they need by using the categories, industries or products that you feature in your mega menu. This can help to better qualify your online prospects prior to them delving deep into your website and potentially reduces the number of steps required before they make a conversion decision.
\nMega menus are used among a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, business services, e-commerce and more. Here’s a really great example of a mega menu that we partnered up with BS+Co to develop for Advanced Data Systems Corporation, a healthcare automation company. This mega menu is a great option that allows users to select a main navigation component where they can look at the solutions that are most relevant to them. The right section segments the users by industry so that they can learn more about how those solutions may work for their business specifically.
This allows users to easily access the solution that is most relevant to them without having to deal with the noise associated with the other elements of the navigation, which is a common complaint for mega menus that are very broad.
They're super easy to navigate
\nMany make claims that mega menus are not easy for users to navigate because of the additional display of information that isn’t relevant to that particular user. When a mega menu is poorly designed, it can be very overwhelming. However, when mega menus are broken down into categories and extraneous information is hidden from the user, it’s much more helpful.
Mega Menus are needed when there are too many sub categories in traditional drop down navigation. Mega Menus are a simpler way to manage multiple offerings and product categories. We can see this is particularly useful for business to consumer retail shops like online fashion retailers, home improvement stores and more.
Implementing mega menus helps avoid endless scrolling in their attempt to find the information they need about the topics that are most important to them. The days of scrolling to the bottom of a webpage to get to the information you need are gone, so long as you plant your mega menu properly.
Users get what they need
\n
Through the use of a mega menu, users can easily navigate between products that they want or explore services that are most relevant to them based on the content categories present in the navigation. The more quickly a user can find what they’re looking for, the greater the potential for converting faster into a lead, since the content they’re viewing out of the gate is more relevant to their interests.
Regular dropdown menus can often hide many user options, which requires users to recall information rather than it remaining in front of them. Mega menus show your users everything in one place for an at-a-glance review of the information they’re seeking.
It also shows relationships between products and services and allows you to target more specifically by topic, service, product type, industry or individual need.
Align your content with the buyer journey
\n
Mega menus allow you to target your content within your navigation based on the needs of your ideal buyer personas. If you are targeting specific industries or roles, have important information that’s relevant to them, want to elaborate on more specific services, or feature specific high-converting pages, this is a great opportunity to do so.
Breaking your content down by industry or most common problems based on role helps your users quickly navigate to content that they identify with. Highlighting pain points or industries can deliver relevant content more quickly than it would for a user just browsing solutions or services on your website. Think of this as a different type of content personalization.
Above you’ll see how a staffing agency has targeted their solutions section and highlighted those looking for executive team members. They’ve also broken down their other service offerings very clearly by needs and segments of their market.
It’s important to organize your mega menu properly if you’re exploring adding one to your website. There are many instances where agencies or businesses failed to do the appropriate amount of research on their buyers and the lack of planning created more conversion issues than it resolved.
By doing in-depth research on your buyers, their journey from awareness to consideration and then decision, and your high converting pages and popular resources, you can easily segment your content in your navigation to better serve your customers and get them to where they want to go.
Need some help implementing a mega menu on your website?
What do you think of mega menus? Share your favorites below in the comments.
When it comes to HubSpot CMS development trends, we’ve seen a lot of different requests over the years. Parallax scrolling animations, retro fonts, 3D visuals, augmented reality and more - web design trends the last few years have brought a lot of interesting features to websites. One feature that isn’t that new, stands out to us and seems to be a more popular request in our recent projects is a website mega menu. While mega menus have been around for many years, we’re just now seeing more adoption in businesses. For a very long time, confusing and difficult-to-navigate hover-over drop down menus dominated business websites. While it helped meet the needs for growing businesses with complex resources on their websites, it often came at the expense of user experience. The majority of the most valuable information remained inside individual web pages and there wasn’t much ability for users to parse through the information most relevant to them or gain a better understanding of what information was both relevant and available to them.
\n\nWhat are mega menus?
\nMega menus are a more robust navigation menu that displays many different categories and options inside a 2D dropdown layout. Mega menus are the perfect way to enhance the user experience and place more central information in the hands of your users. Rather than guessing at what they’d like to see, your prospects can easily review a list of categories that apply to your goods and services. Segment your goods and services by industry or market to assist website visitors in better determining how your products apply to their business. The result? More organized navigation and resource centers that break down offerings by type or category.
Mega menus are one of the web development trends for HubSpot CMS that are here to stay. Here’s why we think that they’re a really valuable design trend that you should consider adding to your website.
They're more interactive
\nWhen it comes to time on page, you want to give your users options while still helping them move down the funnel in the buyer’s journey by delivering them the most relevant content. By adding a mega menu to your website, you can help your users get to the information that they need by using the categories, industries or products that you feature in your mega menu. This can help to better qualify your online prospects prior to them delving deep into your website and potentially reduces the number of steps required before they make a conversion decision.
\nMega menus are used among a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, business services, e-commerce and more. Here’s a really great example of a mega menu that we partnered up with BS+Co to develop for Advanced Data Systems Corporation, a healthcare automation company. This mega menu is a great option that allows users to select a main navigation component where they can look at the solutions that are most relevant to them. The right section segments the users by industry so that they can learn more about how those solutions may work for their business specifically.
This allows users to easily access the solution that is most relevant to them without having to deal with the noise associated with the other elements of the navigation, which is a common complaint for mega menus that are very broad.
They're super easy to navigate
\nMany make claims that mega menus are not easy for users to navigate because of the additional display of information that isn’t relevant to that particular user. When a mega menu is poorly designed, it can be very overwhelming. However, when mega menus are broken down into categories and extraneous information is hidden from the user, it’s much more helpful.
Mega Menus are needed when there are too many sub categories in traditional drop down navigation. Mega Menus are a simpler way to manage multiple offerings and product categories. We can see this is particularly useful for business to consumer retail shops like online fashion retailers, home improvement stores and more.
Implementing mega menus helps avoid endless scrolling in their attempt to find the information they need about the topics that are most important to them. The days of scrolling to the bottom of a webpage to get to the information you need are gone, so long as you plant your mega menu properly.
Users get what they need
\n
Through the use of a mega menu, users can easily navigate between products that they want or explore services that are most relevant to them based on the content categories present in the navigation. The more quickly a user can find what they’re looking for, the greater the potential for converting faster into a lead, since the content they’re viewing out of the gate is more relevant to their interests.
Regular dropdown menus can often hide many user options, which requires users to recall information rather than it remaining in front of them. Mega menus show your users everything in one place for an at-a-glance review of the information they’re seeking.
It also shows relationships between products and services and allows you to target more specifically by topic, service, product type, industry or individual need.
Align your content with the buyer journey
\n
Mega menus allow you to target your content within your navigation based on the needs of your ideal buyer personas. If you are targeting specific industries or roles, have important information that’s relevant to them, want to elaborate on more specific services, or feature specific high-converting pages, this is a great opportunity to do so.
Breaking your content down by industry or most common problems based on role helps your users quickly navigate to content that they identify with. Highlighting pain points or industries can deliver relevant content more quickly than it would for a user just browsing solutions or services on your website. Think of this as a different type of content personalization.
Above you’ll see how a staffing agency has targeted their solutions section and highlighted those looking for executive team members. They’ve also broken down their other service offerings very clearly by needs and segments of their market.
It’s important to organize your mega menu properly if you’re exploring adding one to your website. There are many instances where agencies or businesses failed to do the appropriate amount of research on their buyers and the lack of planning created more conversion issues than it resolved.
By doing in-depth research on your buyers, their journey from awareness to consideration and then decision, and your high converting pages and popular resources, you can easily segment your content in your navigation to better serve your customers and get them to where they want to go.
Need some help implementing a mega menu on your website?
What do you think of mega menus? Share your favorites below in the comments.
When it comes to HubSpot CMS development trends, we’ve seen a lot of different requests over the years. Parallax scrolling animations, retro fonts, 3D visuals, augmented reality and more - web design trends the last few years have brought a lot of interesting features to websites. One feature that isn’t that new, stands out to us and seems to be a more popular request in our recent projects is a website mega menu. While mega menus have been around for many years, we’re just now seeing more adoption in businesses. For a very long time, confusing and difficult-to-navigate hover-over drop down menus dominated business websites. While it helped meet the needs for growing businesses with complex resources on their websites, it often came at the expense of user experience. The majority of the most valuable information remained inside individual web pages and there wasn’t much ability for users to parse through the information most relevant to them or gain a better understanding of what information was both relevant and available to them.
\n\nWhat are mega menus?
\nMega menus are a more robust navigation menu that displays many different categories and options inside a 2D dropdown layout. Mega menus are the perfect way to enhance the user experience and place more central information in the hands of your users. Rather than guessing at what they’d like to see, your prospects can easily review a list of categories that apply to your goods and services. Segment your goods and services by industry or market to assist website visitors in better determining how your products apply to their business. The result? More organized navigation and resource centers that break down offerings by type or category.
Mega menus are one of the web development trends for HubSpot CMS that are here to stay. Here’s why we think that they’re a really valuable design trend that you should consider adding to your website.
They're more interactive
\nWhen it comes to time on page, you want to give your users options while still helping them move down the funnel in the buyer’s journey by delivering them the most relevant content. By adding a mega menu to your website, you can help your users get to the information that they need by using the categories, industries or products that you feature in your mega menu. This can help to better qualify your online prospects prior to them delving deep into your website and potentially reduces the number of steps required before they make a conversion decision.
\nMega menus are used among a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, business services, e-commerce and more. Here’s a really great example of a mega menu that we partnered up with BS+Co to develop for Advanced Data Systems Corporation, a healthcare automation company. This mega menu is a great option that allows users to select a main navigation component where they can look at the solutions that are most relevant to them. The right section segments the users by industry so that they can learn more about how those solutions may work for their business specifically.
This allows users to easily access the solution that is most relevant to them without having to deal with the noise associated with the other elements of the navigation, which is a common complaint for mega menus that are very broad.
They're super easy to navigate
\nMany make claims that mega menus are not easy for users to navigate because of the additional display of information that isn’t relevant to that particular user. When a mega menu is poorly designed, it can be very overwhelming. However, when mega menus are broken down into categories and extraneous information is hidden from the user, it’s much more helpful.
Mega Menus are needed when there are too many sub categories in traditional drop down navigation. Mega Menus are a simpler way to manage multiple offerings and product categories. We can see this is particularly useful for business to consumer retail shops like online fashion retailers, home improvement stores and more.
Implementing mega menus helps avoid endless scrolling in their attempt to find the information they need about the topics that are most important to them. The days of scrolling to the bottom of a webpage to get to the information you need are gone, so long as you plant your mega menu properly.
Users get what they need
\n
Through the use of a mega menu, users can easily navigate between products that they want or explore services that are most relevant to them based on the content categories present in the navigation. The more quickly a user can find what they’re looking for, the greater the potential for converting faster into a lead, since the content they’re viewing out of the gate is more relevant to their interests.
Regular dropdown menus can often hide many user options, which requires users to recall information rather than it remaining in front of them. Mega menus show your users everything in one place for an at-a-glance review of the information they’re seeking.
It also shows relationships between products and services and allows you to target more specifically by topic, service, product type, industry or individual need.
Align your content with the buyer journey
\n
Mega menus allow you to target your content within your navigation based on the needs of your ideal buyer personas. If you are targeting specific industries or roles, have important information that’s relevant to them, want to elaborate on more specific services, or feature specific high-converting pages, this is a great opportunity to do so.
Breaking your content down by industry or most common problems based on role helps your users quickly navigate to content that they identify with. Highlighting pain points or industries can deliver relevant content more quickly than it would for a user just browsing solutions or services on your website. Think of this as a different type of content personalization.
Above you’ll see how a staffing agency has targeted their solutions section and highlighted those looking for executive team members. They’ve also broken down their other service offerings very clearly by needs and segments of their market.
It’s important to organize your mega menu properly if you’re exploring adding one to your website. There are many instances where agencies or businesses failed to do the appropriate amount of research on their buyers and the lack of planning created more conversion issues than it resolved.
By doing in-depth research on your buyers, their journey from awareness to consideration and then decision, and your high converting pages and popular resources, you can easily segment your content in your navigation to better serve your customers and get them to where they want to go.
Need some help implementing a mega menu on your website?
What do you think of mega menus? Share your favorites below in the comments.
When it comes to HubSpot CMS development trends, we’ve seen a lot of different requests over the years. Parallax scrolling animations, retro fonts, 3D visuals, augmented reality and more - web design trends the last few years have brought a lot of interesting features to websites. One feature that isn’t that new, stands out to us and seems to be a more popular request in our recent projects is a website mega menu. While mega menus have been around for many years, we’re just now seeing more adoption in businesses. For a very long time, confusing and difficult-to-navigate hover-over drop down menus dominated business websites. While it helped meet the needs for growing businesses with complex resources on their websites, it often came at the expense of user experience. The majority of the most valuable information remained inside individual web pages and there wasn’t much ability for users to parse through the information most relevant to them or gain a better understanding of what information was both relevant and available to them.
","postFeaturedImageIfEnabled":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/Screenshots/mega-menu-staffing.jpg","postListContent":"When it comes to HubSpot CMS development trends, we’ve seen a lot of different requests over the years. Parallax scrolling animations, retro fonts, 3D visuals, augmented reality and more - web design trends the last few years have brought a lot of interesting features to websites. One feature that isn’t that new, stands out to us and seems to be a more popular request in our recent projects is a website mega menu. While mega menus have been around for many years, we’re just now seeing more adoption in businesses. For a very long time, confusing and difficult-to-navigate hover-over drop down menus dominated business websites. While it helped meet the needs for growing businesses with complex resources on their websites, it often came at the expense of user experience. The majority of the most valuable information remained inside individual web pages and there wasn’t much ability for users to parse through the information most relevant to them or gain a better understanding of what information was both relevant and available to them.
","postListSummaryFeaturedImage":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/Screenshots/mega-menu-staffing.jpg","postRssContent":"When it comes to HubSpot CMS development trends, we’ve seen a lot of different requests over the years. Parallax scrolling animations, retro fonts, 3D visuals, augmented reality and more - web design trends the last few years have brought a lot of interesting features to websites. One feature that isn’t that new, stands out to us and seems to be a more popular request in our recent projects is a website mega menu. While mega menus have been around for many years, we’re just now seeing more adoption in businesses. For a very long time, confusing and difficult-to-navigate hover-over drop down menus dominated business websites. While it helped meet the needs for growing businesses with complex resources on their websites, it often came at the expense of user experience. The majority of the most valuable information remained inside individual web pages and there wasn’t much ability for users to parse through the information most relevant to them or gain a better understanding of what information was both relevant and available to them.
","postRssSummaryFeaturedImage":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/Screenshots/mega-menu-staffing.jpg","postSummary":"When it comes to HubSpot CMS development trends, we’ve seen a lot of different requests over the years. Parallax scrolling animations, retro fonts, 3D visuals, augmented reality and more - web design trends the last few years have brought a lot of interesting features to websites. One feature that isn’t that new, stands out to us and seems to be a more popular request in our recent projects is a website mega menu. While mega menus have been around for many years, we’re just now seeing more adoption in businesses. For a very long time, confusing and difficult-to-navigate hover-over drop down menus dominated business websites. While it helped meet the needs for growing businesses with complex resources on their websites, it often came at the expense of user experience. The majority of the most valuable information remained inside individual web pages and there wasn’t much ability for users to parse through the information most relevant to them or gain a better understanding of what information was both relevant and available to them.
\n","postSummaryRss":"When it comes to HubSpot CMS development trends, we’ve seen a lot of different requests over the years. Parallax scrolling animations, retro fonts, 3D visuals, augmented reality and more - web design trends the last few years have brought a lot of interesting features to websites. One feature that isn’t that new, stands out to us and seems to be a more popular request in our recent projects is a website mega menu. While mega menus have been around for many years, we’re just now seeing more adoption in businesses. For a very long time, confusing and difficult-to-navigate hover-over drop down menus dominated business websites. While it helped meet the needs for growing businesses with complex resources on their websites, it often came at the expense of user experience. The majority of the most valuable information remained inside individual web pages and there wasn’t much ability for users to parse through the information most relevant to them or gain a better understanding of what information was both relevant and available to them.
","postTemplate":"deckerdevs-theme/templates/blog-content.html","previewImageSrc":null,"previewKey":"EgMwDoAd","previousPostFeaturedImage":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/deckerdevs-mega%20menu%20mistakes2.png","previousPostFeaturedImageAltText":"","previousPostName":"HubSpot CMS Development Tips: Mega Mistakes with Mega Menus","previousPostSlug":"blogs/hubspot-cms-development-tips-mega-mistakes-with-mega-menus","processingStatus":"PUBLISHED","propertyForDynamicPageCanonicalUrl":null,"propertyForDynamicPageFeaturedImage":null,"propertyForDynamicPageMetaDescription":null,"propertyForDynamicPageSlug":null,"propertyForDynamicPageTitle":null,"publicAccessRules":[],"publicAccessRulesEnabled":false,"publishDate":1660322381000,"publishDateLocalTime":1660322381000,"publishDateLocalized":{"date":1660322381000,"format":"medium","language":null},"publishImmediately":true,"publishTimezoneOffset":null,"publishedAt":1718126434431,"publishedByEmail":null,"publishedById":8982263,"publishedByName":null,"publishedUrl":"https://deckerdevs.com/blogs/hubspot-cms-development-trends-mega-menus-are-here-to-stay","resolvedDomain":"deckerdevs.com","resolvedLanguage":null,"rssBody":"When it comes to HubSpot CMS development trends, we’ve seen a lot of different requests over the years. Parallax scrolling animations, retro fonts, 3D visuals, augmented reality and more - web design trends the last few years have brought a lot of interesting features to websites. One feature that isn’t that new, stands out to us and seems to be a more popular request in our recent projects is a website mega menu. While mega menus have been around for many years, we’re just now seeing more adoption in businesses. For a very long time, confusing and difficult-to-navigate hover-over drop down menus dominated business websites. While it helped meet the needs for growing businesses with complex resources on their websites, it often came at the expense of user experience. The majority of the most valuable information remained inside individual web pages and there wasn’t much ability for users to parse through the information most relevant to them or gain a better understanding of what information was both relevant and available to them.
\n\nWhat are mega menus?
\nMega menus are a more robust navigation menu that displays many different categories and options inside a 2D dropdown layout. Mega menus are the perfect way to enhance the user experience and place more central information in the hands of your users. Rather than guessing at what they’d like to see, your prospects can easily review a list of categories that apply to your goods and services. Segment your goods and services by industry or market to assist website visitors in better determining how your products apply to their business. The result? More organized navigation and resource centers that break down offerings by type or category.
Mega menus are one of the web development trends for HubSpot CMS that are here to stay. Here’s why we think that they’re a really valuable design trend that you should consider adding to your website.
They're more interactive
\nWhen it comes to time on page, you want to give your users options while still helping them move down the funnel in the buyer’s journey by delivering them the most relevant content. By adding a mega menu to your website, you can help your users get to the information that they need by using the categories, industries or products that you feature in your mega menu. This can help to better qualify your online prospects prior to them delving deep into your website and potentially reduces the number of steps required before they make a conversion decision.
\nMega menus are used among a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, business services, e-commerce and more. Here’s a really great example of a mega menu that we partnered up with BS+Co to develop for Advanced Data Systems Corporation, a healthcare automation company. This mega menu is a great option that allows users to select a main navigation component where they can look at the solutions that are most relevant to them. The right section segments the users by industry so that they can learn more about how those solutions may work for their business specifically.
This allows users to easily access the solution that is most relevant to them without having to deal with the noise associated with the other elements of the navigation, which is a common complaint for mega menus that are very broad.
They're super easy to navigate
\nMany make claims that mega menus are not easy for users to navigate because of the additional display of information that isn’t relevant to that particular user. When a mega menu is poorly designed, it can be very overwhelming. However, when mega menus are broken down into categories and extraneous information is hidden from the user, it’s much more helpful.
Mega Menus are needed when there are too many sub categories in traditional drop down navigation. Mega Menus are a simpler way to manage multiple offerings and product categories. We can see this is particularly useful for business to consumer retail shops like online fashion retailers, home improvement stores and more.
Implementing mega menus helps avoid endless scrolling in their attempt to find the information they need about the topics that are most important to them. The days of scrolling to the bottom of a webpage to get to the information you need are gone, so long as you plant your mega menu properly.
Users get what they need
\n
Through the use of a mega menu, users can easily navigate between products that they want or explore services that are most relevant to them based on the content categories present in the navigation. The more quickly a user can find what they’re looking for, the greater the potential for converting faster into a lead, since the content they’re viewing out of the gate is more relevant to their interests.
Regular dropdown menus can often hide many user options, which requires users to recall information rather than it remaining in front of them. Mega menus show your users everything in one place for an at-a-glance review of the information they’re seeking.
It also shows relationships between products and services and allows you to target more specifically by topic, service, product type, industry or individual need.
Align your content with the buyer journey
\n
Mega menus allow you to target your content within your navigation based on the needs of your ideal buyer personas. If you are targeting specific industries or roles, have important information that’s relevant to them, want to elaborate on more specific services, or feature specific high-converting pages, this is a great opportunity to do so.
