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How to Organize a Mega Menu for IT Managed Services Company
Here's how to organize your mega menu for IT managed services companies.
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When it comes to the specifics of organizing a mega menu, every business and industry is totally different. While some service offerings for consumer service brands might be very basic, a B2B brand with complex services offerings or retail brands with lots of different categories might need to go about how they organize a mega menu totally differently. The competition and market share in the IT Managed Services space has grown exponentially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Yahoo, The industry is estimated to reach nearly $245 billion by the end of 2022. From remote employment to cloud hosting, data access, and managing security breaches, the role of the IT Managed Services Company is more important than ever in the world of business. But how can you create a mega menu that encompasses the breadth of the services, industries, and resources that you offer without inundating your prospects?
\n\n![\"Charlie](\"https://i.imgflip.com/1itoun.jpg?a463920\")
Planning and organization are everything here.
Here are a few things you need to know when it comes to learning how to organize a mega menu in the IT Managed Services industry:
\nBuyer Personas & Industries
\nIT Managed Services Companies usually have a few different buyer personas, depending on the types of businesses they serve. They might be talking to an IT Director or CTO, an Operations Manager or a business owner. The daily focuses and concerns for each of these roles are all totally different.
While a high level Chief Technology Officer or Chief Information Office may be focused on evolving technology or business continuity, an Operations Manager or COO might be focused on employee efficiency or customer service. All of these personas will be a bit bottom-line driven, but none more than the CEO or CFO inside an organization. The executive and management levels at these companies may work in any different industry and have varied responsibilities based on their unique role in the organizations. These are important CTAs to consider, in addition to any industry verticals that you may want to address whose focuses might be even more specific.
If you have specific industries you specialize in like Construction, Nonprofit or Real Estate, you’ll want to break these down in your mega menu. While most IT professionals and Managed Services companies understand that a blanket proactive approach to IT can be applied across industries, it does make professionals feel good when they know that a vendor has experience in their particular industry.
Content Categories, Symptoms or Benefits
\nYou’ll want to make sure that you categorize your content with symptoms and benefits, for your top-funnel prospects that are not as well versed in your service offerings. Ask yourself: What are the categories of content that you’re writing about for your audience? These might correlate with your services, which you’ll list separately, but might more directly speak to the issues or symptoms that your prospects or buyer personas are suffering from. Categorizing your content by the types of problems that your prospects are trying to solve is a great way to guide them down further into their buyer journey by speaking to their problems directly.
For a Managed Services Company mega menu, you might want to include items like, “Employee Efficiency, Disaster Recovery Planning and Malware & Virus Protection,” rather than industry specific services like, “Business Continuity” or “Technology Planning” or “Security Services” - speaking to symptoms or benefits helps avoid jargon and keeps the benefit or chief concern front and center - which is usually the best option for prospects that still find themselves early in the decision making process.
Services
\nListing your services by the names they’re recognized for in your industry is still important for prospects at the bottom of the funnel or referral resources that need a quick understanding of what you do. If you don’t have enough space in your navigation to address both, symptoms and services you can use some real estate in your mega menu for a short description sentence that outlines the benefits or symptoms associated with your service lines to combine the last point with this one.
For the IT industry specifically, services terms like Business Continuity and Cloud Services may resonate with well-qualified prospects like an IT Director, CTO or CIO while the more general symptom-specific categories listed above might appeal more to an Operations Executive, CEO or Management Level prospect or buyer that is less familiar with the offerings associated with the Managed Services industry. Your mega menu has the ability to address both with either separate categories or additional areas for descriptions.
Icons
If you don’t have much real estate to offer descriptions or just want to add a little extra flair to your mega menu, Icons are a great way to help a prospect further understand information in the services section. It can also help provide a graphical representation for top-funnel prospects if they’re unfamiliar with industry jargon.
For Managed Services companies, a shield to indicate security protection, a cloud for cloud hosting, a phone icon for VOIP services — there are a number of icons to help further explain your services without using too much additional real estate on lengthy descriptions. Icons can say a lot, keep things clear and concise and direct your buyers easily.
Tools or Resources
\nThis is usually the most complicated aspect of the mega menu planning process, since the arsenal of content for organizations with a digital strategy is usually quite large. An IT company might have a disaster recovery checklist, an IT security eBook, a guide for choosing the best VOIP system, a webinar breaking down the latest security threat or phishing attempt, or pillar pages that really help a prospect dig into to the different aspects of business continuity, employee efficiency and how it all impacts the bottom line, bringing those resources all together.
Multiple content types, topics and mediums of delivery make that pretty complicated to break down on a mega menu alone. We highly recommend resource center filters and in some cases multiple filters to help your website prospects better sift through that content. You can break your mega menu categories down by content type, add that content by industry or as it relates to the symptoms your fix and and services you provide.
If you have pillar pages to organize your content, they might have previously been hidden deep within a resource center or only found through a CTA or organic search. A mega menu can change that, placing your highest converting content at the top of the page in your mega menu using a featured content area, image, CTA or link.
Get creative with how you layout your resources and tools within the different categories provided and feel free to experiment with different formats over a certain time period to test what seems to work the best.
Smart Content
\nSmart content is being used more and more in e-mails, on website landing pages and inside services pages, but what about navigation? If you’re a HubSpot customer, HubSpot doesn’t include smart content in navigation out of the box, but we are huge supporters of taking technology to the next level and we’ve been experimenting with smart content in mega menu formats.
If a user has filled out a form, your development team can create a sophisticated mega menu based on forms that the prospect has filled out previously or content viewed on the website. If your prospect has downloaded and consumed multiple resources regarding Business Continuity services, for example, your mega menu can be configured to display content that aids them in their buyer journey by placing business continuity, disaster planning, cloud hosting and backup solutions front and center in their mega menu display.
Content mapping to the buyer journey is much more powerful when you enable smart content. HubSpot users can even combine smart content with lead scores and custom buyer journey mapping properties in HubSpot. An experienced HubSpot developer can really supercharge what HubSpot provides out of the box.
Mega menus are seriously unutilized and as a technology company, IT Managed Services providers really need to explore how a robust mega menu can really help their users access all the valuable content they publish. Organize that content by industry, service, symptom and benefit and place the most important CTAs inside your mega menu using icons, links, graphics and buttons to take your mega menu to the next level.
Ready to implement a mega menu for your IT Managed Services company website, but not sure where to start? Schedule a meeting and let’s break it down together.
When it comes to the specifics of organizing a mega menu, every business and industry is totally different. While some service offerings for consumer service brands might be very basic, a B2B brand with complex services offerings or retail brands with lots of different categories might need to go about how they organize a mega menu totally differently. The competition and market share in the IT Managed Services space has grown exponentially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Yahoo, The industry is estimated to reach nearly $245 billion by the end of 2022. From remote employment to cloud hosting, data access, and managing security breaches, the role of the IT Managed Services Company is more important than ever in the world of business. But how can you create a mega menu that encompasses the breadth of the services, industries, and resources that you offer without inundating your prospects?
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\n\n
Planning and organization are everything here.
Here are a few things you need to know when it comes to learning how to organize a mega menu in the IT Managed Services industry:
\nBuyer Personas & Industries
\nIT Managed Services Companies usually have a few different buyer personas, depending on the types of businesses they serve. They might be talking to an IT Director or CTO, an Operations Manager or a business owner. The daily focuses and concerns for each of these roles are all totally different.
While a high level Chief Technology Officer or Chief Information Office may be focused on evolving technology or business continuity, an Operations Manager or COO might be focused on employee efficiency or customer service. All of these personas will be a bit bottom-line driven, but none more than the CEO or CFO inside an organization. The executive and management levels at these companies may work in any different industry and have varied responsibilities based on their unique role in the organizations. These are important CTAs to consider, in addition to any industry verticals that you may want to address whose focuses might be even more specific.
If you have specific industries you specialize in like Construction, Nonprofit or Real Estate, you’ll want to break these down in your mega menu. While most IT professionals and Managed Services companies understand that a blanket proactive approach to IT can be applied across industries, it does make professionals feel good when they know that a vendor has experience in their particular industry.
Content Categories, Symptoms or Benefits
\nYou’ll want to make sure that you categorize your content with symptoms and benefits, for your top-funnel prospects that are not as well versed in your service offerings. Ask yourself: What are the categories of content that you’re writing about for your audience? These might correlate with your services, which you’ll list separately, but might more directly speak to the issues or symptoms that your prospects or buyer personas are suffering from. Categorizing your content by the types of problems that your prospects are trying to solve is a great way to guide them down further into their buyer journey by speaking to their problems directly.
For a Managed Services Company mega menu, you might want to include items like, “Employee Efficiency, Disaster Recovery Planning and Malware & Virus Protection,” rather than industry specific services like, “Business Continuity” or “Technology Planning” or “Security Services” - speaking to symptoms or benefits helps avoid jargon and keeps the benefit or chief concern front and center - which is usually the best option for prospects that still find themselves early in the decision making process.
Services
\nListing your services by the names they’re recognized for in your industry is still important for prospects at the bottom of the funnel or referral resources that need a quick understanding of what you do. If you don’t have enough space in your navigation to address both, symptoms and services you can use some real estate in your mega menu for a short description sentence that outlines the benefits or symptoms associated with your service lines to combine the last point with this one.
