Epic love stories don’t come around too often, do they? The internet is absolutely losing it over the love story unfolding between Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs Travis Kelce and we’ve got to say, the AFC championship pics had us inspired to talk about a little love affair of our own that’s unfolding. With Valentine’s Day around the corner, we’re exploring ways that we can improve the relationship that agencies and HubSpot users alike have with their websites and the interfaces that power them inside HubSpot, while balancing the ultimate hurdle - your budget. It has taken years of meetings and negotiations and trying to figure out how to service businesses of all sizes for us to launch this - but nothing worth having comes easy, right? Especially innovation - and love. 

We want customers to not only love their websites when they spend $50,000 on them. We want them to love them when they only have $15,000 to spend. That’s a huge part of the reason that deckerdevs HubSpot custom theme builder happened to begin with. 

Understand that great relationships are built over time

Just like it has taken Taylor Swift many, many different relationships (and songs recounting them) to land in the mutually supportive relationship she has with Travis Kelce, it takes a long time to build the perfect website for you. Sometimes, you’re not ready for exactly what you’re looking for. Sometimes you don’t have the budget, sometimes the timing is wrong, or sometimes it’s just not the right person for what you need. All of these things are as true in web development as they are in love. 

Historically, loving your website couldn’t happen overnight, particularly if you had a smaller budget… and even more particularly if you were hosted on WordPress and wanted to switch your website over to HubSpot. But, what you may not realize, is with the right foundation you can start with something slightly smaller, do a little work and let it blossom over time with the right person (or right web developer) into something beautiful, unbreakable, and perfectly what you need. 

By establishing a relationship with a developer before you purchase a template, custom HubSpot CMS theme builder, or going all in on a fully custom website, you’re not only able to properly vet your partner and explore how your relationship will unfold, but understand their workflow knowing that you’re on the same page about everything before you get started. 

Start with a solid foundation

Building a website that you can fall in love with requires the right foundation. Templates can be useful, but often require much more customization that you might first realize and usually by the time a business realizes they need help with the template, they are locked into a developer they’ve never met. 

On the other hand, if you’re looking at a more custom website, this will start at tens of thousands of dollars straight away and odds are good you’re going to run out of budget before you’ve addressed all the bells and whistles you need and have to come out of pocket for more tweaks, integrations and custom development features. 

Every business has different priorities, but at the end of the day you need a place where prospects and customers can connect with you on a different level, learn more about your products and services, and hopefully “get” who you are and how you resolve all of the issues they’ve come to you with. 

Foundationally, your budget doesn’t matter as much as your ability to persistently tweak your website according to those valuable analytics reports that you’re paying for and update your website easily in ways that help optimize conversion. 

A great relationship isn’t all or nothing straightaway. It builds over time on a steady, flexible foundation built to withstand the growing burdens of business and life. 

Understand that what happens behind the scenes is as important as the public view

Celebrity relationships are certainly under a lot of scrutiny and Taylor Swift is probably receiving more scrutiny than any other A list celebrity, by far. For this reason, their PR specialists are probably on them to make sure that their relationship from the outside looks as perfect as possible. But it’s often the things that no one sees that can make or break a relationship and the same concept applies to your website. 

Aesthetic websites are always a huge fixation - and while the bells and whistles can certainly be nice, we already know that establishing that foundational framework is the most important thing. That’s why, for us, at least, we focus on that first. HubSpot CMS is already an incredibly user friendly platform - it’s literally why it was built. But that doesn’t mean that every developer that builds a website inside there knows exactly what they’re doing. Or that they’re creating websites that are as solid on the back end as they are on the front end. 

Flexible modules that allow you to modify for many different use cases can give  your marketing team the tools they need to not only upload content easily, but also refine the look and feel of your website using existing tools. Not having to go through a developer every single time the smallest tweak is needed is a huge productivity boost for your team and will leave them happier and more productive, creating content on your website at regular intervals that will better inform your website prospects. 

Behind the scenes you need to be as happy as you are with the look and feel of your website - so ask the right questions and make sure that your developer is focused on this so you can fall in love with the end result. 

RELATED: questions to ask your HubSpot CMS developer

Long term support makes all the difference

Critical to a successful relationship is external support. You can’t remain in a relationship without support when things don’t go the way you need them to. If your website needs some updates, or if a feature isn’t working the way you thought it would, you need to be able to rely on a team that’s going to help you resolve things, provide adequate training and make sure you have everything you need to keep building. You already know that websites are ever-evolving monsters that need to be fed content, tweaked based on analytics and new campaigns and upgraded every now and then to account for how your content library is performing. 

By partnering up with an experienced and reliable HubSpot CMS developer and establishing a close supportive relationship with them from the outset, you can get the appropriate training to build the website of your dreams knowing that your developer is behind you, while still empowering you with an infrastructure that works.

Falling in love is easy, staying in love can be difficult - particularly if you’ve invested lots of money and aren’t getting the flexibility and results you need from an expensive custom website or re-hashed and customized HubSpot theme. With the support of an experienced developer? You’re off to the races and continually refining your website - off to the Super Bowl in no time. 

For the longest time there were two options - pay tons of money for a custom website or use a template theme that isn’t built exactly the way you need it to be built. Now? There’s a third. Using a custom theme builder, you can take all the best aspects of the control and DIY of a template website with the custom CSS development and feature enrichment that comes with a fully custom website. Depending on your budget, you can do the legwork with training, onboarding and support or you can customize the experience to add features and get more help in building out your pages. 

Step a little outside your comfort zone and you might find that a great love is on the horizon.