Breaking your content down by industry or most common problems based on role helps your users quickly navigate to content that they identify with. Highlighting pain points or industries can deliver relevant content more quickly than it would for a user just browsing solutions or services on your website. Think of this as a different type of content personalization.
Above you’ll see how a staffing agency has targeted their solutions section and highlighted those looking for executive team members. They’ve also broken down their other service offerings very clearly by needs and segments of their market.
It’s important to organize your mega menu properly if you’re exploring adding one to your website. There are many instances where agencies or businesses failed to do the appropriate amount of research on their buyers and the lack of planning created more conversion issues than it resolved.
By doing in-depth research on your buyers, their journey from awareness to consideration and then decision, and your high converting pages and popular resources, you can easily segment your content in your navigation to better serve your customers and get them to where they want to go.
Need some help implementing a mega menu on your website?
What do you think of mega menus? Share your favorites below in the comments.
When it comes to HubSpot CMS development trends, we’ve seen a lot of different requests over the years. Parallax scrolling animations, retro fonts, 3D visuals, augmented reality and more - web design trends the last few years have brought a lot of interesting features to websites. One feature that isn’t that new, stands out to us and seems to be a more popular request in our recent projects is a website mega menu. While mega menus have been around for many years, we’re just now seeing more adoption in businesses. For a very long time, confusing and difficult-to-navigate hover-over drop down menus dominated business websites. While it helped meet the needs for growing businesses with complex resources on their websites, it often came at the expense of user experience. The majority of the most valuable information remained inside individual web pages and there wasn’t much ability for users to parse through the information most relevant to them or gain a better understanding of what information was both relevant and available to them.
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Bounce Rate: 6 Things Sending People Away from Your Website","id":81837670676,"includeDefaultCustomCss":null,"isCaptchaRequired":true,"isCrawlableByBots":false,"isDraft":false,"isInstanceLayoutPage":false,"isInstantEmailEnabled":false,"isPublished":true,"isSocialPublishingEnabled":false,"keywords":[],"label":"Website Bounce Rate: 6 Things Sending People Away from Your Website","language":"en","lastEditSessionId":null,"lastEditUpdateId":null,"layoutSections":{},"legacyBlogTabid":null,"legacyId":null,"legacyPostGuid":null,"linkRelCanonicalUrl":"","listTemplate":"","liveDomain":"deckerdevs.com","mab":false,"mabExperimentId":null,"mabMaster":false,"mabVariant":false,"meta":{"html_title":"Website Bounce Rate: 6 Things Sending People Away from Your Website","public_access_rules":[],"public_access_rules_enabled":false,"enable_google_amp_output_override":false,"generate_json_ld_enabled":true,"composition_id":0,"is_crawlable_by_bots":false,"use_featured_image":true,"post_summary":"When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
\n","post_body":"When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
\n\nYour bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that come to your website and take no other action before leaving. This is an indicator to search engines that the content they’ve clicked through isn’t valuable or relevant for what the user searched for, or your website isn’t the best source of information for that topic. This can happen for a number of reasons, but lowering that bounce rate is going to be really critical not only for search engine rankings but also to ensure you’re getting the most out of the traffic that you work so hard to funnel to your website to begin with.
\n\n
Why work on your bounce rate?
\n- \n
- The goal for more people is to have a large percentage of your website visitors taking an action on your website. \n
- One of the considerations for website rank by search engines is bounce rate. The lower your bounce rate, the better your potential to rank is. \n
Even the most savvy marketers can miss something when it comes to decreasing the bounce rate on their website. The intricacies of conversion can be a little daunting to master all at once, but with the right strategy, you can slowly bring down your website’s bounce rate.
Here are a few factors that contribute to an increased bounce rate on your website:
Not mobile-friendly
\n![\"deckerdevs-mobile](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/deckerdevs-mobile%20optimization-devices-1.svg\")
It is very rare that you’ll encounter a web developer that doesn’t leverage mobile-first design. In the design of your website, you should make sure that your developer either asks for your mobile design or insists that they establish the mobile design prior to beginning the development of the website.
\n
Understanding how elements on the page will shift as the browser size changes is critical to creating a good user experience for your website visitors. If images don’t properly shift above or below the words they support or the navigation doesn’t translate in a logical way to a smaller mobile browser, you could risk losing visitors to confusing mobile and tablet views.
Not only should your website developer be looking over your mobile design first, but they should be making intuitive suggestions for search options, filtering and other expert tips to make sure your website translates well to browsers on mobile devices.
Related: HubSpot Developer Utopia - 7 Things to Expert When Developing a HubSpot CMS Website
\nPoorly Planned Design
\n
UX, font size, ugly color contrasts, menu navigation that is too clunky or not intuitive - all of these things contribute to a poor user interface, which can annihilate a bounce rate. It seems logical, but users (especially in the ADD on-demand world we live in today) want to find the information they’re looking for easily, without extra work and without hurting their eyes.
As a rule of thumb, if a user can’t locate the information they want within 4 seconds of clicking on a page, they’re probably leaving for the next source of information. This means that you have to have a simple and intuitive design, fast loading pages, colors that are complementary but not too contrasting and navigation that is easy to understand.
A list of common issues with poorly designed websites?
- \n
- Fonts that are too big or too small \n
- Glaringly contrasting colors that are hard to read or look at \n
- Pages that have too many elements loading at the same time and take longer than 4 seconds to load \n
- Large useless animations \n
- Music that doesn’t allow the user to control the volume or plays the moment a page is clicked \n
- Irrelevant, obnoxious images \n
- Too many ads or banners popping up \n
- Chat or opt-in boxes that are relentless \n
- Layouts that shift as you move down the page \n
Some developers created the Big Ugly Website to give you a hint for the types of things that turn off a user. It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often things like font size, color and poor layout are encountered by users.
\n\n
We could go on and on, but those are just a few of the things that can easily frustrate users from a design perspective. You’ll want to minimize or avoid these things entirely to make sure that your users are getting exactly what they are looking for when it comes to your products and services.
Your page loads too slowly
\n
We already discussed the 4 second rule, but there’s a lot more to page load speed than most realize. From your website host and server to excessive plugins, large images, scripts and other elements - every second matters. In fact, according to websitesetup.org: 7 out of 10 people say that the speed of a website page affects their desire to buy from an online retailer. Not only that, but websites that take 5 seconds to load have a 90% bounce rate!
Page load speed matters more than you realize. A few tenths of a second may not seem like much, but if it puts you over that critical threshold, you’re handicapping your ability to convert your visitors and sending your bounce rate up. In the retail industry, decreasing your load time by just one tenth of a second can result in 8.4% increase in conversion rates! That’s HUGE! The same article states that that same .1 second decrease in load speed also yielded 9.2% increase in order size and page view per session by 8.6%
Things like image size and optimization, scripts and old code, fonts and icons, videos and hosting are the biggest culprits for bogging down load speed. We’ve got a write up on page speed optimization that includes 5 factors that could be bogging down your website that you should definitely check out.
Your title tag and meta description may be misleading
\n
In the age of click-bait articles, so many news outlets and blogs are using their title tag and meta description to get people to click through. But when it comes to reducing your bounce rate, relevance matters. You want your user to know in as few words as possible what the information they’re about to click through includes while still ensuring the description is as compelling as possible. A gifted copywriter will be able to assist with this.
For SEO purposes, make sure that your Title Tag is 60 characters or less (or that the most important information is included within those 60 characters) and that your Meta Description is 160 characters or less.
It should be a relevant description of what the user hopes to gain and the keyword that you’re optimizing that particular website page or blog for should be relevant to the topic you’re discussing. Oftentimes a local business makes an effort to optimize their website for a certain product type or service offering and includes that keyword in a blog title that may not be perfectly relevant for that topic.
When it comes to planning your content, it’s most important to offer valuable information without being misleading, spamming keywords or trying to weave in keywords that don’t entirely fit the topic of the blog post or website page.
Remember: Google is trying to deliver the most relevant information to help answer a user's question. The more you focus on the user, the better off you’ll be and the more people will engage with the content that you’re putting out, resulting in lower bounce rates.
Poor quality referrals
\n
Inbound links are a great way to get traffic to your site and increase your credibility with search engines - to a point. You want to make sure that you’re not just listing your business in any irrelevant directory that you can and that every inbound link actually makes sense for the types of people that you’re looking for.
What are good ways to get quality inbound links and referral traffic?
- \n
- Industry specific directories. Are there directories specifically for your industry and offerings? You should be there. As a HubSpot CMS Developer, we’ve become a HubSpot Partner and are now listed in their Partner Marketplace, which has actually been a source of a few great leads for us. Do some research on listings that are relevant to you and see if you can get listed there. It’s a simple and easy way to get qualified referral traffic sent to your site.
- Guest blogging for other websites is a great way to get relevant inbound links to your site. Align yourself with industries that you serve, other authorities in your space and create partnerships with businesses whose products and services cater to a similar audience.
- Keep writing original, quality content. Performing your own research can be a great way to get linked to or even just having original thoughts about problems that your prospects and customers relate to. Don’t underestimate the value of a quality content creator and strategist and NEVER use a bot or AI software to write your blog articles. Your content is the most important way to keep your visitors engaged and you want to make sure it holds plenty of value and thought leadership for web visitors. \n
For most businesses, the goal of your website is to attract visitors and keep them on your website until they make a conversion decision. If a poor design, low quality content, slow loading pages or other elements of your website are pushing them away before they take any desired actions, you need to take action to help keep them on your site and reduce your bounce rate. Installing a heat map software like HotJar is a great start. This will help you to understand what users are doing on your website, optimize the most common actions and eliminate any elements of your site that appear to be confusing to your website visitors.
Using a tool like HotJar in tandem with an experienced web developer will help you understand what actions can be taken to make your website more successful in converting your visitors and keeping them on your page for longer. An experienced website developer will know what features can be added and how to best shift elements around, change typography and best optimize UX to create a positive experience for your users.
What are some thing you've noticed about websites that have made you want to leave? You can even post a link with examples!
When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
\n","rss_body":"When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
\n\nYour bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that come to your website and take no other action before leaving. This is an indicator to search engines that the content they’ve clicked through isn’t valuable or relevant for what the user searched for, or your website isn’t the best source of information for that topic. This can happen for a number of reasons, but lowering that bounce rate is going to be really critical not only for search engine rankings but also to ensure you’re getting the most out of the traffic that you work so hard to funnel to your website to begin with.
\n\n
Why work on your bounce rate?
\n- \n
- The goal for more people is to have a large percentage of your website visitors taking an action on your website. \n
- One of the considerations for website rank by search engines is bounce rate. The lower your bounce rate, the better your potential to rank is. \n
Even the most savvy marketers can miss something when it comes to decreasing the bounce rate on their website. The intricacies of conversion can be a little daunting to master all at once, but with the right strategy, you can slowly bring down your website’s bounce rate.
Here are a few factors that contribute to an increased bounce rate on your website:
Not mobile-friendly
\nIt is very rare that you’ll encounter a web developer that doesn’t leverage mobile-first design. In the design of your website, you should make sure that your developer either asks for your mobile design or insists that they establish the mobile design prior to beginning the development of the website.
\n
Understanding how elements on the page will shift as the browser size changes is critical to creating a good user experience for your website visitors. If images don’t properly shift above or below the words they support or the navigation doesn’t translate in a logical way to a smaller mobile browser, you could risk losing visitors to confusing mobile and tablet views.
Not only should your website developer be looking over your mobile design first, but they should be making intuitive suggestions for search options, filtering and other expert tips to make sure your website translates well to browsers on mobile devices.
Related: HubSpot Developer Utopia - 7 Things to Expert When Developing a HubSpot CMS Website
\nPoorly Planned Design
\n
UX, font size, ugly color contrasts, menu navigation that is too clunky or not intuitive - all of these things contribute to a poor user interface, which can annihilate a bounce rate. It seems logical, but users (especially in the ADD on-demand world we live in today) want to find the information they’re looking for easily, without extra work and without hurting their eyes.
As a rule of thumb, if a user can’t locate the information they want within 4 seconds of clicking on a page, they’re probably leaving for the next source of information. This means that you have to have a simple and intuitive design, fast loading pages, colors that are complementary but not too contrasting and navigation that is easy to understand.
A list of common issues with poorly designed websites?
- \n
- Fonts that are too big or too small \n
- Glaringly contrasting colors that are hard to read or look at \n
- Pages that have too many elements loading at the same time and take longer than 4 seconds to load \n
- Large useless animations \n
- Music that doesn’t allow the user to control the volume or plays the moment a page is clicked \n
- Irrelevant, obnoxious images \n
- Too many ads or banners popping up \n
- Chat or opt-in boxes that are relentless \n
- Layouts that shift as you move down the page \n
Some developers created the Big Ugly Website to give you a hint for the types of things that turn off a user. It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often things like font size, color and poor layout are encountered by users.
\n\n
We could go on and on, but those are just a few of the things that can easily frustrate users from a design perspective. You’ll want to minimize or avoid these things entirely to make sure that your users are getting exactly what they are looking for when it comes to your products and services.
Your page loads too slowly
\n
We already discussed the 4 second rule, but there’s a lot more to page load speed than most realize. From your website host and server to excessive plugins, large images, scripts and other elements - every second matters. In fact, according to websitesetup.org: 7 out of 10 people say that the speed of a website page affects their desire to buy from an online retailer. Not only that, but websites that take 5 seconds to load have a 90% bounce rate!
Page load speed matters more than you realize. A few tenths of a second may not seem like much, but if it puts you over that critical threshold, you’re handicapping your ability to convert your visitors and sending your bounce rate up. In the retail industry, decreasing your load time by just one tenth of a second can result in 8.4% increase in conversion rates! That’s HUGE! The same article states that that same .1 second decrease in load speed also yielded 9.2% increase in order size and page view per session by 8.6%
Things like image size and optimization, scripts and old code, fonts and icons, videos and hosting are the biggest culprits for bogging down load speed. We’ve got a write up on page speed optimization that includes 5 factors that could be bogging down your website that you should definitely check out.
Your title tag and meta description may be misleading
\n
In the age of click-bait articles, so many news outlets and blogs are using their title tag and meta description to get people to click through. But when it comes to reducing your bounce rate, relevance matters. You want your user to know in as few words as possible what the information they’re about to click through includes while still ensuring the description is as compelling as possible. A gifted copywriter will be able to assist with this.
For SEO purposes, make sure that your Title Tag is 60 characters or less (or that the most important information is included within those 60 characters) and that your Meta Description is 160 characters or less.
It should be a relevant description of what the user hopes to gain and the keyword that you’re optimizing that particular website page or blog for should be relevant to the topic you’re discussing. Oftentimes a local business makes an effort to optimize their website for a certain product type or service offering and includes that keyword in a blog title that may not be perfectly relevant for that topic.
When it comes to planning your content, it’s most important to offer valuable information without being misleading, spamming keywords or trying to weave in keywords that don’t entirely fit the topic of the blog post or website page.
Remember: Google is trying to deliver the most relevant information to help answer a user's question. The more you focus on the user, the better off you’ll be and the more people will engage with the content that you’re putting out, resulting in lower bounce rates.
Poor quality referrals
\n
Inbound links are a great way to get traffic to your site and increase your credibility with search engines - to a point. You want to make sure that you’re not just listing your business in any irrelevant directory that you can and that every inbound link actually makes sense for the types of people that you’re looking for.
What are good ways to get quality inbound links and referral traffic?
- \n
- Industry specific directories. Are there directories specifically for your industry and offerings? You should be there. As a HubSpot CMS Developer, we’ve become a HubSpot Partner and are now listed in their Partner Marketplace, which has actually been a source of a few great leads for us. Do some research on listings that are relevant to you and see if you can get listed there. It’s a simple and easy way to get qualified referral traffic sent to your site.
- Guest blogging for other websites is a great way to get relevant inbound links to your site. Align yourself with industries that you serve, other authorities in your space and create partnerships with businesses whose products and services cater to a similar audience.
- Keep writing original, quality content. Performing your own research can be a great way to get linked to or even just having original thoughts about problems that your prospects and customers relate to. Don’t underestimate the value of a quality content creator and strategist and NEVER use a bot or AI software to write your blog articles. Your content is the most important way to keep your visitors engaged and you want to make sure it holds plenty of value and thought leadership for web visitors. \n
For most businesses, the goal of your website is to attract visitors and keep them on your website until they make a conversion decision. If a poor design, low quality content, slow loading pages or other elements of your website are pushing them away before they take any desired actions, you need to take action to help keep them on your site and reduce your bounce rate. Installing a heat map software like HotJar is a great start. This will help you to understand what users are doing on your website, optimize the most common actions and eliminate any elements of your site that appear to be confusing to your website visitors.
Using a tool like HotJar in tandem with an experienced web developer will help you understand what actions can be taken to make your website more successful in converting your visitors and keeping them on your page for longer. An experienced website developer will know what features can be added and how to best shift elements around, change typography and best optimize UX to create a positive experience for your users.
What are some thing you've noticed about websites that have made you want to leave? You can even post a link with examples!
When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
\n\nYour bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that come to your website and take no other action before leaving. This is an indicator to search engines that the content they’ve clicked through isn’t valuable or relevant for what the user searched for, or your website isn’t the best source of information for that topic. This can happen for a number of reasons, but lowering that bounce rate is going to be really critical not only for search engine rankings but also to ensure you’re getting the most out of the traffic that you work so hard to funnel to your website to begin with.
\n\n
Why work on your bounce rate?
\n- \n
- The goal for more people is to have a large percentage of your website visitors taking an action on your website. \n
- One of the considerations for website rank by search engines is bounce rate. The lower your bounce rate, the better your potential to rank is. \n
Even the most savvy marketers can miss something when it comes to decreasing the bounce rate on their website. The intricacies of conversion can be a little daunting to master all at once, but with the right strategy, you can slowly bring down your website’s bounce rate.
Here are a few factors that contribute to an increased bounce rate on your website:
Not mobile-friendly
\nIt is very rare that you’ll encounter a web developer that doesn’t leverage mobile-first design. In the design of your website, you should make sure that your developer either asks for your mobile design or insists that they establish the mobile design prior to beginning the development of the website.
\n
Understanding how elements on the page will shift as the browser size changes is critical to creating a good user experience for your website visitors. If images don’t properly shift above or below the words they support or the navigation doesn’t translate in a logical way to a smaller mobile browser, you could risk losing visitors to confusing mobile and tablet views.
Not only should your website developer be looking over your mobile design first, but they should be making intuitive suggestions for search options, filtering and other expert tips to make sure your website translates well to browsers on mobile devices.
Related: HubSpot Developer Utopia - 7 Things to Expert When Developing a HubSpot CMS Website
\nPoorly Planned Design
\n
UX, font size, ugly color contrasts, menu navigation that is too clunky or not intuitive - all of these things contribute to a poor user interface, which can annihilate a bounce rate. It seems logical, but users (especially in the ADD on-demand world we live in today) want to find the information they’re looking for easily, without extra work and without hurting their eyes.
As a rule of thumb, if a user can’t locate the information they want within 4 seconds of clicking on a page, they’re probably leaving for the next source of information. This means that you have to have a simple and intuitive design, fast loading pages, colors that are complementary but not too contrasting and navigation that is easy to understand.
A list of common issues with poorly designed websites?
- \n
- Fonts that are too big or too small \n
- Glaringly contrasting colors that are hard to read or look at \n
- Pages that have too many elements loading at the same time and take longer than 4 seconds to load \n
- Large useless animations \n
- Music that doesn’t allow the user to control the volume or plays the moment a page is clicked \n
- Irrelevant, obnoxious images \n
- Too many ads or banners popping up \n
- Chat or opt-in boxes that are relentless \n
- Layouts that shift as you move down the page \n
Some developers created the Big Ugly Website to give you a hint for the types of things that turn off a user. It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often things like font size, color and poor layout are encountered by users.
\n\n
We could go on and on, but those are just a few of the things that can easily frustrate users from a design perspective. You’ll want to minimize or avoid these things entirely to make sure that your users are getting exactly what they are looking for when it comes to your products and services.
Your page loads too slowly
\n
We already discussed the 4 second rule, but there’s a lot more to page load speed than most realize. From your website host and server to excessive plugins, large images, scripts and other elements - every second matters. In fact, according to websitesetup.org: 7 out of 10 people say that the speed of a website page affects their desire to buy from an online retailer. Not only that, but websites that take 5 seconds to load have a 90% bounce rate!
Page load speed matters more than you realize. A few tenths of a second may not seem like much, but if it puts you over that critical threshold, you’re handicapping your ability to convert your visitors and sending your bounce rate up. In the retail industry, decreasing your load time by just one tenth of a second can result in 8.4% increase in conversion rates! That’s HUGE! The same article states that that same .1 second decrease in load speed also yielded 9.2% increase in order size and page view per session by 8.6%
Things like image size and optimization, scripts and old code, fonts and icons, videos and hosting are the biggest culprits for bogging down load speed. We’ve got a write up on page speed optimization that includes 5 factors that could be bogging down your website that you should definitely check out.
Your title tag and meta description may be misleading
\n
In the age of click-bait articles, so many news outlets and blogs are using their title tag and meta description to get people to click through. But when it comes to reducing your bounce rate, relevance matters. You want your user to know in as few words as possible what the information they’re about to click through includes while still ensuring the description is as compelling as possible. A gifted copywriter will be able to assist with this.