For the IT industry specifically, services terms like Business Continuity and Cloud Services may resonate with well-qualified prospects like an IT Director, CTO or CIO while the more general symptom-specific categories listed above might appeal more to an Operations Executive, CEO or Management Level prospect or buyer that is less familiar with the offerings associated with the Managed Services industry. Your mega menu has the ability to address both with either separate categories or additional areas for descriptions.
Icons
If you don’t have much real estate to offer descriptions or just want to add a little extra flair to your mega menu, Icons are a great way to help a prospect further understand information in the services section. It can also help provide a graphical representation for top-funnel prospects if they’re unfamiliar with industry jargon.
For Managed Services companies, a shield to indicate security protection, a cloud for cloud hosting, a phone icon for VOIP services — there are a number of icons to help further explain your services without using too much additional real estate on lengthy descriptions. Icons can say a lot, keep things clear and concise and direct your buyers easily.
Tools or Resources
\nThis is usually the most complicated aspect of the mega menu planning process, since the arsenal of content for organizations with a digital strategy is usually quite large. An IT company might have a disaster recovery checklist, an IT security eBook, a guide for choosing the best VOIP system, a webinar breaking down the latest security threat or phishing attempt, or pillar pages that really help a prospect dig into to the different aspects of business continuity, employee efficiency and how it all impacts the bottom line, bringing those resources all together.
Multiple content types, topics and mediums of delivery make that pretty complicated to break down on a mega menu alone. We highly recommend resource center filters and in some cases multiple filters to help your website prospects better sift through that content. You can break your mega menu categories down by content type, add that content by industry or as it relates to the symptoms your fix and and services you provide.
If you have pillar pages to organize your content, they might have previously been hidden deep within a resource center or only found through a CTA or organic search. A mega menu can change that, placing your highest converting content at the top of the page in your mega menu using a featured content area, image, CTA or link.
Get creative with how you layout your resources and tools within the different categories provided and feel free to experiment with different formats over a certain time period to test what seems to work the best.
Smart Content
\nSmart content is being used more and more in e-mails, on website landing pages and inside services pages, but what about navigation? If you’re a HubSpot customer, HubSpot doesn’t include smart content in navigation out of the box, but we are huge supporters of taking technology to the next level and we’ve been experimenting with smart content in mega menu formats.
If a user has filled out a form, your development team can create a sophisticated mega menu based on forms that the prospect has filled out previously or content viewed on the website. If your prospect has downloaded and consumed multiple resources regarding Business Continuity services, for example, your mega menu can be configured to display content that aids them in their buyer journey by placing business continuity, disaster planning, cloud hosting and backup solutions front and center in their mega menu display.
Content mapping to the buyer journey is much more powerful when you enable smart content. HubSpot users can even combine smart content with lead scores and custom buyer journey mapping properties in HubSpot. An experienced HubSpot developer can really supercharge what HubSpot provides out of the box.
Mega menus are seriously unutilized and as a technology company, IT Managed Services providers really need to explore how a robust mega menu can really help their users access all the valuable content they publish. Organize that content by industry, service, symptom and benefit and place the most important CTAs inside your mega menu using icons, links, graphics and buttons to take your mega menu to the next level.
Ready to implement a mega menu for your IT Managed Services company website, but not sure where to start? Schedule a meeting and let’s break it down together.
When it comes to the specifics of organizing a mega menu, every business and industry is totally different. While some service offerings for consumer service brands might be very basic, a B2B brand with complex services offerings or retail brands with lots of different categories might need to go about how they organize a mega menu totally differently. The competition and market share in the IT Managed Services space has grown exponentially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Yahoo, The industry is estimated to reach nearly $245 billion by the end of 2022. From remote employment to cloud hosting, data access, and managing security breaches, the role of the IT Managed Services Company is more important than ever in the world of business. But how can you create a mega menu that encompasses the breadth of the services, industries, and resources that you offer without inundating your prospects?
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While some service offerings for consumer service brands might be very basic, a B2B brand with complex services offerings or retail brands with lots of different categories might need to go about how they organize a mega menu totally differently. The competition and market share in the IT Managed Services space has grown exponentially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Yahoo, The industry is estimated to reach nearly $245 billion by the end of 2022. From remote employment to cloud hosting, data access, and managing security breaches, the role of the IT Managed Services Company is more important than ever in the world of business. But how can you create a mega menu that encompasses the breadth of the services, industries, and resources that you offer without inundating your prospects?
\n\n
Planning and organization are everything here.
Here are a few things you need to know when it comes to learning how to organize a mega menu in the IT Managed Services industry:
\nBuyer Personas & Industries
\nIT Managed Services Companies usually have a few different buyer personas, depending on the types of businesses they serve. They might be talking to an IT Director or CTO, an Operations Manager or a business owner. The daily focuses and concerns for each of these roles are all totally different.
While a high level Chief Technology Officer or Chief Information Office may be focused on evolving technology or business continuity, an Operations Manager or COO might be focused on employee efficiency or customer service. All of these personas will be a bit bottom-line driven, but none more than the CEO or CFO inside an organization. The executive and management levels at these companies may work in any different industry and have varied responsibilities based on their unique role in the organizations. These are important CTAs to consider, in addition to any industry verticals that you may want to address whose focuses might be even more specific.
If you have specific industries you specialize in like Construction, Nonprofit or Real Estate, you’ll want to break these down in your mega menu. While most IT professionals and Managed Services companies understand that a blanket proactive approach to IT can be applied across industries, it does make professionals feel good when they know that a vendor has experience in their particular industry.
Content Categories, Symptoms or Benefits
\nYou’ll want to make sure that you categorize your content with symptoms and benefits, for your top-funnel prospects that are not as well versed in your service offerings. Ask yourself: What are the categories of content that you’re writing about for your audience? These might correlate with your services, which you’ll list separately, but might more directly speak to the issues or symptoms that your prospects or buyer personas are suffering from. Categorizing your content by the types of problems that your prospects are trying to solve is a great way to guide them down further into their buyer journey by speaking to their problems directly.
For a Managed Services Company mega menu, you might want to include items like, “Employee Efficiency, Disaster Recovery Planning and Malware & Virus Protection,” rather than industry specific services like, “Business Continuity” or “Technology Planning” or “Security Services” - speaking to symptoms or benefits helps avoid jargon and keeps the benefit or chief concern front and center - which is usually the best option for prospects that still find themselves early in the decision making process.
Services
\nListing your services by the names they’re recognized for in your industry is still important for prospects at the bottom of the funnel or referral resources that need a quick understanding of what you do. If you don’t have enough space in your navigation to address both, symptoms and services you can use some real estate in your mega menu for a short description sentence that outlines the benefits or symptoms associated with your service lines to combine the last point with this one.
For the IT industry specifically, services terms like Business Continuity and Cloud Services may resonate with well-qualified prospects like an IT Director, CTO or CIO while the more general symptom-specific categories listed above might appeal more to an Operations Executive, CEO or Management Level prospect or buyer that is less familiar with the offerings associated with the Managed Services industry. Your mega menu has the ability to address both with either separate categories or additional areas for descriptions.
Icons
If you don’t have much real estate to offer descriptions or just want to add a little extra flair to your mega menu, Icons are a great way to help a prospect further understand information in the services section. It can also help provide a graphical representation for top-funnel prospects if they’re unfamiliar with industry jargon.
For Managed Services companies, a shield to indicate security protection, a cloud for cloud hosting, a phone icon for VOIP services — there are a number of icons to help further explain your services without using too much additional real estate on lengthy descriptions. Icons can say a lot, keep things clear and concise and direct your buyers easily.
Tools or Resources
\nThis is usually the most complicated aspect of the mega menu planning process, since the arsenal of content for organizations with a digital strategy is usually quite large. An IT company might have a disaster recovery checklist, an IT security eBook, a guide for choosing the best VOIP system, a webinar breaking down the latest security threat or phishing attempt, or pillar pages that really help a prospect dig into to the different aspects of business continuity, employee efficiency and how it all impacts the bottom line, bringing those resources all together.
Multiple content types, topics and mediums of delivery make that pretty complicated to break down on a mega menu alone. We highly recommend resource center filters and in some cases multiple filters to help your website prospects better sift through that content. You can break your mega menu categories down by content type, add that content by industry or as it relates to the symptoms your fix and and services you provide.
If you have pillar pages to organize your content, they might have previously been hidden deep within a resource center or only found through a CTA or organic search. A mega menu can change that, placing your highest converting content at the top of the page in your mega menu using a featured content area, image, CTA or link.
Get creative with how you layout your resources and tools within the different categories provided and feel free to experiment with different formats over a certain time period to test what seems to work the best.
Smart Content
\nSmart content is being used more and more in e-mails, on website landing pages and inside services pages, but what about navigation? If you’re a HubSpot customer, HubSpot doesn’t include smart content in navigation out of the box, but we are huge supporters of taking technology to the next level and we’ve been experimenting with smart content in mega menu formats.
If a user has filled out a form, your development team can create a sophisticated mega menu based on forms that the prospect has filled out previously or content viewed on the website. If your prospect has downloaded and consumed multiple resources regarding Business Continuity services, for example, your mega menu can be configured to display content that aids them in their buyer journey by placing business continuity, disaster planning, cloud hosting and backup solutions front and center in their mega menu display.
Content mapping to the buyer journey is much more powerful when you enable smart content. HubSpot users can even combine smart content with lead scores and custom buyer journey mapping properties in HubSpot. An experienced HubSpot developer can really supercharge what HubSpot provides out of the box.
Mega menus are seriously unutilized and as a technology company, IT Managed Services providers really need to explore how a robust mega menu can really help their users access all the valuable content they publish. Organize that content by industry, service, symptom and benefit and place the most important CTAs inside your mega menu using icons, links, graphics and buttons to take your mega menu to the next level.
Ready to implement a mega menu for your IT Managed Services company website, but not sure where to start? Schedule a meeting and let’s break it down together.
When it comes to the specifics of organizing a mega menu, every business and industry is totally different. While some service offerings for consumer service brands might be very basic, a B2B brand with complex services offerings or retail brands with lots of different categories might need to go about how they organize a mega menu totally differently. The competition and market share in the IT Managed Services space has grown exponentially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Yahoo, The industry is estimated to reach nearly $245 billion by the end of 2022. From remote employment to cloud hosting, data access, and managing security breaches, the role of the IT Managed Services Company is more important than ever in the world of business. But how can you create a mega menu that encompasses the breadth of the services, industries, and resources that you offer without inundating your prospects?
\n\n
Planning and organization are everything here.
Here are a few things you need to know when it comes to learning how to organize a mega menu in the IT Managed Services industry:
\nBuyer Personas & Industries
\nIT Managed Services Companies usually have a few different buyer personas, depending on the types of businesses they serve. They might be talking to an IT Director or CTO, an Operations Manager or a business owner. The daily focuses and concerns for each of these roles are all totally different.
While a high level Chief Technology Officer or Chief Information Office may be focused on evolving technology or business continuity, an Operations Manager or COO might be focused on employee efficiency or customer service. All of these personas will be a bit bottom-line driven, but none more than the CEO or CFO inside an organization. The executive and management levels at these companies may work in any different industry and have varied responsibilities based on their unique role in the organizations. These are important CTAs to consider, in addition to any industry verticals that you may want to address whose focuses might be even more specific.
If you have specific industries you specialize in like Construction, Nonprofit or Real Estate, you’ll want to break these down in your mega menu. While most IT professionals and Managed Services companies understand that a blanket proactive approach to IT can be applied across industries, it does make professionals feel good when they know that a vendor has experience in their particular industry.
Content Categories, Symptoms or Benefits
\nYou’ll want to make sure that you categorize your content with symptoms and benefits, for your top-funnel prospects that are not as well versed in your service offerings. Ask yourself: What are the categories of content that you’re writing about for your audience? These might correlate with your services, which you’ll list separately, but might more directly speak to the issues or symptoms that your prospects or buyer personas are suffering from. Categorizing your content by the types of problems that your prospects are trying to solve is a great way to guide them down further into their buyer journey by speaking to their problems directly.
For a Managed Services Company mega menu, you might want to include items like, “Employee Efficiency, Disaster Recovery Planning and Malware & Virus Protection,” rather than industry specific services like, “Business Continuity” or “Technology Planning” or “Security Services” - speaking to symptoms or benefits helps avoid jargon and keeps the benefit or chief concern front and center - which is usually the best option for prospects that still find themselves early in the decision making process.
Services
\nListing your services by the names they’re recognized for in your industry is still important for prospects at the bottom of the funnel or referral resources that need a quick understanding of what you do. If you don’t have enough space in your navigation to address both, symptoms and services you can use some real estate in your mega menu for a short description sentence that outlines the benefits or symptoms associated with your service lines to combine the last point with this one.
For the IT industry specifically, services terms like Business Continuity and Cloud Services may resonate with well-qualified prospects like an IT Director, CTO or CIO while the more general symptom-specific categories listed above might appeal more to an Operations Executive, CEO or Management Level prospect or buyer that is less familiar with the offerings associated with the Managed Services industry. Your mega menu has the ability to address both with either separate categories or additional areas for descriptions.
Icons
If you don’t have much real estate to offer descriptions or just want to add a little extra flair to your mega menu, Icons are a great way to help a prospect further understand information in the services section. It can also help provide a graphical representation for top-funnel prospects if they’re unfamiliar with industry jargon.
For Managed Services companies, a shield to indicate security protection, a cloud for cloud hosting, a phone icon for VOIP services — there are a number of icons to help further explain your services without using too much additional real estate on lengthy descriptions. Icons can say a lot, keep things clear and concise and direct your buyers easily.
Tools or Resources
\nThis is usually the most complicated aspect of the mega menu planning process, since the arsenal of content for organizations with a digital strategy is usually quite large. An IT company might have a disaster recovery checklist, an IT security eBook, a guide for choosing the best VOIP system, a webinar breaking down the latest security threat or phishing attempt, or pillar pages that really help a prospect dig into to the different aspects of business continuity, employee efficiency and how it all impacts the bottom line, bringing those resources all together.
Multiple content types, topics and mediums of delivery make that pretty complicated to break down on a mega menu alone. We highly recommend resource center filters and in some cases multiple filters to help your website prospects better sift through that content. You can break your mega menu categories down by content type, add that content by industry or as it relates to the symptoms your fix and and services you provide.
If you have pillar pages to organize your content, they might have previously been hidden deep within a resource center or only found through a CTA or organic search. A mega menu can change that, placing your highest converting content at the top of the page in your mega menu using a featured content area, image, CTA or link.
Get creative with how you layout your resources and tools within the different categories provided and feel free to experiment with different formats over a certain time period to test what seems to work the best.
Smart Content
\nSmart content is being used more and more in e-mails, on website landing pages and inside services pages, but what about navigation? If you’re a HubSpot customer, HubSpot doesn’t include smart content in navigation out of the box, but we are huge supporters of taking technology to the next level and we’ve been experimenting with smart content in mega menu formats.
If a user has filled out a form, your development team can create a sophisticated mega menu based on forms that the prospect has filled out previously or content viewed on the website. If your prospect has downloaded and consumed multiple resources regarding Business Continuity services, for example, your mega menu can be configured to display content that aids them in their buyer journey by placing business continuity, disaster planning, cloud hosting and backup solutions front and center in their mega menu display.
Content mapping to the buyer journey is much more powerful when you enable smart content. HubSpot users can even combine smart content with lead scores and custom buyer journey mapping properties in HubSpot. An experienced HubSpot developer can really supercharge what HubSpot provides out of the box.
Mega menus are seriously unutilized and as a technology company, IT Managed Services providers really need to explore how a robust mega menu can really help their users access all the valuable content they publish. Organize that content by industry, service, symptom and benefit and place the most important CTAs inside your mega menu using icons, links, graphics and buttons to take your mega menu to the next level.
Ready to implement a mega menu for your IT Managed Services company website, but not sure where to start? Schedule a meeting and let’s break it down together.
When it comes to the specifics of organizing a mega menu, every business and industry is totally different. While some service offerings for consumer service brands might be very basic, a B2B brand with complex services offerings or retail brands with lots of different categories might need to go about how they organize a mega menu totally differently. The competition and market share in the IT Managed Services space has grown exponentially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Yahoo, The industry is estimated to reach nearly $245 billion by the end of 2022. From remote employment to cloud hosting, data access, and managing security breaches, the role of the IT Managed Services Company is more important than ever in the world of business. But how can you create a mega menu that encompasses the breadth of the services, industries, and resources that you offer without inundating your prospects?
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\n\n
Planning and organization are everything here.
Here are a few things you need to know when it comes to learning how to organize a mega menu in the IT Managed Services industry:
\nBuyer Personas & Industries
\nIT Managed Services Companies usually have a few different buyer personas, depending on the types of businesses they serve. They might be talking to an IT Director or CTO, an Operations Manager or a business owner. The daily focuses and concerns for each of these roles are all totally different.
While a high level Chief Technology Officer or Chief Information Office may be focused on evolving technology or business continuity, an Operations Manager or COO might be focused on employee efficiency or customer service. All of these personas will be a bit bottom-line driven, but none more than the CEO or CFO inside an organization. The executive and management levels at these companies may work in any different industry and have varied responsibilities based on their unique role in the organizations. These are important CTAs to consider, in addition to any industry verticals that you may want to address whose focuses might be even more specific.
If you have specific industries you specialize in like Construction, Nonprofit or Real Estate, you’ll want to break these down in your mega menu. While most IT professionals and Managed Services companies understand that a blanket proactive approach to IT can be applied across industries, it does make professionals feel good when they know that a vendor has experience in their particular industry.
Content Categories, Symptoms or Benefits
\nYou’ll want to make sure that you categorize your content with symptoms and benefits, for your top-funnel prospects that are not as well versed in your service offerings. Ask yourself: What are the categories of content that you’re writing about for your audience? These might correlate with your services, which you’ll list separately, but might more directly speak to the issues or symptoms that your prospects or buyer personas are suffering from. Categorizing your content by the types of problems that your prospects are trying to solve is a great way to guide them down further into their buyer journey by speaking to their problems directly.