For SEO purposes, make sure that your Title Tag is 60 characters or less (or that the most important information is included within those 60 characters) and that your Meta Description is 160 characters or less.
It should be a relevant description of what the user hopes to gain and the keyword that you’re optimizing that particular website page or blog for should be relevant to the topic you’re discussing. Oftentimes a local business makes an effort to optimize their website for a certain product type or service offering and includes that keyword in a blog title that may not be perfectly relevant for that topic.
When it comes to planning your content, it’s most important to offer valuable information without being misleading, spamming keywords or trying to weave in keywords that don’t entirely fit the topic of the blog post or website page.
Remember: Google is trying to deliver the most relevant information to help answer a user's question. The more you focus on the user, the better off you’ll be and the more people will engage with the content that you’re putting out, resulting in lower bounce rates.
Poor quality referrals
\n
Inbound links are a great way to get traffic to your site and increase your credibility with search engines - to a point. You want to make sure that you’re not just listing your business in any irrelevant directory that you can and that every inbound link actually makes sense for the types of people that you’re looking for.
What are good ways to get quality inbound links and referral traffic?
- \n
- Industry specific directories. Are there directories specifically for your industry and offerings? You should be there. As a HubSpot CMS Developer, we’ve become a HubSpot Partner and are now listed in their Partner Marketplace, which has actually been a source of a few great leads for us. Do some research on listings that are relevant to you and see if you can get listed there. It’s a simple and easy way to get qualified referral traffic sent to your site.
- Guest blogging for other websites is a great way to get relevant inbound links to your site. Align yourself with industries that you serve, other authorities in your space and create partnerships with businesses whose products and services cater to a similar audience.
- Keep writing original, quality content. Performing your own research can be a great way to get linked to or even just having original thoughts about problems that your prospects and customers relate to. Don’t underestimate the value of a quality content creator and strategist and NEVER use a bot or AI software to write your blog articles. Your content is the most important way to keep your visitors engaged and you want to make sure it holds plenty of value and thought leadership for web visitors. \n
For most businesses, the goal of your website is to attract visitors and keep them on your website until they make a conversion decision. If a poor design, low quality content, slow loading pages or other elements of your website are pushing them away before they take any desired actions, you need to take action to help keep them on your site and reduce your bounce rate. Installing a heat map software like HotJar is a great start. This will help you to understand what users are doing on your website, optimize the most common actions and eliminate any elements of your site that appear to be confusing to your website visitors.
Using a tool like HotJar in tandem with an experienced web developer will help you understand what actions can be taken to make your website more successful in converting your visitors and keeping them on your page for longer. An experienced website developer will know what features can be added and how to best shift elements around, change typography and best optimize UX to create a positive experience for your users.
What are some thing you've noticed about websites that have made you want to leave? You can even post a link with examples!
When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
\n\nYour bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that come to your website and take no other action before leaving. This is an indicator to search engines that the content they’ve clicked through isn’t valuable or relevant for what the user searched for, or your website isn’t the best source of information for that topic. This can happen for a number of reasons, but lowering that bounce rate is going to be really critical not only for search engine rankings but also to ensure you’re getting the most out of the traffic that you work so hard to funnel to your website to begin with.
\n\n
Why work on your bounce rate?
\n- \n
- The goal for more people is to have a large percentage of your website visitors taking an action on your website. \n
- One of the considerations for website rank by search engines is bounce rate. The lower your bounce rate, the better your potential to rank is. \n
Even the most savvy marketers can miss something when it comes to decreasing the bounce rate on their website. The intricacies of conversion can be a little daunting to master all at once, but with the right strategy, you can slowly bring down your website’s bounce rate.
Here are a few factors that contribute to an increased bounce rate on your website:
Not mobile-friendly
\nIt is very rare that you’ll encounter a web developer that doesn’t leverage mobile-first design. In the design of your website, you should make sure that your developer either asks for your mobile design or insists that they establish the mobile design prior to beginning the development of the website.
\n
Understanding how elements on the page will shift as the browser size changes is critical to creating a good user experience for your website visitors. If images don’t properly shift above or below the words they support or the navigation doesn’t translate in a logical way to a smaller mobile browser, you could risk losing visitors to confusing mobile and tablet views.
Not only should your website developer be looking over your mobile design first, but they should be making intuitive suggestions for search options, filtering and other expert tips to make sure your website translates well to browsers on mobile devices.
Related: HubSpot Developer Utopia - 7 Things to Expert When Developing a HubSpot CMS Website
\nPoorly Planned Design
\n
UX, font size, ugly color contrasts, menu navigation that is too clunky or not intuitive - all of these things contribute to a poor user interface, which can annihilate a bounce rate. It seems logical, but users (especially in the ADD on-demand world we live in today) want to find the information they’re looking for easily, without extra work and without hurting their eyes.
As a rule of thumb, if a user can’t locate the information they want within 4 seconds of clicking on a page, they’re probably leaving for the next source of information. This means that you have to have a simple and intuitive design, fast loading pages, colors that are complementary but not too contrasting and navigation that is easy to understand.
A list of common issues with poorly designed websites?
- \n
- Fonts that are too big or too small \n
- Glaringly contrasting colors that are hard to read or look at \n
- Pages that have too many elements loading at the same time and take longer than 4 seconds to load \n
- Large useless animations \n
- Music that doesn’t allow the user to control the volume or plays the moment a page is clicked \n
- Irrelevant, obnoxious images \n
- Too many ads or banners popping up \n
- Chat or opt-in boxes that are relentless \n
- Layouts that shift as you move down the page \n
Some developers created the Big Ugly Website to give you a hint for the types of things that turn off a user. It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often things like font size, color and poor layout are encountered by users.
\n\n
We could go on and on, but those are just a few of the things that can easily frustrate users from a design perspective. You’ll want to minimize or avoid these things entirely to make sure that your users are getting exactly what they are looking for when it comes to your products and services.
Your page loads too slowly
\n
We already discussed the 4 second rule, but there’s a lot more to page load speed than most realize. From your website host and server to excessive plugins, large images, scripts and other elements - every second matters. In fact, according to websitesetup.org: 7 out of 10 people say that the speed of a website page affects their desire to buy from an online retailer. Not only that, but websites that take 5 seconds to load have a 90% bounce rate!
Page load speed matters more than you realize. A few tenths of a second may not seem like much, but if it puts you over that critical threshold, you’re handicapping your ability to convert your visitors and sending your bounce rate up. In the retail industry, decreasing your load time by just one tenth of a second can result in 8.4% increase in conversion rates! That’s HUGE! The same article states that that same .1 second decrease in load speed also yielded 9.2% increase in order size and page view per session by 8.6%
Things like image size and optimization, scripts and old code, fonts and icons, videos and hosting are the biggest culprits for bogging down load speed. We’ve got a write up on page speed optimization that includes 5 factors that could be bogging down your website that you should definitely check out.
Your title tag and meta description may be misleading
\n
In the age of click-bait articles, so many news outlets and blogs are using their title tag and meta description to get people to click through. But when it comes to reducing your bounce rate, relevance matters. You want your user to know in as few words as possible what the information they’re about to click through includes while still ensuring the description is as compelling as possible. A gifted copywriter will be able to assist with this.
For SEO purposes, make sure that your Title Tag is 60 characters or less (or that the most important information is included within those 60 characters) and that your Meta Description is 160 characters or less.
It should be a relevant description of what the user hopes to gain and the keyword that you’re optimizing that particular website page or blog for should be relevant to the topic you’re discussing. Oftentimes a local business makes an effort to optimize their website for a certain product type or service offering and includes that keyword in a blog title that may not be perfectly relevant for that topic.
When it comes to planning your content, it’s most important to offer valuable information without being misleading, spamming keywords or trying to weave in keywords that don’t entirely fit the topic of the blog post or website page.
Remember: Google is trying to deliver the most relevant information to help answer a user's question. The more you focus on the user, the better off you’ll be and the more people will engage with the content that you’re putting out, resulting in lower bounce rates.
Poor quality referrals
\n
Inbound links are a great way to get traffic to your site and increase your credibility with search engines - to a point. You want to make sure that you’re not just listing your business in any irrelevant directory that you can and that every inbound link actually makes sense for the types of people that you’re looking for.
What are good ways to get quality inbound links and referral traffic?
- \n
- Industry specific directories. Are there directories specifically for your industry and offerings? You should be there. As a HubSpot CMS Developer, we’ve become a HubSpot Partner and are now listed in their Partner Marketplace, which has actually been a source of a few great leads for us. Do some research on listings that are relevant to you and see if you can get listed there. It’s a simple and easy way to get qualified referral traffic sent to your site.
- Guest blogging for other websites is a great way to get relevant inbound links to your site. Align yourself with industries that you serve, other authorities in your space and create partnerships with businesses whose products and services cater to a similar audience.
- Keep writing original, quality content. Performing your own research can be a great way to get linked to or even just having original thoughts about problems that your prospects and customers relate to. Don’t underestimate the value of a quality content creator and strategist and NEVER use a bot or AI software to write your blog articles. Your content is the most important way to keep your visitors engaged and you want to make sure it holds plenty of value and thought leadership for web visitors. \n
For most businesses, the goal of your website is to attract visitors and keep them on your website until they make a conversion decision. If a poor design, low quality content, slow loading pages or other elements of your website are pushing them away before they take any desired actions, you need to take action to help keep them on your site and reduce your bounce rate. Installing a heat map software like HotJar is a great start. This will help you to understand what users are doing on your website, optimize the most common actions and eliminate any elements of your site that appear to be confusing to your website visitors.
Using a tool like HotJar in tandem with an experienced web developer will help you understand what actions can be taken to make your website more successful in converting your visitors and keeping them on your page for longer. An experienced website developer will know what features can be added and how to best shift elements around, change typography and best optimize UX to create a positive experience for your users.
What are some thing you've noticed about websites that have made you want to leave? You can even post a link with examples!
When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
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","postRssSummaryFeaturedImage":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/deckerdevs-bounce%20rate.png","postSummary":"When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
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\n\nYour bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that come to your website and take no other action before leaving. This is an indicator to search engines that the content they’ve clicked through isn’t valuable or relevant for what the user searched for, or your website isn’t the best source of information for that topic. This can happen for a number of reasons, but lowering that bounce rate is going to be really critical not only for search engine rankings but also to ensure you’re getting the most out of the traffic that you work so hard to funnel to your website to begin with.
\n\n
Why work on your bounce rate?
\n- \n
- The goal for more people is to have a large percentage of your website visitors taking an action on your website. \n
- One of the considerations for website rank by search engines is bounce rate. The lower your bounce rate, the better your potential to rank is. \n
Even the most savvy marketers can miss something when it comes to decreasing the bounce rate on their website. The intricacies of conversion can be a little daunting to master all at once, but with the right strategy, you can slowly bring down your website’s bounce rate.
Here are a few factors that contribute to an increased bounce rate on your website:
Not mobile-friendly
\nIt is very rare that you’ll encounter a web developer that doesn’t leverage mobile-first design. In the design of your website, you should make sure that your developer either asks for your mobile design or insists that they establish the mobile design prior to beginning the development of the website.
\n
Understanding how elements on the page will shift as the browser size changes is critical to creating a good user experience for your website visitors. If images don’t properly shift above or below the words they support or the navigation doesn’t translate in a logical way to a smaller mobile browser, you could risk losing visitors to confusing mobile and tablet views.
Not only should your website developer be looking over your mobile design first, but they should be making intuitive suggestions for search options, filtering and other expert tips to make sure your website translates well to browsers on mobile devices.
Related: HubSpot Developer Utopia - 7 Things to Expert When Developing a HubSpot CMS Website
\nPoorly Planned Design
\n
UX, font size, ugly color contrasts, menu navigation that is too clunky or not intuitive - all of these things contribute to a poor user interface, which can annihilate a bounce rate. It seems logical, but users (especially in the ADD on-demand world we live in today) want to find the information they’re looking for easily, without extra work and without hurting their eyes.
As a rule of thumb, if a user can’t locate the information they want within 4 seconds of clicking on a page, they’re probably leaving for the next source of information. This means that you have to have a simple and intuitive design, fast loading pages, colors that are complementary but not too contrasting and navigation that is easy to understand.
A list of common issues with poorly designed websites?
- \n
- Fonts that are too big or too small \n
- Glaringly contrasting colors that are hard to read or look at \n
- Pages that have too many elements loading at the same time and take longer than 4 seconds to load \n
- Large useless animations \n
- Music that doesn’t allow the user to control the volume or plays the moment a page is clicked \n
- Irrelevant, obnoxious images \n
- Too many ads or banners popping up \n
- Chat or opt-in boxes that are relentless \n
- Layouts that shift as you move down the page \n
Some developers created the Big Ugly Website to give you a hint for the types of things that turn off a user. It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often things like font size, color and poor layout are encountered by users.
\n\n
We could go on and on, but those are just a few of the things that can easily frustrate users from a design perspective. You’ll want to minimize or avoid these things entirely to make sure that your users are getting exactly what they are looking for when it comes to your products and services.
Your page loads too slowly
\n
We already discussed the 4 second rule, but there’s a lot more to page load speed than most realize. From your website host and server to excessive plugins, large images, scripts and other elements - every second matters. In fact, according to websitesetup.org: 7 out of 10 people say that the speed of a website page affects their desire to buy from an online retailer. Not only that, but websites that take 5 seconds to load have a 90% bounce rate!
Page load speed matters more than you realize. A few tenths of a second may not seem like much, but if it puts you over that critical threshold, you’re handicapping your ability to convert your visitors and sending your bounce rate up. In the retail industry, decreasing your load time by just one tenth of a second can result in 8.4% increase in conversion rates! That’s HUGE! The same article states that that same .1 second decrease in load speed also yielded 9.2% increase in order size and page view per session by 8.6%
Things like image size and optimization, scripts and old code, fonts and icons, videos and hosting are the biggest culprits for bogging down load speed. We’ve got a write up on page speed optimization that includes 5 factors that could be bogging down your website that you should definitely check out.
Your title tag and meta description may be misleading
\n
In the age of click-bait articles, so many news outlets and blogs are using their title tag and meta description to get people to click through. But when it comes to reducing your bounce rate, relevance matters. You want your user to know in as few words as possible what the information they’re about to click through includes while still ensuring the description is as compelling as possible. A gifted copywriter will be able to assist with this.
For SEO purposes, make sure that your Title Tag is 60 characters or less (or that the most important information is included within those 60 characters) and that your Meta Description is 160 characters or less.
It should be a relevant description of what the user hopes to gain and the keyword that you’re optimizing that particular website page or blog for should be relevant to the topic you’re discussing. Oftentimes a local business makes an effort to optimize their website for a certain product type or service offering and includes that keyword in a blog title that may not be perfectly relevant for that topic.
When it comes to planning your content, it’s most important to offer valuable information without being misleading, spamming keywords or trying to weave in keywords that don’t entirely fit the topic of the blog post or website page.
Remember: Google is trying to deliver the most relevant information to help answer a user's question. The more you focus on the user, the better off you’ll be and the more people will engage with the content that you’re putting out, resulting in lower bounce rates.
Poor quality referrals
\n
Inbound links are a great way to get traffic to your site and increase your credibility with search engines - to a point. You want to make sure that you’re not just listing your business in any irrelevant directory that you can and that every inbound link actually makes sense for the types of people that you’re looking for.
What are good ways to get quality inbound links and referral traffic?
- \n
- Industry specific directories. Are there directories specifically for your industry and offerings? You should be there. As a HubSpot CMS Developer, we’ve become a HubSpot Partner and are now listed in their Partner Marketplace, which has actually been a source of a few great leads for us. Do some research on listings that are relevant to you and see if you can get listed there. It’s a simple and easy way to get qualified referral traffic sent to your site.
- Guest blogging for other websites is a great way to get relevant inbound links to your site. Align yourself with industries that you serve, other authorities in your space and create partnerships with businesses whose products and services cater to a similar audience.
- Keep writing original, quality content. Performing your own research can be a great way to get linked to or even just having original thoughts about problems that your prospects and customers relate to. Don’t underestimate the value of a quality content creator and strategist and NEVER use a bot or AI software to write your blog articles. Your content is the most important way to keep your visitors engaged and you want to make sure it holds plenty of value and thought leadership for web visitors. \n
For most businesses, the goal of your website is to attract visitors and keep them on your website until they make a conversion decision. If a poor design, low quality content, slow loading pages or other elements of your website are pushing them away before they take any desired actions, you need to take action to help keep them on your site and reduce your bounce rate. Installing a heat map software like HotJar is a great start. This will help you to understand what users are doing on your website, optimize the most common actions and eliminate any elements of your site that appear to be confusing to your website visitors.
Using a tool like HotJar in tandem with an experienced web developer will help you understand what actions can be taken to make your website more successful in converting your visitors and keeping them on your page for longer. An experienced website developer will know what features can be added and how to best shift elements around, change typography and best optimize UX to create a positive experience for your users.
What are some thing you've noticed about websites that have made you want to leave? You can even post a link with examples!
When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
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time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
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![\"hs](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/hs%20partners.svg\")
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
The client should focus on what’s important
\n
If the client has provided an expected, finalized and approved design, they’ll be looking to test and approve a draft that looks very similar if not identical to that design. They will not want to handle major bugs, formatting issues, questions of inconsistencies in browser compatibility and other aesthetic issues.
If you’re working with a one-man development team, it’s very difficult for them to objectively look at work and see it from any other angle. It’s likely that if this is the case, you’re gonna need external departments or others (hopefully not the client) to look it over objectively. Allowing a single developer to complete a project and turn it directly over to the client is basically asking your client to complete quality assurance for you. A very good developer may be able to catch an issue or two, but you’ll always want to have a separate, skilled person that understands how to properly test a website for bugs, browser compatibility issues and other problems.
Once your development team finishes a round of edits or the initial design template, you’ll want to have your internal team take a close look at what they’ve built. Working within the template build to find usability issues, bugs and any other glitches is important. Your project management staff or quality assurance staff (if you’re lucky enough to have them) can review all of these items before the design is handed off to the client.
You should have a comprehensive list of QA items for them to review and some sort of tool that allows for collaboration and feedback. Our team uses Pastel. Pastel is a great tool because it allows for internal and external collaboration, hidden comments, status updates and more. You can do QA on PDF, JPEG and live website pages. The team at Pastel is very passionate about making improvements and they particularly enjoy working with agencies. (No, we aren’t paid to say that, we just think they’re really awesome.) You can snag a free trial to test it out.
It'll shorten the development process
\n
Who doesn’t love scope creep?
Just kidding. Everyone hates scope creep.
It can be an inevitable and sometimes unavoidable evil in the industry of marketing services delivery and website development, but implementing a really good quality assurance process can go a long way to avoiding scope creep. When you deliver a draft website to a client or when you receive a draft website as a client, you’ll want to make sure it’s as close to the design as possible. We’ve heard the statement before, “The CEO just can’t get past the formatting issue to proof the copy” or “These images aren’t what we want” - it is sometimes difficult when a website is still in draft mode to envision that end product when all that the client wants to see is the perfect iteration of the original design document. ![\"deckerdevs-mobile](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/deckerdevs-mobile%20optimization-1.svg\")
Delivering a draft that is as close to complete as possible will allow the client to to focus on the elements they need to focus on - like core functionality, adding or delivering the correct images and copy and providing the important feedback and envisioning how the design is working well for both internal marketers and the prospects and leads that will find themselves on the website. The more they can focus on these items, the more “wish list” items they may compile, which provides strong support for them leveraging growth driven design (more on that later).
\n
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It puts more eyes on the work
\n
Developers have very different brains.
Believe us when we say that it requires a special kind of nerd to have a passion to create something by staring at tiny lines of code all day. We’re very good at what we do, but we don’t necessarily have marketer brains. Placing a project manager, quality assurance specialist or marketer in the middle of a project before it is sent over for review is critical. They’ll ask important questions, play with modules until they can break them, and identify issues that the development team may not see.
By having a centralized spreadsheet or piece of software that manages these edits, you can eliminate a large portion of feedback and make things easier for both the developer and the client. The more people that see the initial draft prior to it being delivered to the client, the more issues can be weeded out in advance.
It keeps edits in a central location and makes teams more productive
\n
Using a software or spreadsheet to manage the quality assurance process keeps everything centralized and helps avoid the issue of project managers or developers wasting time threading through a 75 e-mail string to find the feedback they need. This also allows multiple people to submit feedback without it becoming overwhelming. We do request in most cases that there be a single “final answer, Regis” contact to provide the edits so we can make sure we have the right information to execute edits and complete changes.
It reduces post-launch feedback
\n
Once a website is completed, we’re ready to jump into the next project. We often encounter “wish list” items that pop up during development that we categorize as pre-launch or post-launch. Post-launch work allows us to develop the bells and whistles for a client that they find are “nice to have” items after the initial website build has been completed.
If we’re stuck in an endless round of edits because of lacking quality assurance testing, it can not only take a lot longer to get to those wish list items, but frustration can build if client expectations are not managed properly and a developer might risk losing a relationship with the client.
We’d much rather move our clients into growth-driven design to accommodate all their projects after launch or a short term development retainer to get some of those wish list items completed.