For a Managed Services Company mega menu, you might want to include items like, “Employee Efficiency, Disaster Recovery Planning and Malware & Virus Protection,” rather than industry specific services like, “Business Continuity” or “Technology Planning” or “Security Services” - speaking to symptoms or benefits helps avoid jargon and keeps the benefit or chief concern front and center - which is usually the best option for prospects that still find themselves early in the decision making process.
Services
\nListing your services by the names they’re recognized for in your industry is still important for prospects at the bottom of the funnel or referral resources that need a quick understanding of what you do. If you don’t have enough space in your navigation to address both, symptoms and services you can use some real estate in your mega menu for a short description sentence that outlines the benefits or symptoms associated with your service lines to combine the last point with this one.
For the IT industry specifically, services terms like Business Continuity and Cloud Services may resonate with well-qualified prospects like an IT Director, CTO or CIO while the more general symptom-specific categories listed above might appeal more to an Operations Executive, CEO or Management Level prospect or buyer that is less familiar with the offerings associated with the Managed Services industry. Your mega menu has the ability to address both with either separate categories or additional areas for descriptions.
Icons
If you don’t have much real estate to offer descriptions or just want to add a little extra flair to your mega menu, Icons are a great way to help a prospect further understand information in the services section. It can also help provide a graphical representation for top-funnel prospects if they’re unfamiliar with industry jargon.
For Managed Services companies, a shield to indicate security protection, a cloud for cloud hosting, a phone icon for VOIP services — there are a number of icons to help further explain your services without using too much additional real estate on lengthy descriptions. Icons can say a lot, keep things clear and concise and direct your buyers easily.
Tools or Resources
\nThis is usually the most complicated aspect of the mega menu planning process, since the arsenal of content for organizations with a digital strategy is usually quite large. An IT company might have a disaster recovery checklist, an IT security eBook, a guide for choosing the best VOIP system, a webinar breaking down the latest security threat or phishing attempt, or pillar pages that really help a prospect dig into to the different aspects of business continuity, employee efficiency and how it all impacts the bottom line, bringing those resources all together.
Multiple content types, topics and mediums of delivery make that pretty complicated to break down on a mega menu alone. We highly recommend resource center filters and in some cases multiple filters to help your website prospects better sift through that content. You can break your mega menu categories down by content type, add that content by industry or as it relates to the symptoms your fix and and services you provide.
If you have pillar pages to organize your content, they might have previously been hidden deep within a resource center or only found through a CTA or organic search. A mega menu can change that, placing your highest converting content at the top of the page in your mega menu using a featured content area, image, CTA or link.
Get creative with how you layout your resources and tools within the different categories provided and feel free to experiment with different formats over a certain time period to test what seems to work the best.
Smart Content
\nSmart content is being used more and more in e-mails, on website landing pages and inside services pages, but what about navigation? If you’re a HubSpot customer, HubSpot doesn’t include smart content in navigation out of the box, but we are huge supporters of taking technology to the next level and we’ve been experimenting with smart content in mega menu formats.
If a user has filled out a form, your development team can create a sophisticated mega menu based on forms that the prospect has filled out previously or content viewed on the website. If your prospect has downloaded and consumed multiple resources regarding Business Continuity services, for example, your mega menu can be configured to display content that aids them in their buyer journey by placing business continuity, disaster planning, cloud hosting and backup solutions front and center in their mega menu display.
Content mapping to the buyer journey is much more powerful when you enable smart content. HubSpot users can even combine smart content with lead scores and custom buyer journey mapping properties in HubSpot. An experienced HubSpot developer can really supercharge what HubSpot provides out of the box.
Mega menus are seriously unutilized and as a technology company, IT Managed Services providers really need to explore how a robust mega menu can really help their users access all the valuable content they publish. Organize that content by industry, service, symptom and benefit and place the most important CTAs inside your mega menu using icons, links, graphics and buttons to take your mega menu to the next level.
Ready to implement a mega menu for your IT Managed Services company website, but not sure where to start? Schedule a meeting and let’s break it down together.
When it comes to the specifics of organizing a mega menu, every business and industry is totally different. While some service offerings for consumer service brands might be very basic, a B2B brand with complex services offerings or retail brands with lots of different categories might need to go about how they organize a mega menu totally differently. The competition and market share in the IT Managed Services space has grown exponentially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Yahoo, The industry is estimated to reach nearly $245 billion by the end of 2022. From remote employment to cloud hosting, data access, and managing security breaches, the role of the IT Managed Services Company is more important than ever in the world of business. But how can you create a mega menu that encompasses the breadth of the services, industries, and resources that you offer without inundating your prospects?
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Let’s Talk Site Performance for Black Friday Weekend","language":"en","lastEditSessionId":null,"lastEditUpdateId":null,"layoutSections":{},"legacyBlogTabid":null,"legacyId":null,"legacyPostGuid":null,"linkRelCanonicalUrl":null,"listTemplate":"","liveDomain":"deckerdevs.com","mab":false,"mabExperimentId":null,"mabMaster":false,"mabVariant":false,"meta":{"blog_post_schedule_task_uid":null,"blog_publish_to_social_media_task":"DONE_NOT_SENT","blog_publish_instant_email_task_uid":null,"blog_publish_instant_email_campaign_id":null,"blog_publish_instant_email_retry_count":null,"rss_body":"Black Friday Weekend comes and goes every year and between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday - the opportunity is ripe to have the best weekend in retail that you have all year round. With a record $9.12 Billion spent this Black Friday, we hope that you took the opportunity to get a little piece for yourself. Tell us, how’d you do? Let’s talk about your website performance for Black Friday weekend…
So many marketers spend months preparing for this weekend and work overtime trying to send e-mails, execute ads and get the word out about their products and sales to maximize revenue. Managing coupon codes, carefully curating and planning your e-mail blasts, optimizing your products for search and spending a premium on social media and display ads are just some of the tactics that we see online retailers leveraging to increase their sales this weekend.
To say that there are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to maximizing your sales during the biggest shopping weekend of the year is an understatement. Each of them are incredibly important, as your success during this weekend and the holiday shopping season in general depends on all of them. But there are a few factors that you may not have considered when it comes to your website and Cyber Monday or optimizing your website for online shopping in general.
![\"site](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/I%20LOOKED%20AT%20YOUR%20WEBSITE-jpg.jpeg\")
We bring up page speed optimization, conversion optimization and user experience relative to retail sales quite a bit in our conversations with clients old and new. But so many fail to account for site performance in all of the rush to promote and get as many people to their website as possible. To optimize your site performance for Black Friday weekend, here are our best tips:
Dig Deep into Page Load Speed
\nFrom image size to video size to all of the scripts that you’re running - the factors bogging down your page load speed are usually small things that stack up over time as you add content, pages and features. For retail customers we usually see issues with slow loading catalogs, images and videos that bog things down.
A bogged down website doesn’t do great things for your bounce rate. Google found that websites whose load times go from 1-3 seconds bounce rate increase probability goes up 32%. And that only gets worse as the load speed goes up. A website whose load speed increases from 1 to 5 seconds has a 90% chance of bounce rate increase.
Page speed optimization is not just an opportunity to optimize sales, but a requirement moving forward. User expectations are increasing too, and across the board for mobile websites the average time It takes to fully load a mobile landing page has dropped by seven seconds.
Bottom line? Reduce your page load time and you’ll do wonders for keeping people on your website and converting those prospects into sales.
Related: Page Speed Optimization - 5 Factors Bogging Down Your Website
\nBoost Conversion Rates with Mega Menus
\nWe are *huge* proponents of mega menus, particularly for organizations that have a lot of information that users need to parse and access quickly and that couldn’t be more true than for retail brands. Companies like GameStop, Home Depot, Wayfair, Best Buy, and even Amazon are constantly testing different versions of mega menus. This allows them to better cater to the complex product offerings, deals and specials they have and optimize conversions by making their information simpler to access.
A mega menu is an expandable menu that allows the user to display a two-dimensional drop-down layout. It usually consists of multiple categories and products associated with those categories along with frequently purchased items, links, and graphics promoting special deals and promotions. ![\"Black](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/Black%20Friday%20Home%20Depot%20Blog%20Image.webp\")
Mega menus are a great way to circumvent impatient customers that might be sensitive to load times when clicking through a website to find the information they’re looking for. They offer a centralized place to see your offerings, which helps avoid user frustration. When a shopper can find everything they’re looking for and understand the depth of your offerings without having to click through to multiple pages on your website, it instantly qualifies your traffic and makes for a better user experience every single time.
Related: Mega Menus are Here to Stay
\nTake a good hard look at your User Experience
\nWe’ve talked about them before, but we can’t stress enough the importance of user experience. A Mega menu or page speed optimization will get you started, but as most marketers know, user experience is an ever-evolving process that requires continuous tweaking and feedback. It goes beyond the standard A-B testing and gets deep into how design draws the eyes or how the color of a button or well-placed sale banner can totally change the game.
Take a look at heat maps, create user experience surveys and do whatever you can to really dig into the intelligence of how every aspect of your website is performing.
Microsoft Clarity is a great (and FREE!) tool that we’ve been testing out recently to help us dig into user sessions and understand a little more about how users are navigating websites. Hot Jar and Lucky Orange are also great tools. If you’re still in the design phase of your landing page and want feedback pre-launch (this is great for all your campaign planning for next year!) Attention Insight is a great paid tool that pulls from AI to predict user behavior and understand how your layout and design will impact user behavior.
Related: 5 Website Optimization Tools to Boost Conversions
If the personal inundation you received from retail brands in your e-mail inbox and text stream this weekend isn’t indication enough, we’re here to tell you: competition is heating up for the attention and wallets of your customers and prospects. It is absolutely critical not only that you take the steps you’re already taking to maximize marketing budget and get in front of their faces - but once you have their attention, you really need to be positive that your website is helping you seal the deal.
By looking at your site navigation, user sessions, heat maps, and optimizing your page load speed, you can increase your conversion rates significantly and boost sales even more going into the holiday season.
Just because Black Friday Weekend is over doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do things now to optimize your site through the holiday shopping season.
Tell us in the comments how you guys did and what you’ll be doing better for the rest of the holiday shopping season.
Black Friday Weekend comes and goes every year and between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday - the opportunity is ripe to have the best weekend in retail that you have all year round. With a record $9.12 Billion spent this Black Friday, we hope that you took the opportunity to get a little piece for yourself. Tell us, how’d you do? Let’s talk about your website performance for Black Friday weekend…
So many marketers spend months preparing for this weekend and work overtime trying to send e-mails, execute ads and get the word out about their products and sales to maximize revenue. Managing coupon codes, carefully curating and planning your e-mail blasts, optimizing your products for search and spending a premium on social media and display ads are just some of the tactics that we see online retailers leveraging to increase their sales this weekend.
To say that there are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to maximizing your sales during the biggest shopping weekend of the year is an understatement. Each of them are incredibly important, as your success during this weekend and the holiday shopping season in general depends on all of them. But there are a few factors that you may not have considered when it comes to your website and Cyber Monday or optimizing your website for online shopping in general.
Black Friday Weekend comes and goes every year and between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday - the opportunity is ripe to have the best weekend in retail that you have all year round. With a record $9.12 Billion spent this Black Friday, we hope that you took the opportunity to get a little piece for yourself. Tell us, how’d you do? Let’s talk about your website performance for Black Friday weekend…
So many marketers spend months preparing for this weekend and work overtime trying to send e-mails, execute ads and get the word out about their products and sales to maximize revenue. Managing coupon codes, carefully curating and planning your e-mail blasts, optimizing your products for search and spending a premium on social media and display ads are just some of the tactics that we see online retailers leveraging to increase their sales this weekend.
To say that there are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to maximizing your sales during the biggest shopping weekend of the year is an understatement. Each of them are incredibly important, as your success during this weekend and the holiday shopping season in general depends on all of them. But there are a few factors that you may not have considered when it comes to your website and Cyber Monday or optimizing your website for online shopping in general.
Black Friday Weekend comes and goes every year and between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday - the opportunity is ripe to have the best weekend in retail that you have all year round. With a record $9.12 Billion spent this Black Friday, we hope that you took the opportunity to get a little piece for yourself. Tell us, how’d you do? Let’s talk about your website performance for Black Friday weekend…
So many marketers spend months preparing for this weekend and work overtime trying to send e-mails, execute ads and get the word out about their products and sales to maximize revenue. Managing coupon codes, carefully curating and planning your e-mail blasts, optimizing your products for search and spending a premium on social media and display ads are just some of the tactics that we see online retailers leveraging to increase their sales this weekend.
To say that there are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to maximizing your sales during the biggest shopping weekend of the year is an understatement. Each of them are incredibly important, as your success during this weekend and the holiday shopping season in general depends on all of them. But there are a few factors that you may not have considered when it comes to your website and Cyber Monday or optimizing your website for online shopping in general.
We bring up page speed optimization, conversion optimization and user experience relative to retail sales quite a bit in our conversations with clients old and new. But so many fail to account for site performance in all of the rush to promote and get as many people to their website as possible. To optimize your site performance for Black Friday weekend, here are our best tips:
Dig Deep into Page Load Speed
\nFrom image size to video size to all of the scripts that you’re running - the factors bogging down your page load speed are usually small things that stack up over time as you add content, pages and features. For retail customers we usually see issues with slow loading catalogs, images and videos that bog things down.
A bogged down website doesn’t do great things for your bounce rate. Google found that websites whose load times go from 1-3 seconds bounce rate increase probability goes up 32%. And that only gets worse as the load speed goes up. A website whose load speed increases from 1 to 5 seconds has a 90% chance of bounce rate increase.
Page speed optimization is not just an opportunity to optimize sales, but a requirement moving forward. User expectations are increasing too, and across the board for mobile websites the average time It takes to fully load a mobile landing page has dropped by seven seconds.
Bottom line? Reduce your page load time and you’ll do wonders for keeping people on your website and converting those prospects into sales.
Related: Page Speed Optimization - 5 Factors Bogging Down Your Website
\nBoost Conversion Rates with Mega Menus
\nWe are *huge* proponents of mega menus, particularly for organizations that have a lot of information that users need to parse and access quickly and that couldn’t be more true than for retail brands. Companies like GameStop, Home Depot, Wayfair, Best Buy, and even Amazon are constantly testing different versions of mega menus. This allows them to better cater to the complex product offerings, deals and specials they have and optimize conversions by making their information simpler to access.
A mega menu is an expandable menu that allows the user to display a two-dimensional drop-down layout. It usually consists of multiple categories and products associated with those categories along with frequently purchased items, links, and graphics promoting special deals and promotions.
Mega menus are a great way to circumvent impatient customers that might be sensitive to load times when clicking through a website to find the information they’re looking for. They offer a centralized place to see your offerings, which helps avoid user frustration. When a shopper can find everything they’re looking for and understand the depth of your offerings without having to click through to multiple pages on your website, it instantly qualifies your traffic and makes for a better user experience every single time.
Related: Mega Menus are Here to Stay
\nTake a good hard look at your User Experience
\nWe’ve talked about them before, but we can’t stress enough the importance of user experience. A Mega menu or page speed optimization will get you started, but as most marketers know, user experience is an ever-evolving process that requires continuous tweaking and feedback. It goes beyond the standard A-B testing and gets deep into how design draws the eyes or how the color of a button or well-placed sale banner can totally change the game.
Take a look at heat maps, create user experience surveys and do whatever you can to really dig into the intelligence of how every aspect of your website is performing.
Microsoft Clarity is a great (and FREE!) tool that we’ve been testing out recently to help us dig into user sessions and understand a little more about how users are navigating websites. Hot Jar and Lucky Orange are also great tools. If you’re still in the design phase of your landing page and want feedback pre-launch (this is great for all your campaign planning for next year!) Attention Insight is a great paid tool that pulls from AI to predict user behavior and understand how your layout and design will impact user behavior.
Related: 5 Website Optimization Tools to Boost Conversions
If the personal inundation you received from retail brands in your e-mail inbox and text stream this weekend isn’t indication enough, we’re here to tell you: competition is heating up for the attention and wallets of your customers and prospects. It is absolutely critical not only that you take the steps you’re already taking to maximize marketing budget and get in front of their faces - but once you have their attention, you really need to be positive that your website is helping you seal the deal.
By looking at your site navigation, user sessions, heat maps, and optimizing your page load speed, you can increase your conversion rates significantly and boost sales even more going into the holiday season.
Just because Black Friday Weekend is over doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do things now to optimize your site through the holiday shopping season.
Tell us in the comments how you guys did and what you’ll be doing better for the rest of the holiday shopping season.
Black Friday Weekend comes and goes every year and between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday - the opportunity is ripe to have the best weekend in retail that you have all year round. With a record $9.12 Billion spent this Black Friday, we hope that you took the opportunity to get a little piece for yourself. Tell us, how’d you do? Let’s talk about your website performance for Black Friday weekend…
So many marketers spend months preparing for this weekend and work overtime trying to send e-mails, execute ads and get the word out about their products and sales to maximize revenue. Managing coupon codes, carefully curating and planning your e-mail blasts, optimizing your products for search and spending a premium on social media and display ads are just some of the tactics that we see online retailers leveraging to increase their sales this weekend.
To say that there are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to maximizing your sales during the biggest shopping weekend of the year is an understatement. Each of them are incredibly important, as your success during this weekend and the holiday shopping season in general depends on all of them. But there are a few factors that you may not have considered when it comes to your website and Cyber Monday or optimizing your website for online shopping in general.
We bring up page speed optimization, conversion optimization and user experience relative to retail sales quite a bit in our conversations with clients old and new. But so many fail to account for site performance in all of the rush to promote and get as many people to their website as possible. To optimize your site performance for Black Friday weekend, here are our best tips:
Dig Deep into Page Load Speed
\nFrom image size to video size to all of the scripts that you’re running - the factors bogging down your page load speed are usually small things that stack up over time as you add content, pages and features. For retail customers we usually see issues with slow loading catalogs, images and videos that bog things down.