Website projects can be cumbersome for a small business. Often they’re only looking at their website every 3-5 years for a redesign. While we as HubSpot development partners are working slowly to show businesses that a long term relationship with a development partner that makes small changes over time (check out why continuous improvement is the best model for your website) is ideal, it will take time for the world to catch up. In the meantime, a comprehensive quality assurance process will help avoid development headaches for everyone involved.
Work on implementing a comprehensive quality assurance process with your development team to ensure that projects launch on time and everyone is as happy with the process as they are with the final project.
","rss_summary":"
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
The client should focus on what’s important
\n
If the client has provided an expected, finalized and approved design, they’ll be looking to test and approve a draft that looks very similar if not identical to that design. They will not want to handle major bugs, formatting issues, questions of inconsistencies in browser compatibility and other aesthetic issues.
If you’re working with a one-man development team, it’s very difficult for them to objectively look at work and see it from any other angle. It’s likely that if this is the case, you’re gonna need external departments or others (hopefully not the client) to look it over objectively. Allowing a single developer to complete a project and turn it directly over to the client is basically asking your client to complete quality assurance for you. A very good developer may be able to catch an issue or two, but you’ll always want to have a separate, skilled person that understands how to properly test a website for bugs, browser compatibility issues and other problems.
Once your development team finishes a round of edits or the initial design template, you’ll want to have your internal team take a close look at what they’ve built. Working within the template build to find usability issues, bugs and any other glitches is important. Your project management staff or quality assurance staff (if you’re lucky enough to have them) can review all of these items before the design is handed off to the client.
You should have a comprehensive list of QA items for them to review and some sort of tool that allows for collaboration and feedback. Our team uses Pastel. Pastel is a great tool because it allows for internal and external collaboration, hidden comments, status updates and more. You can do QA on PDF, JPEG and live website pages. The team at Pastel is very passionate about making improvements and they particularly enjoy working with agencies. (No, we aren’t paid to say that, we just think they’re really awesome.) You can snag a free trial to test it out.
It'll shorten the development process
\n
Who doesn’t love scope creep?
Just kidding. Everyone hates scope creep.
It can be an inevitable and sometimes unavoidable evil in the industry of marketing services delivery and website development, but implementing a really good quality assurance process can go a long way to avoiding scope creep. When you deliver a draft website to a client or when you receive a draft website as a client, you’ll want to make sure it’s as close to the design as possible. We’ve heard the statement before, “The CEO just can’t get past the formatting issue to proof the copy” or “These images aren’t what we want” - it is sometimes difficult when a website is still in draft mode to envision that end product when all that the client wants to see is the perfect iteration of the original design document. Delivering a draft that is as close to complete as possible will allow the client to to focus on the elements they need to focus on - like core functionality, adding or delivering the correct images and copy and providing the important feedback and envisioning how the design is working well for both internal marketers and the prospects and leads that will find themselves on the website. The more they can focus on these items, the more “wish list” items they may compile, which provides strong support for them leveraging growth driven design (more on that later).
\n
\n
It puts more eyes on the work
\n
Developers have very different brains.
Believe us when we say that it requires a special kind of nerd to have a passion to create something by staring at tiny lines of code all day. We’re very good at what we do, but we don’t necessarily have marketer brains. Placing a project manager, quality assurance specialist or marketer in the middle of a project before it is sent over for review is critical. They’ll ask important questions, play with modules until they can break them, and identify issues that the development team may not see.
By having a centralized spreadsheet or piece of software that manages these edits, you can eliminate a large portion of feedback and make things easier for both the developer and the client. The more people that see the initial draft prior to it being delivered to the client, the more issues can be weeded out in advance.
It keeps edits in a central location and makes teams more productive
\n
Using a software or spreadsheet to manage the quality assurance process keeps everything centralized and helps avoid the issue of project managers or developers wasting time threading through a 75 e-mail string to find the feedback they need. This also allows multiple people to submit feedback without it becoming overwhelming. We do request in most cases that there be a single “final answer, Regis” contact to provide the edits so we can make sure we have the right information to execute edits and complete changes.
It reduces post-launch feedback
\n
Once a website is completed, we’re ready to jump into the next project. We often encounter “wish list” items that pop up during development that we categorize as pre-launch or post-launch. Post-launch work allows us to develop the bells and whistles for a client that they find are “nice to have” items after the initial website build has been completed.
If we’re stuck in an endless round of edits because of lacking quality assurance testing, it can not only take a lot longer to get to those wish list items, but frustration can build if client expectations are not managed properly and a developer might risk losing a relationship with the client.
We’d much rather move our clients into growth-driven design to accommodate all their projects after launch or a short term development retainer to get some of those wish list items completed.
Website projects can be cumbersome for a small business. Often they’re only looking at their website every 3-5 years for a redesign. While we as HubSpot development partners are working slowly to show businesses that a long term relationship with a development partner that makes small changes over time (check out why continuous improvement is the best model for your website) is ideal, it will take time for the world to catch up. In the meantime, a comprehensive quality assurance process will help avoid development headaches for everyone involved.
Work on implementing a comprehensive quality assurance process with your development team to ensure that projects launch on time and everyone is as happy with the process as they are with the final project.
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We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
The client should focus on what’s important
\n
If the client has provided an expected, finalized and approved design, they’ll be looking to test and approve a draft that looks very similar if not identical to that design. They will not want to handle major bugs, formatting issues, questions of inconsistencies in browser compatibility and other aesthetic issues.
If you’re working with a one-man development team, it’s very difficult for them to objectively look at work and see it from any other angle. It’s likely that if this is the case, you’re gonna need external departments or others (hopefully not the client) to look it over objectively. Allowing a single developer to complete a project and turn it directly over to the client is basically asking your client to complete quality assurance for you. A very good developer may be able to catch an issue or two, but you’ll always want to have a separate, skilled person that understands how to properly test a website for bugs, browser compatibility issues and other problems.
Once your development team finishes a round of edits or the initial design template, you’ll want to have your internal team take a close look at what they’ve built. Working within the template build to find usability issues, bugs and any other glitches is important. Your project management staff or quality assurance staff (if you’re lucky enough to have them) can review all of these items before the design is handed off to the client.
You should have a comprehensive list of QA items for them to review and some sort of tool that allows for collaboration and feedback. Our team uses Pastel. Pastel is a great tool because it allows for internal and external collaboration, hidden comments, status updates and more. You can do QA on PDF, JPEG and live website pages. The team at Pastel is very passionate about making improvements and they particularly enjoy working with agencies. (No, we aren’t paid to say that, we just think they’re really awesome.) You can snag a free trial to test it out.
It'll shorten the development process
\n
Who doesn’t love scope creep?
Just kidding. Everyone hates scope creep.
It can be an inevitable and sometimes unavoidable evil in the industry of marketing services delivery and website development, but implementing a really good quality assurance process can go a long way to avoiding scope creep. When you deliver a draft website to a client or when you receive a draft website as a client, you’ll want to make sure it’s as close to the design as possible. We’ve heard the statement before, “The CEO just can’t get past the formatting issue to proof the copy” or “These images aren’t what we want” - it is sometimes difficult when a website is still in draft mode to envision that end product when all that the client wants to see is the perfect iteration of the original design document. Delivering a draft that is as close to complete as possible will allow the client to to focus on the elements they need to focus on - like core functionality, adding or delivering the correct images and copy and providing the important feedback and envisioning how the design is working well for both internal marketers and the prospects and leads that will find themselves on the website. The more they can focus on these items, the more “wish list” items they may compile, which provides strong support for them leveraging growth driven design (more on that later).
\n
\n
It puts more eyes on the work
\n
Developers have very different brains.
Believe us when we say that it requires a special kind of nerd to have a passion to create something by staring at tiny lines of code all day. We’re very good at what we do, but we don’t necessarily have marketer brains. Placing a project manager, quality assurance specialist or marketer in the middle of a project before it is sent over for review is critical. They’ll ask important questions, play with modules until they can break them, and identify issues that the development team may not see.
By having a centralized spreadsheet or piece of software that manages these edits, you can eliminate a large portion of feedback and make things easier for both the developer and the client. The more people that see the initial draft prior to it being delivered to the client, the more issues can be weeded out in advance.
It keeps edits in a central location and makes teams more productive
\n
Using a software or spreadsheet to manage the quality assurance process keeps everything centralized and helps avoid the issue of project managers or developers wasting time threading through a 75 e-mail string to find the feedback they need. This also allows multiple people to submit feedback without it becoming overwhelming. We do request in most cases that there be a single “final answer, Regis” contact to provide the edits so we can make sure we have the right information to execute edits and complete changes.
It reduces post-launch feedback
\n
Once a website is completed, we’re ready to jump into the next project. We often encounter “wish list” items that pop up during development that we categorize as pre-launch or post-launch. Post-launch work allows us to develop the bells and whistles for a client that they find are “nice to have” items after the initial website build has been completed.
If we’re stuck in an endless round of edits because of lacking quality assurance testing, it can not only take a lot longer to get to those wish list items, but frustration can build if client expectations are not managed properly and a developer might risk losing a relationship with the client.
We’d much rather move our clients into growth-driven design to accommodate all their projects after launch or a short term development retainer to get some of those wish list items completed.
Website projects can be cumbersome for a small business. Often they’re only looking at their website every 3-5 years for a redesign. While we as HubSpot development partners are working slowly to show businesses that a long term relationship with a development partner that makes small changes over time (check out why continuous improvement is the best model for your website) is ideal, it will take time for the world to catch up. In the meantime, a comprehensive quality assurance process will help avoid development headaches for everyone involved.
Work on implementing a comprehensive quality assurance process with your development team to ensure that projects launch on time and everyone is as happy with the process as they are with the final project.
","postBodyRss":"
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
The client should focus on what’s important
\n
If the client has provided an expected, finalized and approved design, they’ll be looking to test and approve a draft that looks very similar if not identical to that design. They will not want to handle major bugs, formatting issues, questions of inconsistencies in browser compatibility and other aesthetic issues.
If you’re working with a one-man development team, it’s very difficult for them to objectively look at work and see it from any other angle. It’s likely that if this is the case, you’re gonna need external departments or others (hopefully not the client) to look it over objectively. Allowing a single developer to complete a project and turn it directly over to the client is basically asking your client to complete quality assurance for you. A very good developer may be able to catch an issue or two, but you’ll always want to have a separate, skilled person that understands how to properly test a website for bugs, browser compatibility issues and other problems.
Once your development team finishes a round of edits or the initial design template, you’ll want to have your internal team take a close look at what they’ve built. Working within the template build to find usability issues, bugs and any other glitches is important. Your project management staff or quality assurance staff (if you’re lucky enough to have them) can review all of these items before the design is handed off to the client.
You should have a comprehensive list of QA items for them to review and some sort of tool that allows for collaboration and feedback. Our team uses Pastel. Pastel is a great tool because it allows for internal and external collaboration, hidden comments, status updates and more. You can do QA on PDF, JPEG and live website pages. The team at Pastel is very passionate about making improvements and they particularly enjoy working with agencies. (No, we aren’t paid to say that, we just think they’re really awesome.) You can snag a free trial to test it out.
It'll shorten the development process
\n
Who doesn’t love scope creep?
Just kidding. Everyone hates scope creep.
It can be an inevitable and sometimes unavoidable evil in the industry of marketing services delivery and website development, but implementing a really good quality assurance process can go a long way to avoiding scope creep. When you deliver a draft website to a client or when you receive a draft website as a client, you’ll want to make sure it’s as close to the design as possible. We’ve heard the statement before, “The CEO just can’t get past the formatting issue to proof the copy” or “These images aren’t what we want” - it is sometimes difficult when a website is still in draft mode to envision that end product when all that the client wants to see is the perfect iteration of the original design document. Delivering a draft that is as close to complete as possible will allow the client to to focus on the elements they need to focus on - like core functionality, adding or delivering the correct images and copy and providing the important feedback and envisioning how the design is working well for both internal marketers and the prospects and leads that will find themselves on the website. The more they can focus on these items, the more “wish list” items they may compile, which provides strong support for them leveraging growth driven design (more on that later).
\n
\n
It puts more eyes on the work
\n
Developers have very different brains.
Believe us when we say that it requires a special kind of nerd to have a passion to create something by staring at tiny lines of code all day. We’re very good at what we do, but we don’t necessarily have marketer brains. Placing a project manager, quality assurance specialist or marketer in the middle of a project before it is sent over for review is critical. They’ll ask important questions, play with modules until they can break them, and identify issues that the development team may not see.
By having a centralized spreadsheet or piece of software that manages these edits, you can eliminate a large portion of feedback and make things easier for both the developer and the client. The more people that see the initial draft prior to it being delivered to the client, the more issues can be weeded out in advance.
It keeps edits in a central location and makes teams more productive
\n
Using a software or spreadsheet to manage the quality assurance process keeps everything centralized and helps avoid the issue of project managers or developers wasting time threading through a 75 e-mail string to find the feedback they need. This also allows multiple people to submit feedback without it becoming overwhelming. We do request in most cases that there be a single “final answer, Regis” contact to provide the edits so we can make sure we have the right information to execute edits and complete changes.
It reduces post-launch feedback
\n
Once a website is completed, we’re ready to jump into the next project. We often encounter “wish list” items that pop up during development that we categorize as pre-launch or post-launch. Post-launch work allows us to develop the bells and whistles for a client that they find are “nice to have” items after the initial website build has been completed.
If we’re stuck in an endless round of edits because of lacking quality assurance testing, it can not only take a lot longer to get to those wish list items, but frustration can build if client expectations are not managed properly and a developer might risk losing a relationship with the client.
We’d much rather move our clients into growth-driven design to accommodate all their projects after launch or a short term development retainer to get some of those wish list items completed.
Website projects can be cumbersome for a small business. Often they’re only looking at their website every 3-5 years for a redesign. While we as HubSpot development partners are working slowly to show businesses that a long term relationship with a development partner that makes small changes over time (check out why continuous improvement is the best model for your website) is ideal, it will take time for the world to catch up. In the meantime, a comprehensive quality assurance process will help avoid development headaches for everyone involved.
Work on implementing a comprehensive quality assurance process with your development team to ensure that projects launch on time and everyone is as happy with the process as they are with the final project.
","postEmailContent":"
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
The client should focus on what’s important
\n
If the client has provided an expected, finalized and approved design, they’ll be looking to test and approve a draft that looks very similar if not identical to that design. They will not want to handle major bugs, formatting issues, questions of inconsistencies in browser compatibility and other aesthetic issues.
If you’re working with a one-man development team, it’s very difficult for them to objectively look at work and see it from any other angle. It’s likely that if this is the case, you’re gonna need external departments or others (hopefully not the client) to look it over objectively. Allowing a single developer to complete a project and turn it directly over to the client is basically asking your client to complete quality assurance for you. A very good developer may be able to catch an issue or two, but you’ll always want to have a separate, skilled person that understands how to properly test a website for bugs, browser compatibility issues and other problems.
Once your development team finishes a round of edits or the initial design template, you’ll want to have your internal team take a close look at what they’ve built. Working within the template build to find usability issues, bugs and any other glitches is important. Your project management staff or quality assurance staff (if you’re lucky enough to have them) can review all of these items before the design is handed off to the client.
You should have a comprehensive list of QA items for them to review and some sort of tool that allows for collaboration and feedback. Our team uses Pastel. Pastel is a great tool because it allows for internal and external collaboration, hidden comments, status updates and more. You can do QA on PDF, JPEG and live website pages. The team at Pastel is very passionate about making improvements and they particularly enjoy working with agencies. (No, we aren’t paid to say that, we just think they’re really awesome.) You can snag a free trial to test it out.
It'll shorten the development process
\n
Who doesn’t love scope creep?
Just kidding. Everyone hates scope creep.
It can be an inevitable and sometimes unavoidable evil in the industry of marketing services delivery and website development, but implementing a really good quality assurance process can go a long way to avoiding scope creep. When you deliver a draft website to a client or when you receive a draft website as a client, you’ll want to make sure it’s as close to the design as possible. We’ve heard the statement before, “The CEO just can’t get past the formatting issue to proof the copy” or “These images aren’t what we want” - it is sometimes difficult when a website is still in draft mode to envision that end product when all that the client wants to see is the perfect iteration of the original design document. Delivering a draft that is as close to complete as possible will allow the client to to focus on the elements they need to focus on - like core functionality, adding or delivering the correct images and copy and providing the important feedback and envisioning how the design is working well for both internal marketers and the prospects and leads that will find themselves on the website. The more they can focus on these items, the more “wish list” items they may compile, which provides strong support for them leveraging growth driven design (more on that later).
\n
\n
It puts more eyes on the work
\n
Developers have very different brains.
Believe us when we say that it requires a special kind of nerd to have a passion to create something by staring at tiny lines of code all day. We’re very good at what we do, but we don’t necessarily have marketer brains. Placing a project manager, quality assurance specialist or marketer in the middle of a project before it is sent over for review is critical. They’ll ask important questions, play with modules until they can break them, and identify issues that the development team may not see.
By having a centralized spreadsheet or piece of software that manages these edits, you can eliminate a large portion of feedback and make things easier for both the developer and the client. The more people that see the initial draft prior to it being delivered to the client, the more issues can be weeded out in advance.
It keeps edits in a central location and makes teams more productive
\n
Using a software or spreadsheet to manage the quality assurance process keeps everything centralized and helps avoid the issue of project managers or developers wasting time threading through a 75 e-mail string to find the feedback they need. This also allows multiple people to submit feedback without it becoming overwhelming. We do request in most cases that there be a single “final answer, Regis” contact to provide the edits so we can make sure we have the right information to execute edits and complete changes.
It reduces post-launch feedback
\n
Once a website is completed, we’re ready to jump into the next project. We often encounter “wish list” items that pop up during development that we categorize as pre-launch or post-launch. Post-launch work allows us to develop the bells and whistles for a client that they find are “nice to have” items after the initial website build has been completed.
If we’re stuck in an endless round of edits because of lacking quality assurance testing, it can not only take a lot longer to get to those wish list items, but frustration can build if client expectations are not managed properly and a developer might risk losing a relationship with the client.
We’d much rather move our clients into growth-driven design to accommodate all their projects after launch or a short term development retainer to get some of those wish list items completed.
Website projects can be cumbersome for a small business. Often they’re only looking at their website every 3-5 years for a redesign. While we as HubSpot development partners are working slowly to show businesses that a long term relationship with a development partner that makes small changes over time (check out why continuous improvement is the best model for your website) is ideal, it will take time for the world to catch up. In the meantime, a comprehensive quality assurance process will help avoid development headaches for everyone involved.
Work on implementing a comprehensive quality assurance process with your development team to ensure that projects launch on time and everyone is as happy with the process as they are with the final project.
","rssSummary":"
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
You get what you pay for
\n
One of the best things about WordPress is that it’s free. You pay for your themes and plugins and the developers who created them usually provide support, or you can hire a web developer if you need either more support or ongoing development expertise. However, that can come at a cost. Security issues, plugins not functioning as you’d hoped, and your website loading more slowly because of so many plugins are just a few common issues with WordPress.
Keep in mind that if you want a robust solution, you’re going to have to fork out a little cash. Committing an investment to HubSpot CMS might mean paying a monthly or annual fee, but it’ll give you a lot more capabilities out of the box without the additional frustration.
HubSpot support is super helpful and not outsourced, so you’re speaking to humans who really understand the platform. Not to mention, there’s an entire fully vetted and trained developer ecosystem with vendors who are crazy experienced and not even a little bit sketchy.
You’re using a ton of different tools to execute on your digital marketing
\n
Versatility used to be what WordPress was known for, but as the number of plugins and developers creating them increases, growing businesses need a less complicated solution. WordPress, as a free CMS with some paid plugins and themes, is a great foundation for a new small business, but once a business starts to move in the direction of lead generation, its needs become more complex.
Now that HubSpot has launched a free version of their CMS, B2B demand generation for startups has become simpler, which is definitely a consideration for those who might’ve gone straight to WordPress in the past. HubSpot CMS Hub Free is HubSpot’s introductory CMS package. It includes premium hosting on HubSpot, the option to build a from-scratch website (with forms, live chat, landing pages, and a blog), and its free CRM platform. This is a perfect option for small businesses that cannot afford HubSpot quite yet, but want to dig into its tools and build a website that creates awareness and builds their brand. It does have a few limitations, however:
- \n
- Limited to 25 website pages \n
- Limited to one blog with 100 posts \n
- No ability to modify system pages \n
- HubSpot branding on website pages, blog posts and landing pages \n
While it might not be for everyone, it gives startups a powerful, free, and simple way to get their brand off the ground. A perfect example is this super basic website we stood up in only three hours using HubSpot CMS Free.
Many growing businesses operating with a WordPress website end up paying a premium for a form manager, SEO plugin, analytics tool, CRM, email marketing platform, and automation solution. All of these different tools not only don’t speak to one another (unless you pay for another integration tool to centralize them), but your marketing team has to login to every single platform to manage information and execute your marketing. It’s cumbersome and inefficient.