A bogged down website doesn’t do great things for your bounce rate. Google found that websites whose load times go from 1-3 seconds bounce rate increase probability goes up 32%. And that only gets worse as the load speed goes up. A website whose load speed increases from 1 to 5 seconds has a 90% chance of bounce rate increase.
Page speed optimization is not just an opportunity to optimize sales, but a requirement moving forward. User expectations are increasing too, and across the board for mobile websites the average time It takes to fully load a mobile landing page has dropped by seven seconds.
Bottom line? Reduce your page load time and you’ll do wonders for keeping people on your website and converting those prospects into sales.
Related: Page Speed Optimization - 5 Factors Bogging Down Your Website
\nBoost Conversion Rates with Mega Menus
\nWe are *huge* proponents of mega menus, particularly for organizations that have a lot of information that users need to parse and access quickly and that couldn’t be more true than for retail brands. Companies like GameStop, Home Depot, Wayfair, Best Buy, and even Amazon are constantly testing different versions of mega menus. This allows them to better cater to the complex product offerings, deals and specials they have and optimize conversions by making their information simpler to access.
A mega menu is an expandable menu that allows the user to display a two-dimensional drop-down layout. It usually consists of multiple categories and products associated with those categories along with frequently purchased items, links, and graphics promoting special deals and promotions.
Mega menus are a great way to circumvent impatient customers that might be sensitive to load times when clicking through a website to find the information they’re looking for. They offer a centralized place to see your offerings, which helps avoid user frustration. When a shopper can find everything they’re looking for and understand the depth of your offerings without having to click through to multiple pages on your website, it instantly qualifies your traffic and makes for a better user experience every single time.
Related: Mega Menus are Here to Stay
\nTake a good hard look at your User Experience
\nWe’ve talked about them before, but we can’t stress enough the importance of user experience. A Mega menu or page speed optimization will get you started, but as most marketers know, user experience is an ever-evolving process that requires continuous tweaking and feedback. It goes beyond the standard A-B testing and gets deep into how design draws the eyes or how the color of a button or well-placed sale banner can totally change the game.
Take a look at heat maps, create user experience surveys and do whatever you can to really dig into the intelligence of how every aspect of your website is performing.
Microsoft Clarity is a great (and FREE!) tool that we’ve been testing out recently to help us dig into user sessions and understand a little more about how users are navigating websites. Hot Jar and Lucky Orange are also great tools. If you’re still in the design phase of your landing page and want feedback pre-launch (this is great for all your campaign planning for next year!) Attention Insight is a great paid tool that pulls from AI to predict user behavior and understand how your layout and design will impact user behavior.
Related: 5 Website Optimization Tools to Boost Conversions
If the personal inundation you received from retail brands in your e-mail inbox and text stream this weekend isn’t indication enough, we’re here to tell you: competition is heating up for the attention and wallets of your customers and prospects. It is absolutely critical not only that you take the steps you’re already taking to maximize marketing budget and get in front of their faces - but once you have their attention, you really need to be positive that your website is helping you seal the deal.
By looking at your site navigation, user sessions, heat maps, and optimizing your page load speed, you can increase your conversion rates significantly and boost sales even more going into the holiday season.
Just because Black Friday Weekend is over doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do things now to optimize your site through the holiday shopping season.
Tell us in the comments how you guys did and what you’ll be doing better for the rest of the holiday shopping season.
Black Friday Weekend comes and goes every year and between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday - the opportunity is ripe to have the best weekend in retail that you have all year round. With a record $9.12 Billion spent this Black Friday, we hope that you took the opportunity to get a little piece for yourself. Tell us, how’d you do? Let’s talk about your website performance for Black Friday weekend…
So many marketers spend months preparing for this weekend and work overtime trying to send e-mails, execute ads and get the word out about their products and sales to maximize revenue. Managing coupon codes, carefully curating and planning your e-mail blasts, optimizing your products for search and spending a premium on social media and display ads are just some of the tactics that we see online retailers leveraging to increase their sales this weekend.
To say that there are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to maximizing your sales during the biggest shopping weekend of the year is an understatement. Each of them are incredibly important, as your success during this weekend and the holiday shopping season in general depends on all of them. But there are a few factors that you may not have considered when it comes to your website and Cyber Monday or optimizing your website for online shopping in general.
We bring up page speed optimization, conversion optimization and user experience relative to retail sales quite a bit in our conversations with clients old and new. But so many fail to account for site performance in all of the rush to promote and get as many people to their website as possible. To optimize your site performance for Black Friday weekend, here are our best tips:
Dig Deep into Page Load Speed
\nFrom image size to video size to all of the scripts that you’re running - the factors bogging down your page load speed are usually small things that stack up over time as you add content, pages and features. For retail customers we usually see issues with slow loading catalogs, images and videos that bog things down.
A bogged down website doesn’t do great things for your bounce rate. Google found that websites whose load times go from 1-3 seconds bounce rate increase probability goes up 32%. And that only gets worse as the load speed goes up. A website whose load speed increases from 1 to 5 seconds has a 90% chance of bounce rate increase.
Page speed optimization is not just an opportunity to optimize sales, but a requirement moving forward. User expectations are increasing too, and across the board for mobile websites the average time It takes to fully load a mobile landing page has dropped by seven seconds.
Bottom line? Reduce your page load time and you’ll do wonders for keeping people on your website and converting those prospects into sales.
Related: Page Speed Optimization - 5 Factors Bogging Down Your Website
\nBoost Conversion Rates with Mega Menus
\nWe are *huge* proponents of mega menus, particularly for organizations that have a lot of information that users need to parse and access quickly and that couldn’t be more true than for retail brands. Companies like GameStop, Home Depot, Wayfair, Best Buy, and even Amazon are constantly testing different versions of mega menus. This allows them to better cater to the complex product offerings, deals and specials they have and optimize conversions by making their information simpler to access.
A mega menu is an expandable menu that allows the user to display a two-dimensional drop-down layout. It usually consists of multiple categories and products associated with those categories along with frequently purchased items, links, and graphics promoting special deals and promotions.
Mega menus are a great way to circumvent impatient customers that might be sensitive to load times when clicking through a website to find the information they’re looking for. They offer a centralized place to see your offerings, which helps avoid user frustration. When a shopper can find everything they’re looking for and understand the depth of your offerings without having to click through to multiple pages on your website, it instantly qualifies your traffic and makes for a better user experience every single time.
Related: Mega Menus are Here to Stay
\nTake a good hard look at your User Experience
\nWe’ve talked about them before, but we can’t stress enough the importance of user experience. A Mega menu or page speed optimization will get you started, but as most marketers know, user experience is an ever-evolving process that requires continuous tweaking and feedback. It goes beyond the standard A-B testing and gets deep into how design draws the eyes or how the color of a button or well-placed sale banner can totally change the game.
Take a look at heat maps, create user experience surveys and do whatever you can to really dig into the intelligence of how every aspect of your website is performing.
Microsoft Clarity is a great (and FREE!) tool that we’ve been testing out recently to help us dig into user sessions and understand a little more about how users are navigating websites. Hot Jar and Lucky Orange are also great tools. If you’re still in the design phase of your landing page and want feedback pre-launch (this is great for all your campaign planning for next year!) Attention Insight is a great paid tool that pulls from AI to predict user behavior and understand how your layout and design will impact user behavior.
Related: 5 Website Optimization Tools to Boost Conversions
If the personal inundation you received from retail brands in your e-mail inbox and text stream this weekend isn’t indication enough, we’re here to tell you: competition is heating up for the attention and wallets of your customers and prospects. It is absolutely critical not only that you take the steps you’re already taking to maximize marketing budget and get in front of their faces - but once you have their attention, you really need to be positive that your website is helping you seal the deal.
By looking at your site navigation, user sessions, heat maps, and optimizing your page load speed, you can increase your conversion rates significantly and boost sales even more going into the holiday season.
Just because Black Friday Weekend is over doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do things now to optimize your site through the holiday shopping season.
Tell us in the comments how you guys did and what you’ll be doing better for the rest of the holiday shopping season.
Black Friday Weekend comes and goes every year and between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday - the opportunity is ripe to have the best weekend in retail that you have all year round. With a record $9.12 Billion spent this Black Friday, we hope that you took the opportunity to get a little piece for yourself. Tell us, how’d you do? Let’s talk about your website performance for Black Friday weekend…
So many marketers spend months preparing for this weekend and work overtime trying to send e-mails, execute ads and get the word out about their products and sales to maximize revenue. Managing coupon codes, carefully curating and planning your e-mail blasts, optimizing your products for search and spending a premium on social media and display ads are just some of the tactics that we see online retailers leveraging to increase their sales this weekend.
To say that there are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to maximizing your sales during the biggest shopping weekend of the year is an understatement. Each of them are incredibly important, as your success during this weekend and the holiday shopping season in general depends on all of them. But there are a few factors that you may not have considered when it comes to your website and Cyber Monday or optimizing your website for online shopping in general.