With HubSpot, you’re managing everything in one portal. From CMS tools to social media marketing, ad management, CRM for sales and email marketing, automation, blogging, SEO, and analytics — it doesn’t get more centralized than that. While all the tools in HubSpot can be costly when purchased together, HubSpot allows you to close the loop with your content marketing and sales processes, attributing revenue to your campaigns and gaining a full view on what efforts are working, so you can execute more of them. With WordPress, you have to be incredibly organized to use all the different tools. You’ll also probably need to create your own spreadsheets to allow you to really understand where your revenue is coming from.
Keeping your tech stack small helps fuel your marketing team to make educated decisions and work more efficiently.
You've coded yourself into a corner
\n
Probably the biggest pitfall that comes with working in WordPress is a bloated website. While we’ve outlined a a few different factors that can contribute to website bloat and how you can optimize your page speed, you cannot unwind the drag that comes with adding poorly coded plugins to your website.
The more plugins you add to your site, the more code a browser has to load, which can bog down your load speed. While you can limit your plugins and have a developer recommend the best ones, eventually you may want to add advanced functionality such as calculators or a robust resource center to your content arsenal.
HubSpot allows you to add functionality to your website with modules that can be coded by a HubSpot developer who knows best practices. Using one development partner who is certified keeps your website code clean and can ensure that your website doesn’t just pile on code from multiple different developers with plugins that break or leave security holes.
It's more secure
\n
WordPress sites are notorious for experiencing malware attacks. While keeping your plugins and WordPress up to date helps, malware attacks can still occur. Security is an extremely important aspect of your website, and HubSpot has the edge over WordPress here.
Because WordPress is open source, hackers can find security holes and exploit the platform easily. In addition, many of the available plugins aren’t supported and updated by the developers who created them. This makes WordPress sites easy targets.
WordPress theme and plugin developers typically bundle quite a few different plugins together to bring a full suite for you to take advantage of, but this can also create dependencies that aren’t updated correctly. Even if the theme is up to date, sometimes those smaller packages underneath aren’t updated and can create additional security vulnerabilities on your site.
HubSpot, however, has SSL encryption, which not only boosts your rankings with Google, but assures the users whose information you’re collecting that their information is safe. In HubSPot, you automatically receive a standard SAN SSL certification through DigiCert when you connect a domain to your account. If you purchase the custom SSL add-on, you can upload custom SSL certifications to HubSpot and configure security settings. Learn more about your SSL options in HubSpot here.
If you’re cost conscious and don’t plan to do much with your website, WordPress may have been a no-brainer for you. It’s free and has infinite customization options. Just be sure if you opt in to WordPress, you update plugins and WordPress regularly, manage comments, and have your site checked for security issues regularly.
If you’re cost conscious and looking for a starter platform that will grow with you as your marketing budget grows and lead generation is important to you, look to HubSpot. While we’re not currently offering development help on CMS Hub Free, we can definitely give you what you need once you’re ready to upgrade your HubSpot CMS Hub and build something that will suit you as you grow. HubSpot’s CRM is unmatched when it comes to sales, and we think that from a sustainability standpoint there’s no better platform for a growing business that is investing heavily into its sales and marketing strategies.
For a scaling business that uses its website as a lead generation tool, you’ll eventually need a better way to make website improvements, ensure the security of your site, and prevent website bloat. We’ve been huge supporters of HubSpot since they were just a tiny piece of analytics code. They continue to prove that they’re not only surpassing best practices, but setting new benchmarks for what to expect from a CMS and comprehensive marketing automation software.
If you’re considering a switch to HubSpot CMS Professional, we’d love to give you a rundown of the power of HubSpot.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
You get what you pay for
\n
One of the best things about WordPress is that it’s free. You pay for your themes and plugins and the developers who created them usually provide support, or you can hire a web developer if you need either more support or ongoing development expertise. However, that can come at a cost. Security issues, plugins not functioning as you’d hoped, and your website loading more slowly because of so many plugins are just a few common issues with WordPress.
Keep in mind that if you want a robust solution, you’re going to have to fork out a little cash. Committing an investment to HubSpot CMS might mean paying a monthly or annual fee, but it’ll give you a lot more capabilities out of the box without the additional frustration.
HubSpot support is super helpful and not outsourced, so you’re speaking to humans who really understand the platform. Not to mention, there’s an entire fully vetted and trained developer ecosystem with vendors who are crazy experienced and not even a little bit sketchy.
You’re using a ton of different tools to execute on your digital marketing
\n
Versatility used to be what WordPress was known for, but as the number of plugins and developers creating them increases, growing businesses need a less complicated solution. WordPress, as a free CMS with some paid plugins and themes, is a great foundation for a new small business, but once a business starts to move in the direction of lead generation, its needs become more complex.
Now that HubSpot has launched a free version of their CMS, B2B demand generation for startups has become simpler, which is definitely a consideration for those who might’ve gone straight to WordPress in the past. HubSpot CMS Hub Free is HubSpot’s introductory CMS package. It includes premium hosting on HubSpot, the option to build a from-scratch website (with forms, live chat, landing pages, and a blog), and its free CRM platform. This is a perfect option for small businesses that cannot afford HubSpot quite yet, but want to dig into its tools and build a website that creates awareness and builds their brand. It does have a few limitations, however:
- \n
- Limited to 25 website pages \n
- Limited to one blog with 100 posts \n
- No ability to modify system pages \n
- HubSpot branding on website pages, blog posts and landing pages \n
While it might not be for everyone, it gives startups a powerful, free, and simple way to get their brand off the ground. A perfect example is this super basic website we stood up in only three hours using HubSpot CMS Free.
Many growing businesses operating with a WordPress website end up paying a premium for a form manager, SEO plugin, analytics tool, CRM, email marketing platform, and automation solution. All of these different tools not only don’t speak to one another (unless you pay for another integration tool to centralize them), but your marketing team has to login to every single platform to manage information and execute your marketing. It’s cumbersome and inefficient.
With HubSpot, you’re managing everything in one portal. From CMS tools to social media marketing, ad management, CRM for sales and email marketing, automation, blogging, SEO, and analytics — it doesn’t get more centralized than that. While all the tools in HubSpot can be costly when purchased together, HubSpot allows you to close the loop with your content marketing and sales processes, attributing revenue to your campaigns and gaining a full view on what efforts are working, so you can execute more of them. With WordPress, you have to be incredibly organized to use all the different tools. You’ll also probably need to create your own spreadsheets to allow you to really understand where your revenue is coming from.
Keeping your tech stack small helps fuel your marketing team to make educated decisions and work more efficiently.
You've coded yourself into a corner
\n
Probably the biggest pitfall that comes with working in WordPress is a bloated website. While we’ve outlined a a few different factors that can contribute to website bloat and how you can optimize your page speed, you cannot unwind the drag that comes with adding poorly coded plugins to your website.
The more plugins you add to your site, the more code a browser has to load, which can bog down your load speed. While you can limit your plugins and have a developer recommend the best ones, eventually you may want to add advanced functionality such as calculators or a robust resource center to your content arsenal.
HubSpot allows you to add functionality to your website with modules that can be coded by a HubSpot developer who knows best practices. Using one development partner who is certified keeps your website code clean and can ensure that your website doesn’t just pile on code from multiple different developers with plugins that break or leave security holes.
It's more secure
\n
WordPress sites are notorious for experiencing malware attacks. While keeping your plugins and WordPress up to date helps, malware attacks can still occur. Security is an extremely important aspect of your website, and HubSpot has the edge over WordPress here.
Because WordPress is open source, hackers can find security holes and exploit the platform easily. In addition, many of the available plugins aren’t supported and updated by the developers who created them. This makes WordPress sites easy targets.
WordPress theme and plugin developers typically bundle quite a few different plugins together to bring a full suite for you to take advantage of, but this can also create dependencies that aren’t updated correctly. Even if the theme is up to date, sometimes those smaller packages underneath aren’t updated and can create additional security vulnerabilities on your site.
HubSpot, however, has SSL encryption, which not only boosts your rankings with Google, but assures the users whose information you’re collecting that their information is safe. In HubSPot, you automatically receive a standard SAN SSL certification through DigiCert when you connect a domain to your account. If you purchase the custom SSL add-on, you can upload custom SSL certifications to HubSpot and configure security settings. Learn more about your SSL options in HubSpot here.
If you’re cost conscious and don’t plan to do much with your website, WordPress may have been a no-brainer for you. It’s free and has infinite customization options. Just be sure if you opt in to WordPress, you update plugins and WordPress regularly, manage comments, and have your site checked for security issues regularly.
If you’re cost conscious and looking for a starter platform that will grow with you as your marketing budget grows and lead generation is important to you, look to HubSpot. While we’re not currently offering development help on CMS Hub Free, we can definitely give you what you need once you’re ready to upgrade your HubSpot CMS Hub and build something that will suit you as you grow. HubSpot’s CRM is unmatched when it comes to sales, and we think that from a sustainability standpoint there’s no better platform for a growing business that is investing heavily into its sales and marketing strategies.
For a scaling business that uses its website as a lead generation tool, you’ll eventually need a better way to make website improvements, ensure the security of your site, and prevent website bloat. We’ve been huge supporters of HubSpot since they were just a tiny piece of analytics code. They continue to prove that they’re not only surpassing best practices, but setting new benchmarks for what to expect from a CMS and comprehensive marketing automation software.
If you’re considering a switch to HubSpot CMS Professional, we’d love to give you a rundown of the power of HubSpot.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
You get what you pay for
\n
One of the best things about WordPress is that it’s free. You pay for your themes and plugins and the developers who created them usually provide support, or you can hire a web developer if you need either more support or ongoing development expertise. However, that can come at a cost. Security issues, plugins not functioning as you’d hoped, and your website loading more slowly because of so many plugins are just a few common issues with WordPress.
Keep in mind that if you want a robust solution, you’re going to have to fork out a little cash. Committing an investment to HubSpot CMS might mean paying a monthly or annual fee, but it’ll give you a lot more capabilities out of the box without the additional frustration.
HubSpot support is super helpful and not outsourced, so you’re speaking to humans who really understand the platform. Not to mention, there’s an entire fully vetted and trained developer ecosystem with vendors who are crazy experienced and not even a little bit sketchy.
You’re using a ton of different tools to execute on your digital marketing
\n
Versatility used to be what WordPress was known for, but as the number of plugins and developers creating them increases, growing businesses need a less complicated solution. WordPress, as a free CMS with some paid plugins and themes, is a great foundation for a new small business, but once a business starts to move in the direction of lead generation, its needs become more complex.
Now that HubSpot has launched a free version of their CMS, B2B demand generation for startups has become simpler, which is definitely a consideration for those who might’ve gone straight to WordPress in the past. HubSpot CMS Hub Free is HubSpot’s introductory CMS package. It includes premium hosting on HubSpot, the option to build a from-scratch website (with forms, live chat, landing pages, and a blog), and its free CRM platform. This is a perfect option for small businesses that cannot afford HubSpot quite yet, but want to dig into its tools and build a website that creates awareness and builds their brand. It does have a few limitations, however:
- \n
- Limited to 25 website pages \n
- Limited to one blog with 100 posts \n
- No ability to modify system pages \n
- HubSpot branding on website pages, blog posts and landing pages \n
While it might not be for everyone, it gives startups a powerful, free, and simple way to get their brand off the ground. A perfect example is this super basic website we stood up in only three hours using HubSpot CMS Free.
Many growing businesses operating with a WordPress website end up paying a premium for a form manager, SEO plugin, analytics tool, CRM, email marketing platform, and automation solution. All of these different tools not only don’t speak to one another (unless you pay for another integration tool to centralize them), but your marketing team has to login to every single platform to manage information and execute your marketing. It’s cumbersome and inefficient.
With HubSpot, you’re managing everything in one portal. From CMS tools to social media marketing, ad management, CRM for sales and email marketing, automation, blogging, SEO, and analytics — it doesn’t get more centralized than that. While all the tools in HubSpot can be costly when purchased together, HubSpot allows you to close the loop with your content marketing and sales processes, attributing revenue to your campaigns and gaining a full view on what efforts are working, so you can execute more of them. With WordPress, you have to be incredibly organized to use all the different tools. You’ll also probably need to create your own spreadsheets to allow you to really understand where your revenue is coming from.
Keeping your tech stack small helps fuel your marketing team to make educated decisions and work more efficiently.
You've coded yourself into a corner
\n
Probably the biggest pitfall that comes with working in WordPress is a bloated website. While we’ve outlined a a few different factors that can contribute to website bloat and how you can optimize your page speed, you cannot unwind the drag that comes with adding poorly coded plugins to your website.
The more plugins you add to your site, the more code a browser has to load, which can bog down your load speed. While you can limit your plugins and have a developer recommend the best ones, eventually you may want to add advanced functionality such as calculators or a robust resource center to your content arsenal.
HubSpot allows you to add functionality to your website with modules that can be coded by a HubSpot developer who knows best practices. Using one development partner who is certified keeps your website code clean and can ensure that your website doesn’t just pile on code from multiple different developers with plugins that break or leave security holes.
It's more secure
\n
WordPress sites are notorious for experiencing malware attacks. While keeping your plugins and WordPress up to date helps, malware attacks can still occur. Security is an extremely important aspect of your website, and HubSpot has the edge over WordPress here.
Because WordPress is open source, hackers can find security holes and exploit the platform easily. In addition, many of the available plugins aren’t supported and updated by the developers who created them. This makes WordPress sites easy targets.
WordPress theme and plugin developers typically bundle quite a few different plugins together to bring a full suite for you to take advantage of, but this can also create dependencies that aren’t updated correctly. Even if the theme is up to date, sometimes those smaller packages underneath aren’t updated and can create additional security vulnerabilities on your site.
HubSpot, however, has SSL encryption, which not only boosts your rankings with Google, but assures the users whose information you’re collecting that their information is safe. In HubSPot, you automatically receive a standard SAN SSL certification through DigiCert when you connect a domain to your account. If you purchase the custom SSL add-on, you can upload custom SSL certifications to HubSpot and configure security settings. Learn more about your SSL options in HubSpot here.
If you’re cost conscious and don’t plan to do much with your website, WordPress may have been a no-brainer for you. It’s free and has infinite customization options. Just be sure if you opt in to WordPress, you update plugins and WordPress regularly, manage comments, and have your site checked for security issues regularly.
If you’re cost conscious and looking for a starter platform that will grow with you as your marketing budget grows and lead generation is important to you, look to HubSpot. While we’re not currently offering development help on CMS Hub Free, we can definitely give you what you need once you’re ready to upgrade your HubSpot CMS Hub and build something that will suit you as you grow. HubSpot’s CRM is unmatched when it comes to sales, and we think that from a sustainability standpoint there’s no better platform for a growing business that is investing heavily into its sales and marketing strategies.
For a scaling business that uses its website as a lead generation tool, you’ll eventually need a better way to make website improvements, ensure the security of your site, and prevent website bloat. We’ve been huge supporters of HubSpot since they were just a tiny piece of analytics code. They continue to prove that they’re not only surpassing best practices, but setting new benchmarks for what to expect from a CMS and comprehensive marketing automation software.
If you’re considering a switch to HubSpot CMS Professional, we’d love to give you a rundown of the power of HubSpot.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
You get what you pay for
\n
One of the best things about WordPress is that it’s free. You pay for your themes and plugins and the developers who created them usually provide support, or you can hire a web developer if you need either more support or ongoing development expertise. However, that can come at a cost. Security issues, plugins not functioning as you’d hoped, and your website loading more slowly because of so many plugins are just a few common issues with WordPress.
Keep in mind that if you want a robust solution, you’re going to have to fork out a little cash. Committing an investment to HubSpot CMS might mean paying a monthly or annual fee, but it’ll give you a lot more capabilities out of the box without the additional frustration.
HubSpot support is super helpful and not outsourced, so you’re speaking to humans who really understand the platform. Not to mention, there’s an entire fully vetted and trained developer ecosystem with vendors who are crazy experienced and not even a little bit sketchy.
You’re using a ton of different tools to execute on your digital marketing
\n
Versatility used to be what WordPress was known for, but as the number of plugins and developers creating them increases, growing businesses need a less complicated solution. WordPress, as a free CMS with some paid plugins and themes, is a great foundation for a new small business, but once a business starts to move in the direction of lead generation, its needs become more complex.
Now that HubSpot has launched a free version of their CMS, B2B demand generation for startups has become simpler, which is definitely a consideration for those who might’ve gone straight to WordPress in the past. HubSpot CMS Hub Free is HubSpot’s introductory CMS package. It includes premium hosting on HubSpot, the option to build a from-scratch website (with forms, live chat, landing pages, and a blog), and its free CRM platform. This is a perfect option for small businesses that cannot afford HubSpot quite yet, but want to dig into its tools and build a website that creates awareness and builds their brand. It does have a few limitations, however:
- \n
- Limited to 25 website pages \n
- Limited to one blog with 100 posts \n
- No ability to modify system pages \n
- HubSpot branding on website pages, blog posts and landing pages \n
While it might not be for everyone, it gives startups a powerful, free, and simple way to get their brand off the ground. A perfect example is this super basic website we stood up in only three hours using HubSpot CMS Free.
Many growing businesses operating with a WordPress website end up paying a premium for a form manager, SEO plugin, analytics tool, CRM, email marketing platform, and automation solution. All of these different tools not only don’t speak to one another (unless you pay for another integration tool to centralize them), but your marketing team has to login to every single platform to manage information and execute your marketing. It’s cumbersome and inefficient.
With HubSpot, you’re managing everything in one portal. From CMS tools to social media marketing, ad management, CRM for sales and email marketing, automation, blogging, SEO, and analytics — it doesn’t get more centralized than that. While all the tools in HubSpot can be costly when purchased together, HubSpot allows you to close the loop with your content marketing and sales processes, attributing revenue to your campaigns and gaining a full view on what efforts are working, so you can execute more of them. With WordPress, you have to be incredibly organized to use all the different tools. You’ll also probably need to create your own spreadsheets to allow you to really understand where your revenue is coming from.
Keeping your tech stack small helps fuel your marketing team to make educated decisions and work more efficiently.
You've coded yourself into a corner
\n
Probably the biggest pitfall that comes with working in WordPress is a bloated website. While we’ve outlined a a few different factors that can contribute to website bloat and how you can optimize your page speed, you cannot unwind the drag that comes with adding poorly coded plugins to your website.
The more plugins you add to your site, the more code a browser has to load, which can bog down your load speed. While you can limit your plugins and have a developer recommend the best ones, eventually you may want to add advanced functionality such as calculators or a robust resource center to your content arsenal.
HubSpot allows you to add functionality to your website with modules that can be coded by a HubSpot developer who knows best practices. Using one development partner who is certified keeps your website code clean and can ensure that your website doesn’t just pile on code from multiple different developers with plugins that break or leave security holes.
It's more secure
\n
WordPress sites are notorious for experiencing malware attacks. While keeping your plugins and WordPress up to date helps, malware attacks can still occur. Security is an extremely important aspect of your website, and HubSpot has the edge over WordPress here.
Because WordPress is open source, hackers can find security holes and exploit the platform easily. In addition, many of the available plugins aren’t supported and updated by the developers who created them. This makes WordPress sites easy targets.
WordPress theme and plugin developers typically bundle quite a few different plugins together to bring a full suite for you to take advantage of, but this can also create dependencies that aren’t updated correctly. Even if the theme is up to date, sometimes those smaller packages underneath aren’t updated and can create additional security vulnerabilities on your site.
HubSpot, however, has SSL encryption, which not only boosts your rankings with Google, but assures the users whose information you’re collecting that their information is safe. In HubSPot, you automatically receive a standard SAN SSL certification through DigiCert when you connect a domain to your account. If you purchase the custom SSL add-on, you can upload custom SSL certifications to HubSpot and configure security settings. Learn more about your SSL options in HubSpot here.
If you’re cost conscious and don’t plan to do much with your website, WordPress may have been a no-brainer for you. It’s free and has infinite customization options. Just be sure if you opt in to WordPress, you update plugins and WordPress regularly, manage comments, and have your site checked for security issues regularly.
If you’re cost conscious and looking for a starter platform that will grow with you as your marketing budget grows and lead generation is important to you, look to HubSpot. While we’re not currently offering development help on CMS Hub Free, we can definitely give you what you need once you’re ready to upgrade your HubSpot CMS Hub and build something that will suit you as you grow. HubSpot’s CRM is unmatched when it comes to sales, and we think that from a sustainability standpoint there’s no better platform for a growing business that is investing heavily into its sales and marketing strategies.
For a scaling business that uses its website as a lead generation tool, you’ll eventually need a better way to make website improvements, ensure the security of your site, and prevent website bloat. We’ve been huge supporters of HubSpot since they were just a tiny piece of analytics code. They continue to prove that they’re not only surpassing best practices, but setting new benchmarks for what to expect from a CMS and comprehensive marketing automation software.
If you’re considering a switch to HubSpot CMS Professional, we’d love to give you a rundown of the power of HubSpot.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
You get what you pay for
\n
One of the best things about WordPress is that it’s free. You pay for your themes and plugins and the developers who created them usually provide support, or you can hire a web developer if you need either more support or ongoing development expertise. However, that can come at a cost. Security issues, plugins not functioning as you’d hoped, and your website loading more slowly because of so many plugins are just a few common issues with WordPress.
Keep in mind that if you want a robust solution, you’re going to have to fork out a little cash. Committing an investment to HubSpot CMS might mean paying a monthly or annual fee, but it’ll give you a lot more capabilities out of the box without the additional frustration.
HubSpot support is super helpful and not outsourced, so you’re speaking to humans who really understand the platform. Not to mention, there’s an entire fully vetted and trained developer ecosystem with vendors who are crazy experienced and not even a little bit sketchy.
You’re using a ton of different tools to execute on your digital marketing
\n
Versatility used to be what WordPress was known for, but as the number of plugins and developers creating them increases, growing businesses need a less complicated solution. WordPress, as a free CMS with some paid plugins and themes, is a great foundation for a new small business, but once a business starts to move in the direction of lead generation, its needs become more complex.
Now that HubSpot has launched a free version of their CMS, B2B demand generation for startups has become simpler, which is definitely a consideration for those who might’ve gone straight to WordPress in the past. HubSpot CMS Hub Free is HubSpot’s introductory CMS package. It includes premium hosting on HubSpot, the option to build a from-scratch website (with forms, live chat, landing pages, and a blog), and its free CRM platform. This is a perfect option for small businesses that cannot afford HubSpot quite yet, but want to dig into its tools and build a website that creates awareness and builds their brand. It does have a few limitations, however:
- \n
- Limited to 25 website pages \n
- Limited to one blog with 100 posts \n
- No ability to modify system pages \n
- HubSpot branding on website pages, blog posts and landing pages \n
While it might not be for everyone, it gives startups a powerful, free, and simple way to get their brand off the ground. A perfect example is this super basic website we stood up in only three hours using HubSpot CMS Free.
Many growing businesses operating with a WordPress website end up paying a premium for a form manager, SEO plugin, analytics tool, CRM, email marketing platform, and automation solution. All of these different tools not only don’t speak to one another (unless you pay for another integration tool to centralize them), but your marketing team has to login to every single platform to manage information and execute your marketing. It’s cumbersome and inefficient.
With HubSpot, you’re managing everything in one portal. From CMS tools to social media marketing, ad management, CRM for sales and email marketing, automation, blogging, SEO, and analytics — it doesn’t get more centralized than that. While all the tools in HubSpot can be costly when purchased together, HubSpot allows you to close the loop with your content marketing and sales processes, attributing revenue to your campaigns and gaining a full view on what efforts are working, so you can execute more of them. With WordPress, you have to be incredibly organized to use all the different tools. You’ll also probably need to create your own spreadsheets to allow you to really understand where your revenue is coming from.
Keeping your tech stack small helps fuel your marketing team to make educated decisions and work more efficiently.
You've coded yourself into a corner
\n
Probably the biggest pitfall that comes with working in WordPress is a bloated website. While we’ve outlined a a few different factors that can contribute to website bloat and how you can optimize your page speed, you cannot unwind the drag that comes with adding poorly coded plugins to your website.
The more plugins you add to your site, the more code a browser has to load, which can bog down your load speed. While you can limit your plugins and have a developer recommend the best ones, eventually you may want to add advanced functionality such as calculators or a robust resource center to your content arsenal.
HubSpot allows you to add functionality to your website with modules that can be coded by a HubSpot developer who knows best practices. Using one development partner who is certified keeps your website code clean and can ensure that your website doesn’t just pile on code from multiple different developers with plugins that break or leave security holes.
It's more secure
\n
WordPress sites are notorious for experiencing malware attacks. While keeping your plugins and WordPress up to date helps, malware attacks can still occur. Security is an extremely important aspect of your website, and HubSpot has the edge over WordPress here.
Because WordPress is open source, hackers can find security holes and exploit the platform easily. In addition, many of the available plugins aren’t supported and updated by the developers who created them. This makes WordPress sites easy targets.
WordPress theme and plugin developers typically bundle quite a few different plugins together to bring a full suite for you to take advantage of, but this can also create dependencies that aren’t updated correctly. Even if the theme is up to date, sometimes those smaller packages underneath aren’t updated and can create additional security vulnerabilities on your site.
HubSpot, however, has SSL encryption, which not only boosts your rankings with Google, but assures the users whose information you’re collecting that their information is safe. In HubSPot, you automatically receive a standard SAN SSL certification through DigiCert when you connect a domain to your account. If you purchase the custom SSL add-on, you can upload custom SSL certifications to HubSpot and configure security settings. Learn more about your SSL options in HubSpot here.
If you’re cost conscious and don’t plan to do much with your website, WordPress may have been a no-brainer for you. It’s free and has infinite customization options. Just be sure if you opt in to WordPress, you update plugins and WordPress regularly, manage comments, and have your site checked for security issues regularly.
If you’re cost conscious and looking for a starter platform that will grow with you as your marketing budget grows and lead generation is important to you, look to HubSpot. While we’re not currently offering development help on CMS Hub Free, we can definitely give you what you need once you’re ready to upgrade your HubSpot CMS Hub and build something that will suit you as you grow. HubSpot’s CRM is unmatched when it comes to sales, and we think that from a sustainability standpoint there’s no better platform for a growing business that is investing heavily into its sales and marketing strategies.
For a scaling business that uses its website as a lead generation tool, you’ll eventually need a better way to make website improvements, ensure the security of your site, and prevent website bloat. We’ve been huge supporters of HubSpot since they were just a tiny piece of analytics code. They continue to prove that they’re not only surpassing best practices, but setting new benchmarks for what to expect from a CMS and comprehensive marketing automation software.
If you’re considering a switch to HubSpot CMS Professional, we’d love to give you a rundown of the power of HubSpot.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Tools that served you before may not serve you as you grow
\n
Sure, Pikachu is cute and all, but Raichu is much more powerful and comes with a bigger set of tools or abilities at his disposal to help you win the battle against your competition for website leads.
Whether it’s developing a cost analysis calculator or price comparison tool, or integrating an important business application, there’s always something you can do to enhance the user experience of clients and prospects seeking information on your website. You may want to add a customer portal or tweak your most commonly used module to create a site that’s easy to navigate for both sales and prospects.
Savvy marketers develop a deep understanding of the complex buying journey surrounding their products and services. As you further break down the buying process and plan content for your website, you may find that the site you designed needs additions in order to facilitate the buying process.
You’re going head to head with your competitors
\n
While the battle may not be quite as intense as a Pokemon training battle, you still want to be prepared to go head to head with your competitors online. You can catch up with them, or even best them, by doing research on the top contenders in your industry and their offerings. Use this research when planning your marketing, including any website additions you may be considering.
If your biggest competition has a large resource section on its site, with multiple blog articles, case studies, white papers, and webinars, consider developing a mega menu that allows you to showcase the information you offer in an easy-to-navigate place.
Understanding what others in your industry are doing will help you stay ahead of the curve and competitively situated when it comes to the evolution of your website.
The team has changing needs and goals
\n
You need to make sure that your marketing team has the tools to do their job properly. Happy employees are 13% more productive, according to a UK study. Many organizations spend too much time planning the design of their website and not enough on how the backend should work for their marketing team. You should make planning your modules and user functions in the backend be part of the design process from the beginning, then continue to address these needs by making regular changes and adding strategic features.
Page templates should be easily accessible and set up properly, and different module iterations should be labeled intuitively. Backend users should be able to easily create pages, add content, and edit and optimize that content. HubSpot CMS makes it particularly easy for marketers. Because it is such a user-friendly platform, tasks like adding opacity or sizing options to a hero module places give marketers even more flexibility and control..The more space a marketer has for freedom, creativity, and flexibility, the more ways they can experiment to deliver remarkable content into the hands of the user — and the more your business benefits.
Related: Happy Employees, Happy Customers: API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nPlanning your resources maximizes your success
\n
While in-game resources might respawn in Pokemon, strategically planning how you use them helps ensure sustainable success. The same is true for the financial resources you allocate toward your website strategy. By having a monthly budget that you allocate toward growth-driven design, you can ensure that your website continues to evolve and your teams have the tools they need. Progress won’t be inhibited by an outdated website that doesn’t suit the growing needs of your marketers and the prospects and customers your website is serving.
Allocating a monthly budget toward the continued optimization and growth of your website lets you keep small changes moving along. This avoids stagnation in your pipeline, reduces frustration from your team, and ultimately makes more money in the long run.
Growth-driven design takes the preconceptions of web development to the next level by assigning them a predictable cost and breaking them down into monthly projects that are much more sustainable. The belief behind growth-driven design is that your website is constantly evolving. It is the ultimate Pokemon, because it never stops improving its features to ensure it remains the most competitive champion of your business’s vision and mission.
A sustainable plan is invaluable. It allows you to dream your biggest dreams, because when you break them into small steps, the entire world is at your disposal. Gloria Steinem said, “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” When you dream big and plan your resources accordingly, nothing is outside your reach.
","rss_summary":"
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Tools that served you before may not serve you as you grow
\n
Sure, Pikachu is cute and all, but Raichu is much more powerful and comes with a bigger set of tools or abilities at his disposal to help you win the battle against your competition for website leads.
Whether it’s developing a cost analysis calculator or price comparison tool, or integrating an important business application, there’s always something you can do to enhance the user experience of clients and prospects seeking information on your website. You may want to add a customer portal or tweak your most commonly used module to create a site that’s easy to navigate for both sales and prospects.
Savvy marketers develop a deep understanding of the complex buying journey surrounding their products and services. As you further break down the buying process and plan content for your website, you may find that the site you designed needs additions in order to facilitate the buying process.
You’re going head to head with your competitors
\n
While the battle may not be quite as intense as a Pokemon training battle, you still want to be prepared to go head to head with your competitors online. You can catch up with them, or even best them, by doing research on the top contenders in your industry and their offerings. Use this research when planning your marketing, including any website additions you may be considering.
If your biggest competition has a large resource section on its site, with multiple blog articles, case studies, white papers, and webinars, consider developing a mega menu that allows you to showcase the information you offer in an easy-to-navigate place.
Understanding what others in your industry are doing will help you stay ahead of the curve and competitively situated when it comes to the evolution of your website.
The team has changing needs and goals
\n
You need to make sure that your marketing team has the tools to do their job properly. Happy employees are 13% more productive, according to a UK study. Many organizations spend too much time planning the design of their website and not enough on how the backend should work for their marketing team. You should make planning your modules and user functions in the backend be part of the design process from the beginning, then continue to address these needs by making regular changes and adding strategic features.
Page templates should be easily accessible and set up properly, and different module iterations should be labeled intuitively. Backend users should be able to easily create pages, add content, and edit and optimize that content. HubSpot CMS makes it particularly easy for marketers. Because it is such a user-friendly platform, tasks like adding opacity or sizing options to a hero module places give marketers even more flexibility and control..The more space a marketer has for freedom, creativity, and flexibility, the more ways they can experiment to deliver remarkable content into the hands of the user — and the more your business benefits.
Related: Happy Employees, Happy Customers: API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nPlanning your resources maximizes your success
\n
While in-game resources might respawn in Pokemon, strategically planning how you use them helps ensure sustainable success. The same is true for the financial resources you allocate toward your website strategy. By having a monthly budget that you allocate toward growth-driven design, you can ensure that your website continues to evolve and your teams have the tools they need. Progress won’t be inhibited by an outdated website that doesn’t suit the growing needs of your marketers and the prospects and customers your website is serving.
Allocating a monthly budget toward the continued optimization and growth of your website lets you keep small changes moving along. This avoids stagnation in your pipeline, reduces frustration from your team, and ultimately makes more money in the long run.
Growth-driven design takes the preconceptions of web development to the next level by assigning them a predictable cost and breaking them down into monthly projects that are much more sustainable. The belief behind growth-driven design is that your website is constantly evolving. It is the ultimate Pokemon, because it never stops improving its features to ensure it remains the most competitive champion of your business’s vision and mission.
A sustainable plan is invaluable. It allows you to dream your biggest dreams, because when you break them into small steps, the entire world is at your disposal. Gloria Steinem said, “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” When you dream big and plan your resources accordingly, nothing is outside your reach.
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Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Tools that served you before may not serve you as you grow
\n
Sure, Pikachu is cute and all, but Raichu is much more powerful and comes with a bigger set of tools or abilities at his disposal to help you win the battle against your competition for website leads.
Whether it’s developing a cost analysis calculator or price comparison tool, or integrating an important business application, there’s always something you can do to enhance the user experience of clients and prospects seeking information on your website. You may want to add a customer portal or tweak your most commonly used module to create a site that’s easy to navigate for both sales and prospects.
Savvy marketers develop a deep understanding of the complex buying journey surrounding their products and services. As you further break down the buying process and plan content for your website, you may find that the site you designed needs additions in order to facilitate the buying process.
You’re going head to head with your competitors
\n
While the battle may not be quite as intense as a Pokemon training battle, you still want to be prepared to go head to head with your competitors online. You can catch up with them, or even best them, by doing research on the top contenders in your industry and their offerings. Use this research when planning your marketing, including any website additions you may be considering.
If your biggest competition has a large resource section on its site, with multiple blog articles, case studies, white papers, and webinars, consider developing a mega menu that allows you to showcase the information you offer in an easy-to-navigate place.
Understanding what others in your industry are doing will help you stay ahead of the curve and competitively situated when it comes to the evolution of your website.
The team has changing needs and goals
\n
You need to make sure that your marketing team has the tools to do their job properly. Happy employees are 13% more productive, according to a UK study. Many organizations spend too much time planning the design of their website and not enough on how the backend should work for their marketing team. You should make planning your modules and user functions in the backend be part of the design process from the beginning, then continue to address these needs by making regular changes and adding strategic features.
Page templates should be easily accessible and set up properly, and different module iterations should be labeled intuitively. Backend users should be able to easily create pages, add content, and edit and optimize that content. HubSpot CMS makes it particularly easy for marketers. Because it is such a user-friendly platform, tasks like adding opacity or sizing options to a hero module places give marketers even more flexibility and control..The more space a marketer has for freedom, creativity, and flexibility, the more ways they can experiment to deliver remarkable content into the hands of the user — and the more your business benefits.
Related: Happy Employees, Happy Customers: API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nPlanning your resources maximizes your success
\n
While in-game resources might respawn in Pokemon, strategically planning how you use them helps ensure sustainable success. The same is true for the financial resources you allocate toward your website strategy. By having a monthly budget that you allocate toward growth-driven design, you can ensure that your website continues to evolve and your teams have the tools they need. Progress won’t be inhibited by an outdated website that doesn’t suit the growing needs of your marketers and the prospects and customers your website is serving.
Allocating a monthly budget toward the continued optimization and growth of your website lets you keep small changes moving along. This avoids stagnation in your pipeline, reduces frustration from your team, and ultimately makes more money in the long run.
Growth-driven design takes the preconceptions of web development to the next level by assigning them a predictable cost and breaking them down into monthly projects that are much more sustainable. The belief behind growth-driven design is that your website is constantly evolving. It is the ultimate Pokemon, because it never stops improving its features to ensure it remains the most competitive champion of your business’s vision and mission.
A sustainable plan is invaluable. It allows you to dream your biggest dreams, because when you break them into small steps, the entire world is at your disposal. Gloria Steinem said, “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” When you dream big and plan your resources accordingly, nothing is outside your reach.
","postBodyRss":"
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Tools that served you before may not serve you as you grow
\n
Sure, Pikachu is cute and all, but Raichu is much more powerful and comes with a bigger set of tools or abilities at his disposal to help you win the battle against your competition for website leads.
Whether it’s developing a cost analysis calculator or price comparison tool, or integrating an important business application, there’s always something you can do to enhance the user experience of clients and prospects seeking information on your website. You may want to add a customer portal or tweak your most commonly used module to create a site that’s easy to navigate for both sales and prospects.
Savvy marketers develop a deep understanding of the complex buying journey surrounding their products and services. As you further break down the buying process and plan content for your website, you may find that the site you designed needs additions in order to facilitate the buying process.
You’re going head to head with your competitors
\n
While the battle may not be quite as intense as a Pokemon training battle, you still want to be prepared to go head to head with your competitors online. You can catch up with them, or even best them, by doing research on the top contenders in your industry and their offerings. Use this research when planning your marketing, including any website additions you may be considering.
If your biggest competition has a large resource section on its site, with multiple blog articles, case studies, white papers, and webinars, consider developing a mega menu that allows you to showcase the information you offer in an easy-to-navigate place.
Understanding what others in your industry are doing will help you stay ahead of the curve and competitively situated when it comes to the evolution of your website.
The team has changing needs and goals
\n
You need to make sure that your marketing team has the tools to do their job properly. Happy employees are 13% more productive, according to a UK study. Many organizations spend too much time planning the design of their website and not enough on how the backend should work for their marketing team. You should make planning your modules and user functions in the backend be part of the design process from the beginning, then continue to address these needs by making regular changes and adding strategic features.
Page templates should be easily accessible and set up properly, and different module iterations should be labeled intuitively. Backend users should be able to easily create pages, add content, and edit and optimize that content. HubSpot CMS makes it particularly easy for marketers. Because it is such a user-friendly platform, tasks like adding opacity or sizing options to a hero module places give marketers even more flexibility and control..The more space a marketer has for freedom, creativity, and flexibility, the more ways they can experiment to deliver remarkable content into the hands of the user — and the more your business benefits.
Related: Happy Employees, Happy Customers: API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nPlanning your resources maximizes your success
\n
While in-game resources might respawn in Pokemon, strategically planning how you use them helps ensure sustainable success. The same is true for the financial resources you allocate toward your website strategy. By having a monthly budget that you allocate toward growth-driven design, you can ensure that your website continues to evolve and your teams have the tools they need. Progress won’t be inhibited by an outdated website that doesn’t suit the growing needs of your marketers and the prospects and customers your website is serving.
Allocating a monthly budget toward the continued optimization and growth of your website lets you keep small changes moving along. This avoids stagnation in your pipeline, reduces frustration from your team, and ultimately makes more money in the long run.
Growth-driven design takes the preconceptions of web development to the next level by assigning them a predictable cost and breaking them down into monthly projects that are much more sustainable. The belief behind growth-driven design is that your website is constantly evolving. It is the ultimate Pokemon, because it never stops improving its features to ensure it remains the most competitive champion of your business’s vision and mission.
A sustainable plan is invaluable. It allows you to dream your biggest dreams, because when you break them into small steps, the entire world is at your disposal. Gloria Steinem said, “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” When you dream big and plan your resources accordingly, nothing is outside your reach.
","postEmailContent":"
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Tools that served you before may not serve you as you grow
\n
Sure, Pikachu is cute and all, but Raichu is much more powerful and comes with a bigger set of tools or abilities at his disposal to help you win the battle against your competition for website leads.
Whether it’s developing a cost analysis calculator or price comparison tool, or integrating an important business application, there’s always something you can do to enhance the user experience of clients and prospects seeking information on your website. You may want to add a customer portal or tweak your most commonly used module to create a site that’s easy to navigate for both sales and prospects.
Savvy marketers develop a deep understanding of the complex buying journey surrounding their products and services. As you further break down the buying process and plan content for your website, you may find that the site you designed needs additions in order to facilitate the buying process.
You’re going head to head with your competitors
\n
While the battle may not be quite as intense as a Pokemon training battle, you still want to be prepared to go head to head with your competitors online. You can catch up with them, or even best them, by doing research on the top contenders in your industry and their offerings. Use this research when planning your marketing, including any website additions you may be considering.
If your biggest competition has a large resource section on its site, with multiple blog articles, case studies, white papers, and webinars, consider developing a mega menu that allows you to showcase the information you offer in an easy-to-navigate place.
Understanding what others in your industry are doing will help you stay ahead of the curve and competitively situated when it comes to the evolution of your website.
The team has changing needs and goals
\n
You need to make sure that your marketing team has the tools to do their job properly. Happy employees are 13% more productive, according to a UK study. Many organizations spend too much time planning the design of their website and not enough on how the backend should work for their marketing team. You should make planning your modules and user functions in the backend be part of the design process from the beginning, then continue to address these needs by making regular changes and adding strategic features.
Page templates should be easily accessible and set up properly, and different module iterations should be labeled intuitively. Backend users should be able to easily create pages, add content, and edit and optimize that content. HubSpot CMS makes it particularly easy for marketers. Because it is such a user-friendly platform, tasks like adding opacity or sizing options to a hero module places give marketers even more flexibility and control..The more space a marketer has for freedom, creativity, and flexibility, the more ways they can experiment to deliver remarkable content into the hands of the user — and the more your business benefits.
Related: Happy Employees, Happy Customers: API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nPlanning your resources maximizes your success
\n
While in-game resources might respawn in Pokemon, strategically planning how you use them helps ensure sustainable success. The same is true for the financial resources you allocate toward your website strategy. By having a monthly budget that you allocate toward growth-driven design, you can ensure that your website continues to evolve and your teams have the tools they need. Progress won’t be inhibited by an outdated website that doesn’t suit the growing needs of your marketers and the prospects and customers your website is serving.
Allocating a monthly budget toward the continued optimization and growth of your website lets you keep small changes moving along. This avoids stagnation in your pipeline, reduces frustration from your team, and ultimately makes more money in the long run.
Growth-driven design takes the preconceptions of web development to the next level by assigning them a predictable cost and breaking them down into monthly projects that are much more sustainable. The belief behind growth-driven design is that your website is constantly evolving. It is the ultimate Pokemon, because it never stops improving its features to ensure it remains the most competitive champion of your business’s vision and mission.