Black Friday Weekend comes and goes every year and between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday - the opportunity is ripe to have the best weekend in retail that you have all year round. With a record $9.12 Billion spent this Black Friday, we hope that you took the opportunity to get a little piece for yourself. Tell us, how’d you do? Let’s talk about your website performance for Black Friday weekend…
So many marketers spend months preparing for this weekend and work overtime trying to send e-mails, execute ads and get the word out about their products and sales to maximize revenue. Managing coupon codes, carefully curating and planning your e-mail blasts, optimizing your products for search and spending a premium on social media and display ads are just some of the tactics that we see online retailers leveraging to increase their sales this weekend.
To say that there are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to maximizing your sales during the biggest shopping weekend of the year is an understatement. Each of them are incredibly important, as your success during this weekend and the holiday shopping season in general depends on all of them. But there are a few factors that you may not have considered when it comes to your website and Cyber Monday or optimizing your website for online shopping in general.
Black Friday Weekend comes and goes every year and between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday - the opportunity is ripe to have the best weekend in retail that you have all year round. With a record $9.12 Billion spent this Black Friday, we hope that you took the opportunity to get a little piece for yourself. Tell us, how’d you do? Let’s talk about your website performance for Black Friday weekend…
So many marketers spend months preparing for this weekend and work overtime trying to send e-mails, execute ads and get the word out about their products and sales to maximize revenue. Managing coupon codes, carefully curating and planning your e-mail blasts, optimizing your products for search and spending a premium on social media and display ads are just some of the tactics that we see online retailers leveraging to increase their sales this weekend.
To say that there are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to maximizing your sales during the biggest shopping weekend of the year is an understatement. Each of them are incredibly important, as your success during this weekend and the holiday shopping season in general depends on all of them. But there are a few factors that you may not have considered when it comes to your website and Cyber Monday or optimizing your website for online shopping in general.
Black Friday Weekend comes and goes every year and between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday - the opportunity is ripe to have the best weekend in retail that you have all year round. With a record $9.12 Billion spent this Black Friday, we hope that you took the opportunity to get a little piece for yourself. Tell us, how’d you do? Let’s talk about your website performance for Black Friday weekend…
So many marketers spend months preparing for this weekend and work overtime trying to send e-mails, execute ads and get the word out about their products and sales to maximize revenue. Managing coupon codes, carefully curating and planning your e-mail blasts, optimizing your products for search and spending a premium on social media and display ads are just some of the tactics that we see online retailers leveraging to increase their sales this weekend.
To say that there are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to maximizing your sales during the biggest shopping weekend of the year is an understatement. Each of them are incredibly important, as your success during this weekend and the holiday shopping season in general depends on all of them. But there are a few factors that you may not have considered when it comes to your website and Cyber Monday or optimizing your website for online shopping in general.
Black Friday Weekend comes and goes every year and between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday - the opportunity is ripe to have the best weekend in retail that you have all year round. With a record $9.12 Billion spent this Black Friday, we hope that you took the opportunity to get a little piece for yourself. Tell us, how’d you do? Let’s talk about your website performance for Black Friday weekend…
So many marketers spend months preparing for this weekend and work overtime trying to send e-mails, execute ads and get the word out about their products and sales to maximize revenue. Managing coupon codes, carefully curating and planning your e-mail blasts, optimizing your products for search and spending a premium on social media and display ads are just some of the tactics that we see online retailers leveraging to increase their sales this weekend.
To say that there are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to maximizing your sales during the biggest shopping weekend of the year is an understatement. Each of them are incredibly important, as your success during this weekend and the holiday shopping season in general depends on all of them. But there are a few factors that you may not have considered when it comes to your website and Cyber Monday or optimizing your website for online shopping in general.
Black Friday Weekend comes and goes every year and between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday - the opportunity is ripe to have the best weekend in retail that you have all year round. With a record $9.12 Billion spent this Black Friday, we hope that you took the opportunity to get a little piece for yourself. Tell us, how’d you do? Let’s talk about your website performance for Black Friday weekend…
So many marketers spend months preparing for this weekend and work overtime trying to send e-mails, execute ads and get the word out about their products and sales to maximize revenue. Managing coupon codes, carefully curating and planning your e-mail blasts, optimizing your products for search and spending a premium on social media and display ads are just some of the tactics that we see online retailers leveraging to increase their sales this weekend.
To say that there are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to maximizing your sales during the biggest shopping weekend of the year is an understatement. Each of them are incredibly important, as your success during this weekend and the holiday shopping season in general depends on all of them. But there are a few factors that you may not have considered when it comes to your website and Cyber Monday or optimizing your website for online shopping in general.
We bring up page speed optimization, conversion optimization and user experience relative to retail sales quite a bit in our conversations with clients old and new. But so many fail to account for site performance in all of the rush to promote and get as many people to their website as possible. To optimize your site performance for Black Friday weekend, here are our best tips:
Dig Deep into Page Load Speed
\nFrom image size to video size to all of the scripts that you’re running - the factors bogging down your page load speed are usually small things that stack up over time as you add content, pages and features. For retail customers we usually see issues with slow loading catalogs, images and videos that bog things down.
A bogged down website doesn’t do great things for your bounce rate. Google found that websites whose load times go from 1-3 seconds bounce rate increase probability goes up 32%. And that only gets worse as the load speed goes up. A website whose load speed increases from 1 to 5 seconds has a 90% chance of bounce rate increase.
Page speed optimization is not just an opportunity to optimize sales, but a requirement moving forward. User expectations are increasing too, and across the board for mobile websites the average time It takes to fully load a mobile landing page has dropped by seven seconds.
Bottom line? Reduce your page load time and you’ll do wonders for keeping people on your website and converting those prospects into sales.
Related: Page Speed Optimization - 5 Factors Bogging Down Your Website
\nBoost Conversion Rates with Mega Menus
\nWe are *huge* proponents of mega menus, particularly for organizations that have a lot of information that users need to parse and access quickly and that couldn’t be more true than for retail brands. Companies like GameStop, Home Depot, Wayfair, Best Buy, and even Amazon are constantly testing different versions of mega menus. This allows them to better cater to the complex product offerings, deals and specials they have and optimize conversions by making their information simpler to access.
A mega menu is an expandable menu that allows the user to display a two-dimensional drop-down layout. It usually consists of multiple categories and products associated with those categories along with frequently purchased items, links, and graphics promoting special deals and promotions.
Mega menus are a great way to circumvent impatient customers that might be sensitive to load times when clicking through a website to find the information they’re looking for. They offer a centralized place to see your offerings, which helps avoid user frustration. When a shopper can find everything they’re looking for and understand the depth of your offerings without having to click through to multiple pages on your website, it instantly qualifies your traffic and makes for a better user experience every single time.
Related: Mega Menus are Here to Stay
\nTake a good hard look at your User Experience
\nWe’ve talked about them before, but we can’t stress enough the importance of user experience. A Mega menu or page speed optimization will get you started, but as most marketers know, user experience is an ever-evolving process that requires continuous tweaking and feedback. It goes beyond the standard A-B testing and gets deep into how design draws the eyes or how the color of a button or well-placed sale banner can totally change the game.
Take a look at heat maps, create user experience surveys and do whatever you can to really dig into the intelligence of how every aspect of your website is performing.
Microsoft Clarity is a great (and FREE!) tool that we’ve been testing out recently to help us dig into user sessions and understand a little more about how users are navigating websites. Hot Jar and Lucky Orange are also great tools. If you’re still in the design phase of your landing page and want feedback pre-launch (this is great for all your campaign planning for next year!) Attention Insight is a great paid tool that pulls from AI to predict user behavior and understand how your layout and design will impact user behavior.
Related: 5 Website Optimization Tools to Boost Conversions
If the personal inundation you received from retail brands in your e-mail inbox and text stream this weekend isn’t indication enough, we’re here to tell you: competition is heating up for the attention and wallets of your customers and prospects. It is absolutely critical not only that you take the steps you’re already taking to maximize marketing budget and get in front of their faces - but once you have their attention, you really need to be positive that your website is helping you seal the deal.
By looking at your site navigation, user sessions, heat maps, and optimizing your page load speed, you can increase your conversion rates significantly and boost sales even more going into the holiday season.
Just because Black Friday Weekend is over doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do things now to optimize your site through the holiday shopping season.
Tell us in the comments how you guys did and what you’ll be doing better for the rest of the holiday shopping season.
Black Friday Weekend comes and goes every year and between Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday - the opportunity is ripe to have the best weekend in retail that you have all year round. With a record $9.12 Billion spent this Black Friday, we hope that you took the opportunity to get a little piece for yourself. Tell us, how’d you do? Let’s talk about your website performance for Black Friday weekend…
So many marketers spend months preparing for this weekend and work overtime trying to send e-mails, execute ads and get the word out about their products and sales to maximize revenue. Managing coupon codes, carefully curating and planning your e-mail blasts, optimizing your products for search and spending a premium on social media and display ads are just some of the tactics that we see online retailers leveraging to increase their sales this weekend.
To say that there are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to maximizing your sales during the biggest shopping weekend of the year is an understatement. Each of them are incredibly important, as your success during this weekend and the holiday shopping season in general depends on all of them. But there are a few factors that you may not have considered when it comes to your website and Cyber Monday or optimizing your website for online shopping in general.