A sustainable plan is invaluable. It allows you to dream your biggest dreams, because when you break them into small steps, the entire world is at your disposal. Gloria Steinem said, “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” When you dream big and plan your resources accordingly, nothing is outside your reach.
","rssSummary":"
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
It avoids the 75-email edit strings
\n
According to a survey by Zippia.com, 80% of employees feel stressed because of ineffective company communication. Clearly no one likes inefficiency when it comes to communication, internally or externally.
One of the most difficult parts of managing communication surrounding website projects can be the multiple rounds of edits. If your developer or agency doesn’t have a simple way to communicate edits with a platform like Pastel, they can get caught in an endless string of back and forth messages.With no centralized feedback option, clients have to compile Google Docs, Powerpoint presentations, or those long strings of emails or Slack messages, which then need to be searched to find every single edit.
Not only does this increase the amount of time that a developer has to spend on updates, edits,and bug fixes, but sometimes a request can be overlooked, prolonging the process and sometimes even delaying the delivery of a completed site for review.
By having feedback centralized in Pastel, we avoid the extra communication, leaving our inboxes and Slack queue cleaner, our brains a little freer, and our development team that much more efficient. Keep in mind that not every client or employee likes to use new tools, so we still allow other feedback options, we just try to default to this to keep things organized.
\n
It allows multiple people to leave feedback in one place.
\n
Of course, it’s easy to assign a single point of contact as a final word on a website, but how often does something get lost in translation? We’ve encountered scenarios when the people at the top are dictating their wants and needs to a marketing director or manager, only for the company’s CEO to step in with their internal team and provide the feedback our teams needed all along. In order to avoid issues with too many cooks in the kitchen while also allowing all eyes in for review, Pastel is a great alternative.
With Pastel, you can hover over sections of the website and pin comments to each section. The comment is sticky and remains in place as you navigate through the rest of the document. This allows you to easily click on comments while reviewing areas of concern to save time in describing issues and identifying the issue in question for the development team receiving the feedback.
You can also @mention any user to quickly ping them with a question, notify them of a new edit, or request an update. You can even hold clients and internal teams accountable by turning off commenting after a “comment deadline.” (This is a favorite feature for us when projects are running on tight timeframes and we need to hold everyone to their deadlines.)
\n
You can stay organized and keep up to date on progress.
\n
Keeping comments organized can sometimes be a hassle, and if your development team has a huge list of edits and bug fixes, they may not know exactly how to prioritize them. You can mark items as high priority or categorize your edits using labels. Once a comment is labeled, the team can review it in real time and address high priority items or certain categories of issues, such as bug fixes, before wishlist items or additional feature functionality are addressed.
Pastel also allows for status updates so you can see how edits are progressing in real time. A status can be updated from Active to In Progress to In Review to Resolved by a team member. This keeps a project management team up to date and allows them to communicate timeframes with the client to manage expectations accordingly.
\n
It offers “live” editing.
\n
Because Pastel pulls from the website URL, it allows you to use the same canvas for multiple rounds of edits if you want. If you use a live website URL for feedback, once the code is changed, the edits will reflect on the same document, allowing the team to verify those changes and make additional suggestions if needed.
It integrates with other common marketing tools for seamless ticket or task creation.
\n
We’ve spoken to the team at Pastel; they have a lot of great ideas about how they’ll continue to evolve the software. They’ve communicated that their intent is to build on the number of integrations they offer to make it easier for development teams to use Pastel. . They’ve also assured us that big things are on the horizon for the platform.
We asked Valentin Stakov, founder at Pastel, what the company’s focus was and what agencies and developers could expect from Pastel in the coming months. He said, \"We're planning on improving our existing integrations to make them more robust, as well as building additional integrations. We're also focused on building out more tools to make it easier to communicate with your clients and to keep them updated on their projects.\"
For now, their website lists the following integrations here:
Asana
Monday
Trello
Adobe XD
Jira
Finding a tool with a forward-thinking team is important; we look forward to seeing what integrations these guys come up with in the future.
It saves you time with additional functionality.
\n
Pastel has a few time-saving features as well.
Its interface allows you to easily add screenshots, upload files, and link URLs in the comments. If you want an image replaced on a web page, company file storage can sometimes take a bit to sort through.
Basic responsiveness tests are also a perk of Pastel. While we use real browsers when available and BrowserStack for full browser compatibility testing, the simple toggle on Pastel gives the client and other reviewers a way t to visualize what the website will look like on both mobile and desktop, allowing for more eyes on the process.
Another common activity during launch preparation is tweaking copy and headlines. While all our clients operating in HubSpot CMS have the flexibility to make updates to all content and headlines themselves, sometimes you need those perfect words to make a website look launch-ready.
\n
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
It avoids the 75-email edit strings
\n
According to a survey by Zippia.com, 80% of employees feel stressed because of ineffective company communication. Clearly no one likes inefficiency when it comes to communication, internally or externally.
One of the most difficult parts of managing communication surrounding website projects can be the multiple rounds of edits. If your developer or agency doesn’t have a simple way to communicate edits with a platform like Pastel, they can get caught in an endless string of back and forth messages.With no centralized feedback option, clients have to compile Google Docs, Powerpoint presentations, or those long strings of emails or Slack messages, which then need to be searched to find every single edit.
Not only does this increase the amount of time that a developer has to spend on updates, edits,and bug fixes, but sometimes a request can be overlooked, prolonging the process and sometimes even delaying the delivery of a completed site for review.
By having feedback centralized in Pastel, we avoid the extra communication, leaving our inboxes and Slack queue cleaner, our brains a little freer, and our development team that much more efficient. Keep in mind that not every client or employee likes to use new tools, so we still allow other feedback options, we just try to default to this to keep things organized.
\n
It allows multiple people to leave feedback in one place.
\n
Of course, it’s easy to assign a single point of contact as a final word on a website, but how often does something get lost in translation? We’ve encountered scenarios when the people at the top are dictating their wants and needs to a marketing director or manager, only for the company’s CEO to step in with their internal team and provide the feedback our teams needed all along. In order to avoid issues with too many cooks in the kitchen while also allowing all eyes in for review, Pastel is a great alternative.
With Pastel, you can hover over sections of the website and pin comments to each section. The comment is sticky and remains in place as you navigate through the rest of the document. This allows you to easily click on comments while reviewing areas of concern to save time in describing issues and identifying the issue in question for the development team receiving the feedback.
You can also @mention any user to quickly ping them with a question, notify them of a new edit, or request an update. You can even hold clients and internal teams accountable by turning off commenting after a “comment deadline.” (This is a favorite feature for us when projects are running on tight timeframes and we need to hold everyone to their deadlines.)
\n
You can stay organized and keep up to date on progress.
\n
Keeping comments organized can sometimes be a hassle, and if your development team has a huge list of edits and bug fixes, they may not know exactly how to prioritize them. You can mark items as high priority or categorize your edits using labels. Once a comment is labeled, the team can review it in real time and address high priority items or certain categories of issues, such as bug fixes, before wishlist items or additional feature functionality are addressed.
Pastel also allows for status updates so you can see how edits are progressing in real time. A status can be updated from Active to In Progress to In Review to Resolved by a team member. This keeps a project management team up to date and allows them to communicate timeframes with the client to manage expectations accordingly.
\n
It offers “live” editing.
\n
Because Pastel pulls from the website URL, it allows you to use the same canvas for multiple rounds of edits if you want. If you use a live website URL for feedback, once the code is changed, the edits will reflect on the same document, allowing the team to verify those changes and make additional suggestions if needed.
It integrates with other common marketing tools for seamless ticket or task creation.
\n
We’ve spoken to the team at Pastel; they have a lot of great ideas about how they’ll continue to evolve the software. They’ve communicated that their intent is to build on the number of integrations they offer to make it easier for development teams to use Pastel. . They’ve also assured us that big things are on the horizon for the platform.
We asked Valentin Stakov, founder at Pastel, what the company’s focus was and what agencies and developers could expect from Pastel in the coming months. He said, \"We're planning on improving our existing integrations to make them more robust, as well as building additional integrations. We're also focused on building out more tools to make it easier to communicate with your clients and to keep them updated on their projects.\"
For now, their website lists the following integrations here:
Asana
Monday
Trello
Adobe XD
Jira
Finding a tool with a forward-thinking team is important; we look forward to seeing what integrations these guys come up with in the future.
It saves you time with additional functionality.
\n
Pastel has a few time-saving features as well.
Its interface allows you to easily add screenshots, upload files, and link URLs in the comments. If you want an image replaced on a web page, company file storage can sometimes take a bit to sort through.
Basic responsiveness tests are also a perk of Pastel. While we use real browsers when available and BrowserStack for full browser compatibility testing, the simple toggle on Pastel gives the client and other reviewers a way t to visualize what the website will look like on both mobile and desktop, allowing for more eyes on the process.
Another common activity during launch preparation is tweaking copy and headlines. While all our clients operating in HubSpot CMS have the flexibility to make updates to all content and headlines themselves, sometimes you need those perfect words to make a website look launch-ready.
\n
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
It avoids the 75-email edit strings
\n
According to a survey by Zippia.com, 80% of employees feel stressed because of ineffective company communication. Clearly no one likes inefficiency when it comes to communication, internally or externally.
One of the most difficult parts of managing communication surrounding website projects can be the multiple rounds of edits. If your developer or agency doesn’t have a simple way to communicate edits with a platform like Pastel, they can get caught in an endless string of back and forth messages.With no centralized feedback option, clients have to compile Google Docs, Powerpoint presentations, or those long strings of emails or Slack messages, which then need to be searched to find every single edit.
Not only does this increase the amount of time that a developer has to spend on updates, edits,and bug fixes, but sometimes a request can be overlooked, prolonging the process and sometimes even delaying the delivery of a completed site for review.
By having feedback centralized in Pastel, we avoid the extra communication, leaving our inboxes and Slack queue cleaner, our brains a little freer, and our development team that much more efficient. Keep in mind that not every client or employee likes to use new tools, so we still allow other feedback options, we just try to default to this to keep things organized.
\n
It allows multiple people to leave feedback in one place.
\n
Of course, it’s easy to assign a single point of contact as a final word on a website, but how often does something get lost in translation? We’ve encountered scenarios when the people at the top are dictating their wants and needs to a marketing director or manager, only for the company’s CEO to step in with their internal team and provide the feedback our teams needed all along. In order to avoid issues with too many cooks in the kitchen while also allowing all eyes in for review, Pastel is a great alternative.
With Pastel, you can hover over sections of the website and pin comments to each section. The comment is sticky and remains in place as you navigate through the rest of the document. This allows you to easily click on comments while reviewing areas of concern to save time in describing issues and identifying the issue in question for the development team receiving the feedback.
You can also @mention any user to quickly ping them with a question, notify them of a new edit, or request an update. You can even hold clients and internal teams accountable by turning off commenting after a “comment deadline.” (This is a favorite feature for us when projects are running on tight timeframes and we need to hold everyone to their deadlines.)
\n
You can stay organized and keep up to date on progress.
\n
Keeping comments organized can sometimes be a hassle, and if your development team has a huge list of edits and bug fixes, they may not know exactly how to prioritize them. You can mark items as high priority or categorize your edits using labels. Once a comment is labeled, the team can review it in real time and address high priority items or certain categories of issues, such as bug fixes, before wishlist items or additional feature functionality are addressed.
Pastel also allows for status updates so you can see how edits are progressing in real time. A status can be updated from Active to In Progress to In Review to Resolved by a team member. This keeps a project management team up to date and allows them to communicate timeframes with the client to manage expectations accordingly.
\n
It offers “live” editing.
\n
Because Pastel pulls from the website URL, it allows you to use the same canvas for multiple rounds of edits if you want. If you use a live website URL for feedback, once the code is changed, the edits will reflect on the same document, allowing the team to verify those changes and make additional suggestions if needed.
It integrates with other common marketing tools for seamless ticket or task creation.
\n
We’ve spoken to the team at Pastel; they have a lot of great ideas about how they’ll continue to evolve the software. They’ve communicated that their intent is to build on the number of integrations they offer to make it easier for development teams to use Pastel. . They’ve also assured us that big things are on the horizon for the platform.
We asked Valentin Stakov, founder at Pastel, what the company’s focus was and what agencies and developers could expect from Pastel in the coming months. He said, \"We're planning on improving our existing integrations to make them more robust, as well as building additional integrations. We're also focused on building out more tools to make it easier to communicate with your clients and to keep them updated on their projects.\"
For now, their website lists the following integrations here:
Asana
Monday
Trello
Adobe XD
Jira
Finding a tool with a forward-thinking team is important; we look forward to seeing what integrations these guys come up with in the future.
It saves you time with additional functionality.
\n
Pastel has a few time-saving features as well.
Its interface allows you to easily add screenshots, upload files, and link URLs in the comments. If you want an image replaced on a web page, company file storage can sometimes take a bit to sort through.
Basic responsiveness tests are also a perk of Pastel. While we use real browsers when available and BrowserStack for full browser compatibility testing, the simple toggle on Pastel gives the client and other reviewers a way t to visualize what the website will look like on both mobile and desktop, allowing for more eyes on the process.
Another common activity during launch preparation is tweaking copy and headlines. While all our clients operating in HubSpot CMS have the flexibility to make updates to all content and headlines themselves, sometimes you need those perfect words to make a website look launch-ready.
\n
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
It avoids the 75-email edit strings
\n
According to a survey by Zippia.com, 80% of employees feel stressed because of ineffective company communication. Clearly no one likes inefficiency when it comes to communication, internally or externally.
One of the most difficult parts of managing communication surrounding website projects can be the multiple rounds of edits. If your developer or agency doesn’t have a simple way to communicate edits with a platform like Pastel, they can get caught in an endless string of back and forth messages.With no centralized feedback option, clients have to compile Google Docs, Powerpoint presentations, or those long strings of emails or Slack messages, which then need to be searched to find every single edit.
Not only does this increase the amount of time that a developer has to spend on updates, edits,and bug fixes, but sometimes a request can be overlooked, prolonging the process and sometimes even delaying the delivery of a completed site for review.
By having feedback centralized in Pastel, we avoid the extra communication, leaving our inboxes and Slack queue cleaner, our brains a little freer, and our development team that much more efficient. Keep in mind that not every client or employee likes to use new tools, so we still allow other feedback options, we just try to default to this to keep things organized.
\n
It allows multiple people to leave feedback in one place.
\n
Of course, it’s easy to assign a single point of contact as a final word on a website, but how often does something get lost in translation? We’ve encountered scenarios when the people at the top are dictating their wants and needs to a marketing director or manager, only for the company’s CEO to step in with their internal team and provide the feedback our teams needed all along. In order to avoid issues with too many cooks in the kitchen while also allowing all eyes in for review, Pastel is a great alternative.
With Pastel, you can hover over sections of the website and pin comments to each section. The comment is sticky and remains in place as you navigate through the rest of the document. This allows you to easily click on comments while reviewing areas of concern to save time in describing issues and identifying the issue in question for the development team receiving the feedback.
You can also @mention any user to quickly ping them with a question, notify them of a new edit, or request an update. You can even hold clients and internal teams accountable by turning off commenting after a “comment deadline.” (This is a favorite feature for us when projects are running on tight timeframes and we need to hold everyone to their deadlines.)
\n
You can stay organized and keep up to date on progress.
\n
Keeping comments organized can sometimes be a hassle, and if your development team has a huge list of edits and bug fixes, they may not know exactly how to prioritize them. You can mark items as high priority or categorize your edits using labels. Once a comment is labeled, the team can review it in real time and address high priority items or certain categories of issues, such as bug fixes, before wishlist items or additional feature functionality are addressed.
Pastel also allows for status updates so you can see how edits are progressing in real time. A status can be updated from Active to In Progress to In Review to Resolved by a team member. This keeps a project management team up to date and allows them to communicate timeframes with the client to manage expectations accordingly.
\n
It offers “live” editing.
\n
Because Pastel pulls from the website URL, it allows you to use the same canvas for multiple rounds of edits if you want. If you use a live website URL for feedback, once the code is changed, the edits will reflect on the same document, allowing the team to verify those changes and make additional suggestions if needed.
It integrates with other common marketing tools for seamless ticket or task creation.
\n
We’ve spoken to the team at Pastel; they have a lot of great ideas about how they’ll continue to evolve the software. They’ve communicated that their intent is to build on the number of integrations they offer to make it easier for development teams to use Pastel. . They’ve also assured us that big things are on the horizon for the platform.
We asked Valentin Stakov, founder at Pastel, what the company’s focus was and what agencies and developers could expect from Pastel in the coming months. He said, \"We're planning on improving our existing integrations to make them more robust, as well as building additional integrations. We're also focused on building out more tools to make it easier to communicate with your clients and to keep them updated on their projects.\"
For now, their website lists the following integrations here:
Asana
Monday
Trello
Adobe XD
Jira
Finding a tool with a forward-thinking team is important; we look forward to seeing what integrations these guys come up with in the future.
It saves you time with additional functionality.
\n
Pastel has a few time-saving features as well.
Its interface allows you to easily add screenshots, upload files, and link URLs in the comments. If you want an image replaced on a web page, company file storage can sometimes take a bit to sort through.
Basic responsiveness tests are also a perk of Pastel. While we use real browsers when available and BrowserStack for full browser compatibility testing, the simple toggle on Pastel gives the client and other reviewers a way t to visualize what the website will look like on both mobile and desktop, allowing for more eyes on the process.
Another common activity during launch preparation is tweaking copy and headlines. While all our clients operating in HubSpot CMS have the flexibility to make updates to all content and headlines themselves, sometimes you need those perfect words to make a website look launch-ready.
\n
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
It avoids the 75-email edit strings
\n
According to a survey by Zippia.com, 80% of employees feel stressed because of ineffective company communication. Clearly no one likes inefficiency when it comes to communication, internally or externally.
One of the most difficult parts of managing communication surrounding website projects can be the multiple rounds of edits. If your developer or agency doesn’t have a simple way to communicate edits with a platform like Pastel, they can get caught in an endless string of back and forth messages.With no centralized feedback option, clients have to compile Google Docs, Powerpoint presentations, or those long strings of emails or Slack messages, which then need to be searched to find every single edit.
Not only does this increase the amount of time that a developer has to spend on updates, edits,and bug fixes, but sometimes a request can be overlooked, prolonging the process and sometimes even delaying the delivery of a completed site for review.
By having feedback centralized in Pastel, we avoid the extra communication, leaving our inboxes and Slack queue cleaner, our brains a little freer, and our development team that much more efficient. Keep in mind that not every client or employee likes to use new tools, so we still allow other feedback options, we just try to default to this to keep things organized.
\n
It allows multiple people to leave feedback in one place.
\n
Of course, it’s easy to assign a single point of contact as a final word on a website, but how often does something get lost in translation? We’ve encountered scenarios when the people at the top are dictating their wants and needs to a marketing director or manager, only for the company’s CEO to step in with their internal team and provide the feedback our teams needed all along. In order to avoid issues with too many cooks in the kitchen while also allowing all eyes in for review, Pastel is a great alternative.
With Pastel, you can hover over sections of the website and pin comments to each section. The comment is sticky and remains in place as you navigate through the rest of the document. This allows you to easily click on comments while reviewing areas of concern to save time in describing issues and identifying the issue in question for the development team receiving the feedback.
You can also @mention any user to quickly ping them with a question, notify them of a new edit, or request an update. You can even hold clients and internal teams accountable by turning off commenting after a “comment deadline.” (This is a favorite feature for us when projects are running on tight timeframes and we need to hold everyone to their deadlines.)
\n
You can stay organized and keep up to date on progress.
\n
Keeping comments organized can sometimes be a hassle, and if your development team has a huge list of edits and bug fixes, they may not know exactly how to prioritize them. You can mark items as high priority or categorize your edits using labels. Once a comment is labeled, the team can review it in real time and address high priority items or certain categories of issues, such as bug fixes, before wishlist items or additional feature functionality are addressed.
Pastel also allows for status updates so you can see how edits are progressing in real time. A status can be updated from Active to In Progress to In Review to Resolved by a team member. This keeps a project management team up to date and allows them to communicate timeframes with the client to manage expectations accordingly.
\n
It offers “live” editing.
\n
Because Pastel pulls from the website URL, it allows you to use the same canvas for multiple rounds of edits if you want. If you use a live website URL for feedback, once the code is changed, the edits will reflect on the same document, allowing the team to verify those changes and make additional suggestions if needed.
It integrates with other common marketing tools for seamless ticket or task creation.
\n
We’ve spoken to the team at Pastel; they have a lot of great ideas about how they’ll continue to evolve the software. They’ve communicated that their intent is to build on the number of integrations they offer to make it easier for development teams to use Pastel. . They’ve also assured us that big things are on the horizon for the platform.
We asked Valentin Stakov, founder at Pastel, what the company’s focus was and what agencies and developers could expect from Pastel in the coming months. He said, \"We're planning on improving our existing integrations to make them more robust, as well as building additional integrations. We're also focused on building out more tools to make it easier to communicate with your clients and to keep them updated on their projects.\"
For now, their website lists the following integrations here:
Asana
Monday
Trello
Adobe XD
Jira
Finding a tool with a forward-thinking team is important; we look forward to seeing what integrations these guys come up with in the future.
It saves you time with additional functionality.
\n
Pastel has a few time-saving features as well.
Its interface allows you to easily add screenshots, upload files, and link URLs in the comments. If you want an image replaced on a web page, company file storage can sometimes take a bit to sort through.
Basic responsiveness tests are also a perk of Pastel. While we use real browsers when available and BrowserStack for full browser compatibility testing, the simple toggle on Pastel gives the client and other reviewers a way t to visualize what the website will look like on both mobile and desktop, allowing for more eyes on the process.
Another common activity during launch preparation is tweaking copy and headlines. While all our clients operating in HubSpot CMS have the flexibility to make updates to all content and headlines themselves, sometimes you need those perfect words to make a website look launch-ready.
\n
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
There's a breakdown between sales and development, and its usually found in over-promising.
\n
We ask all our agency clients to include us in scoping and estimation of all projects and not to throw out a number until we have the opportunity to look closely at a website project, integration, or web app. When an executive or sales professional begins pitching a new website or integration project sale without getting preliminary information or including us on the call, we sometimes run into issues.
An account manager or even the executive team can throw out a ballpark figure based on their experience, only to find there’s a huge customer portal or some other sort of integration required to make it happen.
There is absolutely no question that talented HubSpot CMS developers are difficult to find and retain, but at times there can be issues associated with development that result from a sales or executive team that isn’t technically minded. We leave our booking link open to our clients and often sit in on sales calls with them to help determine the best course of action for a website project, based on budget, desired platform, functionality, required integrations, and goals.
When a sales professional runs a HubSpot CMS development project request meeting, they usually don’t know what information to ask for and miss a lot of important insights. By including your developer in the initial stages of the meeting, you can closely manage expectations and build confidence in your prospect or customer by showing them that you have people on your side that have executed these projects before and know exactly what is needed to complete them.
Sometimes when executive teams lack technical acumen, they are taken advantage of.
\n
We recently encountered a client whose Wordpress developer told them that they could develop a website in HubSpot CMS without any issues. A few weeks and thousands of dollars later, their web developer ghosted them and they went into their portal only to find hard-coded modules implemented that didn’t allow for marketers to complete any edits whatsoever without coding knowledge. It ended up costing them and their client thousands more to have the work entirely redone.
This is the type of issue that can occur if an agency is inexpensively outsourcing and doesn’t have much technical acumen. If you’re outsourcing cheap web development, you should at least consider paying a consultant or HubSpot developer to interview and vet your talent to make sure that you’re getting what you’re paying for.
When it comes to value, when you pay less you’ll compromise on something and pay for that lack of experience down the road. A gifted developer will work more efficiently and be better able to make suggestions during the sales process up front to not only give an accurate estimate, but to really wow the client by not just delivering what they want, but taking those ideas to the next level.
Related: Why an Experienced Web Developer? Your Website Isn't a Sub Sandwich.
\nAn experienced developer can really flex their skills and leverage the capabilities of HubSpot.
\n
Great developers geek out on things like custom objects, line of business application integrations, and other fun projects. If you’re just starting a website development project with an existing client or new prospect, your salesperson or executive team may not know how to take the robust tools available in HubSpot and really integrate the client’s website and business processes into it.
By leveraging an experienced developer as a technical director, you can include them where necessary in your sales meetings and take the time to understand how tools like Operations Hub, Services Hub, and Sales Hub can integrate with your website to create a truly comprehensive experience for the client and customer.
The client expects the expertise that you promised them.
\n
We prefer to work with agencies. They have the understanding and knowledge of the process to create a really amazing website design that functions in a way that serves the customer. They usually have a seamless process for design, they’re willing to interface with the client, and they usually bring us well-qualified clients that “get it.” Our relationships with our agency clients are our favorite and most consistent relationships, hands down.
Every now and then we are referred to an agency that wants to operate on price alone. They don’t understand the value of a gifted developer, they aren’t seeing the red flags that pop up when they find cheap development, and they don’t have a process in place to quality control the work that they do outsource. Most often, those clients don’t have a robust web development side of their business.
We find this interesting, because in the same sales meeting where that agency convinced the client of their value, they’re selling a project short by not honoring their own beliefs when it comes to getting value for what you’re willing to pay for.
We get it. Business is business. But you can’t, in good conscience, pitch a mission to bring incredible marketing into the world and let your development lag short of that, can you?
Related: 6 Signs it's Time to Ditch Your HubSpot Developer
\n
When you spend so much time talking about customer delight, but also spend a lot of time trying to find the cheapest way to source your development talent while still billing the client as much as possible, we’re not sure you’re being true to your mission.
Instead, maybe what you get in value in these projects over time and the increased trust from your clients and customers means that paying a little more up front is worth it.
Maybe spending a little more for experienced developers that you bring into the fold as part of your sales process can be a complete game-changer for the services you offer and the ways you delight your clients and customers.
Maybe you can completely change your agency by hiring top-tier talent.
We like to think so anyway.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
There's a breakdown between sales and development, and its usually found in over-promising.
\n
We ask all our agency clients to include us in scoping and estimation of all projects and not to throw out a number until we have the opportunity to look closely at a website project, integration, or web app. When an executive or sales professional begins pitching a new website or integration project sale without getting preliminary information or including us on the call, we sometimes run into issues.
An account manager or even the executive team can throw out a ballpark figure based on their experience, only to find there’s a huge customer portal or some other sort of integration required to make it happen.
There is absolutely no question that talented HubSpot CMS developers are difficult to find and retain, but at times there can be issues associated with development that result from a sales or executive team that isn’t technically minded. We leave our booking link open to our clients and often sit in on sales calls with them to help determine the best course of action for a website project, based on budget, desired platform, functionality, required integrations, and goals.
When a sales professional runs a HubSpot CMS development project request meeting, they usually don’t know what information to ask for and miss a lot of important insights. By including your developer in the initial stages of the meeting, you can closely manage expectations and build confidence in your prospect or customer by showing them that you have people on your side that have executed these projects before and know exactly what is needed to complete them.
Sometimes when executive teams lack technical acumen, they are taken advantage of.
\n
We recently encountered a client whose Wordpress developer told them that they could develop a website in HubSpot CMS without any issues. A few weeks and thousands of dollars later, their web developer ghosted them and they went into their portal only to find hard-coded modules implemented that didn’t allow for marketers to complete any edits whatsoever without coding knowledge. It ended up costing them and their client thousands more to have the work entirely redone.
This is the type of issue that can occur if an agency is inexpensively outsourcing and doesn’t have much technical acumen. If you’re outsourcing cheap web development, you should at least consider paying a consultant or HubSpot developer to interview and vet your talent to make sure that you’re getting what you’re paying for.
When it comes to value, when you pay less you’ll compromise on something and pay for that lack of experience down the road. A gifted developer will work more efficiently and be better able to make suggestions during the sales process up front to not only give an accurate estimate, but to really wow the client by not just delivering what they want, but taking those ideas to the next level.
Related: Why an Experienced Web Developer? Your Website Isn't a Sub Sandwich.
\nAn experienced developer can really flex their skills and leverage the capabilities of HubSpot.
\n
Great developers geek out on things like custom objects, line of business application integrations, and other fun projects. If you’re just starting a website development project with an existing client or new prospect, your salesperson or executive team may not know how to take the robust tools available in HubSpot and really integrate the client’s website and business processes into it.
By leveraging an experienced developer as a technical director, you can include them where necessary in your sales meetings and take the time to understand how tools like Operations Hub, Services Hub, and Sales Hub can integrate with your website to create a truly comprehensive experience for the client and customer.
The client expects the expertise that you promised them.
\n
We prefer to work with agencies. They have the understanding and knowledge of the process to create a really amazing website design that functions in a way that serves the customer. They usually have a seamless process for design, they’re willing to interface with the client, and they usually bring us well-qualified clients that “get it.” Our relationships with our agency clients are our favorite and most consistent relationships, hands down.
Every now and then we are referred to an agency that wants to operate on price alone. They don’t understand the value of a gifted developer, they aren’t seeing the red flags that pop up when they find cheap development, and they don’t have a process in place to quality control the work that they do outsource. Most often, those clients don’t have a robust web development side of their business.
We find this interesting, because in the same sales meeting where that agency convinced the client of their value, they’re selling a project short by not honoring their own beliefs when it comes to getting value for what you’re willing to pay for.
We get it. Business is business. But you can’t, in good conscience, pitch a mission to bring incredible marketing into the world and let your development lag short of that, can you?
Related: 6 Signs it's Time to Ditch Your HubSpot Developer
\n
When you spend so much time talking about customer delight, but also spend a lot of time trying to find the cheapest way to source your development talent while still billing the client as much as possible, we’re not sure you’re being true to your mission.
Instead, maybe what you get in value in these projects over time and the increased trust from your clients and customers means that paying a little more up front is worth it.
Maybe spending a little more for experienced developers that you bring into the fold as part of your sales process can be a complete game-changer for the services you offer and the ways you delight your clients and customers.
Maybe you can completely change your agency by hiring top-tier talent.
We like to think so anyway.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
There's a breakdown between sales and development, and its usually found in over-promising.
\n
We ask all our agency clients to include us in scoping and estimation of all projects and not to throw out a number until we have the opportunity to look closely at a website project, integration, or web app. When an executive or sales professional begins pitching a new website or integration project sale without getting preliminary information or including us on the call, we sometimes run into issues.
An account manager or even the executive team can throw out a ballpark figure based on their experience, only to find there’s a huge customer portal or some other sort of integration required to make it happen.
There is absolutely no question that talented HubSpot CMS developers are difficult to find and retain, but at times there can be issues associated with development that result from a sales or executive team that isn’t technically minded. We leave our booking link open to our clients and often sit in on sales calls with them to help determine the best course of action for a website project, based on budget, desired platform, functionality, required integrations, and goals.
When a sales professional runs a HubSpot CMS development project request meeting, they usually don’t know what information to ask for and miss a lot of important insights. By including your developer in the initial stages of the meeting, you can closely manage expectations and build confidence in your prospect or customer by showing them that you have people on your side that have executed these projects before and know exactly what is needed to complete them.
Sometimes when executive teams lack technical acumen, they are taken advantage of.
\n
We recently encountered a client whose Wordpress developer told them that they could develop a website in HubSpot CMS without any issues. A few weeks and thousands of dollars later, their web developer ghosted them and they went into their portal only to find hard-coded modules implemented that didn’t allow for marketers to complete any edits whatsoever without coding knowledge. It ended up costing them and their client thousands more to have the work entirely redone.
This is the type of issue that can occur if an agency is inexpensively outsourcing and doesn’t have much technical acumen. If you’re outsourcing cheap web development, you should at least consider paying a consultant or HubSpot developer to interview and vet your talent to make sure that you’re getting what you’re paying for.
When it comes to value, when you pay less you’ll compromise on something and pay for that lack of experience down the road. A gifted developer will work more efficiently and be better able to make suggestions during the sales process up front to not only give an accurate estimate, but to really wow the client by not just delivering what they want, but taking those ideas to the next level.
Related: Why an Experienced Web Developer? Your Website Isn't a Sub Sandwich.
\nAn experienced developer can really flex their skills and leverage the capabilities of HubSpot.
\n
Great developers geek out on things like custom objects, line of business application integrations, and other fun projects. If you’re just starting a website development project with an existing client or new prospect, your salesperson or executive team may not know how to take the robust tools available in HubSpot and really integrate the client’s website and business processes into it.
By leveraging an experienced developer as a technical director, you can include them where necessary in your sales meetings and take the time to understand how tools like Operations Hub, Services Hub, and Sales Hub can integrate with your website to create a truly comprehensive experience for the client and customer.
The client expects the expertise that you promised them.
\n
We prefer to work with agencies. They have the understanding and knowledge of the process to create a really amazing website design that functions in a way that serves the customer. They usually have a seamless process for design, they’re willing to interface with the client, and they usually bring us well-qualified clients that “get it.” Our relationships with our agency clients are our favorite and most consistent relationships, hands down.
Every now and then we are referred to an agency that wants to operate on price alone. They don’t understand the value of a gifted developer, they aren’t seeing the red flags that pop up when they find cheap development, and they don’t have a process in place to quality control the work that they do outsource. Most often, those clients don’t have a robust web development side of their business.
We find this interesting, because in the same sales meeting where that agency convinced the client of their value, they’re selling a project short by not honoring their own beliefs when it comes to getting value for what you’re willing to pay for.
We get it. Business is business. But you can’t, in good conscience, pitch a mission to bring incredible marketing into the world and let your development lag short of that, can you?
Related: 6 Signs it's Time to Ditch Your HubSpot Developer
\n
When you spend so much time talking about customer delight, but also spend a lot of time trying to find the cheapest way to source your development talent while still billing the client as much as possible, we’re not sure you’re being true to your mission.
Instead, maybe what you get in value in these projects over time and the increased trust from your clients and customers means that paying a little more up front is worth it.
Maybe spending a little more for experienced developers that you bring into the fold as part of your sales process can be a complete game-changer for the services you offer and the ways you delight your clients and customers.
Maybe you can completely change your agency by hiring top-tier talent.
We like to think so anyway.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
There's a breakdown between sales and development, and its usually found in over-promising.
\n
We ask all our agency clients to include us in scoping and estimation of all projects and not to throw out a number until we have the opportunity to look closely at a website project, integration, or web app. When an executive or sales professional begins pitching a new website or integration project sale without getting preliminary information or including us on the call, we sometimes run into issues.
An account manager or even the executive team can throw out a ballpark figure based on their experience, only to find there’s a huge customer portal or some other sort of integration required to make it happen.
There is absolutely no question that talented HubSpot CMS developers are difficult to find and retain, but at times there can be issues associated with development that result from a sales or executive team that isn’t technically minded. We leave our booking link open to our clients and often sit in on sales calls with them to help determine the best course of action for a website project, based on budget, desired platform, functionality, required integrations, and goals.
When a sales professional runs a HubSpot CMS development project request meeting, they usually don’t know what information to ask for and miss a lot of important insights. By including your developer in the initial stages of the meeting, you can closely manage expectations and build confidence in your prospect or customer by showing them that you have people on your side that have executed these projects before and know exactly what is needed to complete them.
Sometimes when executive teams lack technical acumen, they are taken advantage of.
\n
We recently encountered a client whose Wordpress developer told them that they could develop a website in HubSpot CMS without any issues. A few weeks and thousands of dollars later, their web developer ghosted them and they went into their portal only to find hard-coded modules implemented that didn’t allow for marketers to complete any edits whatsoever without coding knowledge. It ended up costing them and their client thousands more to have the work entirely redone.
This is the type of issue that can occur if an agency is inexpensively outsourcing and doesn’t have much technical acumen. If you’re outsourcing cheap web development, you should at least consider paying a consultant or HubSpot developer to interview and vet your talent to make sure that you’re getting what you’re paying for.
When it comes to value, when you pay less you’ll compromise on something and pay for that lack of experience down the road. A gifted developer will work more efficiently and be better able to make suggestions during the sales process up front to not only give an accurate estimate, but to really wow the client by not just delivering what they want, but taking those ideas to the next level.
Related: Why an Experienced Web Developer? Your Website Isn't a Sub Sandwich.
\nAn experienced developer can really flex their skills and leverage the capabilities of HubSpot.
\n
Great developers geek out on things like custom objects, line of business application integrations, and other fun projects. If you’re just starting a website development project with an existing client or new prospect, your salesperson or executive team may not know how to take the robust tools available in HubSpot and really integrate the client’s website and business processes into it.
By leveraging an experienced developer as a technical director, you can include them where necessary in your sales meetings and take the time to understand how tools like Operations Hub, Services Hub, and Sales Hub can integrate with your website to create a truly comprehensive experience for the client and customer.
The client expects the expertise that you promised them.
\n
We prefer to work with agencies. They have the understanding and knowledge of the process to create a really amazing website design that functions in a way that serves the customer. They usually have a seamless process for design, they’re willing to interface with the client, and they usually bring us well-qualified clients that “get it.” Our relationships with our agency clients are our favorite and most consistent relationships, hands down.
Every now and then we are referred to an agency that wants to operate on price alone. They don’t understand the value of a gifted developer, they aren’t seeing the red flags that pop up when they find cheap development, and they don’t have a process in place to quality control the work that they do outsource. Most often, those clients don’t have a robust web development side of their business.
We find this interesting, because in the same sales meeting where that agency convinced the client of their value, they’re selling a project short by not honoring their own beliefs when it comes to getting value for what you’re willing to pay for.
We get it. Business is business. But you can’t, in good conscience, pitch a mission to bring incredible marketing into the world and let your development lag short of that, can you?
Related: 6 Signs it's Time to Ditch Your HubSpot Developer
\n
When you spend so much time talking about customer delight, but also spend a lot of time trying to find the cheapest way to source your development talent while still billing the client as much as possible, we’re not sure you’re being true to your mission.
Instead, maybe what you get in value in these projects over time and the increased trust from your clients and customers means that paying a little more up front is worth it.
Maybe spending a little more for experienced developers that you bring into the fold as part of your sales process can be a complete game-changer for the services you offer and the ways you delight your clients and customers.
Maybe you can completely change your agency by hiring top-tier talent.
We like to think so anyway.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
There's a breakdown between sales and development, and its usually found in over-promising.
\n
We ask all our agency clients to include us in scoping and estimation of all projects and not to throw out a number until we have the opportunity to look closely at a website project, integration, or web app. When an executive or sales professional begins pitching a new website or integration project sale without getting preliminary information or including us on the call, we sometimes run into issues.
An account manager or even the executive team can throw out a ballpark figure based on their experience, only to find there’s a huge customer portal or some other sort of integration required to make it happen.
There is absolutely no question that talented HubSpot CMS developers are difficult to find and retain, but at times there can be issues associated with development that result from a sales or executive team that isn’t technically minded. We leave our booking link open to our clients and often sit in on sales calls with them to help determine the best course of action for a website project, based on budget, desired platform, functionality, required integrations, and goals.
When a sales professional runs a HubSpot CMS development project request meeting, they usually don’t know what information to ask for and miss a lot of important insights. By including your developer in the initial stages of the meeting, you can closely manage expectations and build confidence in your prospect or customer by showing them that you have people on your side that have executed these projects before and know exactly what is needed to complete them.
Sometimes when executive teams lack technical acumen, they are taken advantage of.
\n
We recently encountered a client whose Wordpress developer told them that they could develop a website in HubSpot CMS without any issues. A few weeks and thousands of dollars later, their web developer ghosted them and they went into their portal only to find hard-coded modules implemented that didn’t allow for marketers to complete any edits whatsoever without coding knowledge. It ended up costing them and their client thousands more to have the work entirely redone.
This is the type of issue that can occur if an agency is inexpensively outsourcing and doesn’t have much technical acumen. If you’re outsourcing cheap web development, you should at least consider paying a consultant or HubSpot developer to interview and vet your talent to make sure that you’re getting what you’re paying for.
When it comes to value, when you pay less you’ll compromise on something and pay for that lack of experience down the road. A gifted developer will work more efficiently and be better able to make suggestions during the sales process up front to not only give an accurate estimate, but to really wow the client by not just delivering what they want, but taking those ideas to the next level.
Related: Why an Experienced Web Developer? Your Website Isn't a Sub Sandwich.
\nAn experienced developer can really flex their skills and leverage the capabilities of HubSpot.
\n
Great developers geek out on things like custom objects, line of business application integrations, and other fun projects. If you’re just starting a website development project with an existing client or new prospect, your salesperson or executive team may not know how to take the robust tools available in HubSpot and really integrate the client’s website and business processes into it.
By leveraging an experienced developer as a technical director, you can include them where necessary in your sales meetings and take the time to understand how tools like Operations Hub, Services Hub, and Sales Hub can integrate with your website to create a truly comprehensive experience for the client and customer.
The client expects the expertise that you promised them.
\n
We prefer to work with agencies. They have the understanding and knowledge of the process to create a really amazing website design that functions in a way that serves the customer. They usually have a seamless process for design, they’re willing to interface with the client, and they usually bring us well-qualified clients that “get it.” Our relationships with our agency clients are our favorite and most consistent relationships, hands down.
Every now and then we are referred to an agency that wants to operate on price alone. They don’t understand the value of a gifted developer, they aren’t seeing the red flags that pop up when they find cheap development, and they don’t have a process in place to quality control the work that they do outsource. Most often, those clients don’t have a robust web development side of their business.
We find this interesting, because in the same sales meeting where that agency convinced the client of their value, they’re selling a project short by not honoring their own beliefs when it comes to getting value for what you’re willing to pay for.
We get it. Business is business. But you can’t, in good conscience, pitch a mission to bring incredible marketing into the world and let your development lag short of that, can you?
Related: 6 Signs it's Time to Ditch Your HubSpot Developer
\n
When you spend so much time talking about customer delight, but also spend a lot of time trying to find the cheapest way to source your development talent while still billing the client as much as possible, we’re not sure you’re being true to your mission.
Instead, maybe what you get in value in these projects over time and the increased trust from your clients and customers means that paying a little more up front is worth it.
Maybe spending a little more for experienced developers that you bring into the fold as part of your sales process can be a complete game-changer for the services you offer and the ways you delight your clients and customers.
Maybe you can completely change your agency by hiring top-tier talent.
We like to think so anyway.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.