WordPress CMS has always been a great way for a small business to develop a pretty customized website. You choose a theme or framework, add some plugins and you’re off to the races. Even a technically savvy small business owner could theoretically walk themselves through basic WordPress development - and many have (though we don’t recommend this).
The problem is, over time this piecemeal approach that served you well in your initial stages ends up cumbersome and doesn’t quite suit your business as it grows. Small businesses outgrow their initial Wordpress framework all the time and we help drive them to a custom solution. How do you know when your business has outgrown Wordpress, though?
![\"i](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/i%20dont%20hate%20it.jpeg\")
Businesses grow. It’s what they’re all meant to do and it’s what we as business owners want. But as they grow, businesses and their teams add line of business applications, additional employees, marketing functions, content and additional functionality to the website. All of a sudden what used to work so well for your business is bogged down, barely keeping up and holding our marketing teams back from really leaping into digital marketing and turning the website into a lead generation tool.
If you’re starting to worry that your WordPress website is holding you back, here are a few signs that you might be outgrowing WordPress…
You find yourself compromising on what you want.
\nPlugins. Am I right? Plugins were always to website features what apps were to user needs with the iPhone. There was always a plugin that did what you needed. Fast forward a few years, and as more and more developers stop supporting their plugins, there are fewer secure options to get your goals accomplished inside WordPress. This means you’ve added multiple plugins to accomplish a goal or help with a workflow, resulting in piecemeal websites bogged down by plugins that aren’t properly supported which leads to security holes and slower load times.
\nYour site keeps getting hacked
\nThe security holes that come with outdated plugins really get you in trouble. The multitudes of WordPress plugins and the clunky way you piece together your website might’ve worked when you were just getting going, but once those plugins went out of date they opened huge security holes and it’s possible your site has been compromised. WordPress is well known for their vulnerability issues. While captcha and security tools can help, attacks can slip through from time to time, because the majority of the plugins hosted on WordPress are third party plugins.
\nUpdates break your website
\nWordPress core, themes, and plugins are almost constantly updating to make up for the security vulnerabilities and attacks, but every time they update to accommodate those security gaps, it has the potential to break your website, especially when the developers that created your theme or plugins may not be updating at the same rate that WordPress. Approaching these plugin updates reactively can mean that you experience downtime before your developer can get in to fix these items - and as a growing business, that downtime becomes more and more costly if you’re relying on your website for any kind of revenue.
But it’s not just outdated plugins that can cause your website to break, but misplaced code and styling within WordPress core, themes and plugins can cause updates to break your website as well. Oftentimes developers hack together CSS and HTML and put it in the wrong places or fail to create child themes and directly update the theme files, instead. They may also target part of the structure that shouldn’t be targeted within a theme or even modify core WordPress files. An example of this might be when you ask a developer to update your WordPress site, and after updating the styling is totally out of whack. Some WordPress themes have very specific rules around how the theme should be updated and developers don’t always follow them or leave behind appropriate documentation, which may work if they’re the only one updating the website long term, but if things are misplaced and themes aren’t treated with best practices, updates will inevitably break your site.
You’re exploring integrations
\nAs your business grows, you’ll find that the pieces of software that you use to manage your day to day items may not serve you as well. You might bring on more robust applications, and eventually you might even want to integrate those applications closely with your website. Customer portals, custom calculators, learning centers, the details of customer registration, event management or sales handoffs are just some of the integrations and applications that customers have approached us to design on their behalf. Integrating these applications or building integrations between an already bogged down website and business application needs to be considered carefully. Investing so heavily in advanced integrations should be part of a really comprehensive evaluation of all your technology - including your website.
\nYour site is slow AF
\nWe discuss the frustration associated with bogged down websites all the time - and it’s a huge segment of the reason that a lot of companies decide to completely overhaul their website. Piecing together functionality that you need using multiple plugins for form capture, graphic displays and chatbots for example is great from a functionality and feature perspective, but pile that on with photo gallery and product management and things start to get slower and slower. Your new marketing manager has even more great ideas - but your site is already too slow and you know that slow loading sites are not good for Google *or* user conversions.
Your website served you well for a long time, but you can’t expect what you started with to continue serving you through this growth period in your business. Just like you upgrade phones and computers and processes, you need to upgrade your website framework and CMS. If you’re experiencing any of the above, it’s very likely that it’s time to upgrade from WordPress and hiring a skilled, experienced developer is gonna get you there.
It’s no secret that at deckerdevs we’re HubSpot advocates. We’ve invested a lot of time and funding into growing our knowledge base and experience in HubSpot. We’ve been around since the onset of this powerful automation software and as we continue to watch their CMS grow, we know we can count on the same boundary-pushing best practices, security, user friendliness and attention to detail they’ve always moved forward in their marketing software. Is HubSpot CMS the solution for every business that has outgrown WordPress? Not necessarily. But it might be.
What’s your WordPress struggle?
Let us know what you’re dealing with in the comments or book some time and let’s chat it out.
\n
WordPress CMS has always been a great way for a small business to develop a pretty customized website. You choose a theme or framework, add some plugins and you’re off to the races. Even a technically savvy small business owner could theoretically walk themselves through basic WordPress development - and many have (though we don’t recommend this).
The problem is, over time this piecemeal approach that served you well in your initial stages ends up cumbersome and doesn’t quite suit your business as it grows. Small businesses outgrow their initial Wordpress framework all the time and we help drive them to a custom solution. How do you know when your business has outgrown Wordpress, though?
WordPress CMS has always been a great way for a small business to develop a pretty customized website. You choose a theme or framework, add some plugins and you’re off to the races. Even a technically savvy small business owner could theoretically walk themselves through basic WordPress development - and many have (though we don’t recommend this).
The problem is, over time this piecemeal approach that served you well in your initial stages ends up cumbersome and doesn’t quite suit your business as it grows. Small businesses outgrow their initial Wordpress framework all the time and we help drive them to a custom solution. How do you know when your business has outgrown Wordpress, though?
Businesses grow. It’s what they’re all meant to do and it’s what we as business owners want. But as they grow, businesses and their teams add line of business applications, additional employees, marketing functions, content and additional functionality to the website. All of a sudden what used to work so well for your business is bogged down, barely keeping up and holding our marketing teams back from really leaping into digital marketing and turning the website into a lead generation tool.
If you’re starting to worry that your WordPress website is holding you back, here are a few signs that you might be outgrowing WordPress…
You find yourself compromising on what you want.
\nPlugins. Am I right? Plugins were always to website features what apps were to user needs with the iPhone. There was always a plugin that did what you needed. Fast forward a few years, and as more and more developers stop supporting their plugins, there are fewer secure options to get your goals accomplished inside WordPress. This means you’ve added multiple plugins to accomplish a goal or help with a workflow, resulting in piecemeal websites bogged down by plugins that aren’t properly supported which leads to security holes and slower load times.
\nYour site keeps getting hacked
\nThe security holes that come with outdated plugins really get you in trouble. The multitudes of WordPress plugins and the clunky way you piece together your website might’ve worked when you were just getting going, but once those plugins went out of date they opened huge security holes and it’s possible your site has been compromised. WordPress is well known for their vulnerability issues. While captcha and security tools can help, attacks can slip through from time to time, because the majority of the plugins hosted on WordPress are third party plugins.
\nUpdates break your website
\nWordPress core, themes, and plugins are almost constantly updating to make up for the security vulnerabilities and attacks, but every time they update to accommodate those security gaps, it has the potential to break your website, especially when the developers that created your theme or plugins may not be updating at the same rate that WordPress. Approaching these plugin updates reactively can mean that you experience downtime before your developer can get in to fix these items - and as a growing business, that downtime becomes more and more costly if you’re relying on your website for any kind of revenue.
But it’s not just outdated plugins that can cause your website to break, but misplaced code and styling within WordPress core, themes and plugins can cause updates to break your website as well. Oftentimes developers hack together CSS and HTML and put it in the wrong places or fail to create child themes and directly update the theme files, instead. They may also target part of the structure that shouldn’t be targeted within a theme or even modify core WordPress files. An example of this might be when you ask a developer to update your WordPress site, and after updating the styling is totally out of whack. Some WordPress themes have very specific rules around how the theme should be updated and developers don’t always follow them or leave behind appropriate documentation, which may work if they’re the only one updating the website long term, but if things are misplaced and themes aren’t treated with best practices, updates will inevitably break your site.
You’re exploring integrations
\nAs your business grows, you’ll find that the pieces of software that you use to manage your day to day items may not serve you as well. You might bring on more robust applications, and eventually you might even want to integrate those applications closely with your website. Customer portals, custom calculators, learning centers, the details of customer registration, event management or sales handoffs are just some of the integrations and applications that customers have approached us to design on their behalf. Integrating these applications or building integrations between an already bogged down website and business application needs to be considered carefully. Investing so heavily in advanced integrations should be part of a really comprehensive evaluation of all your technology - including your website.
\nYour site is slow AF
\nWe discuss the frustration associated with bogged down websites all the time - and it’s a huge segment of the reason that a lot of companies decide to completely overhaul their website. Piecing together functionality that you need using multiple plugins for form capture, graphic displays and chatbots for example is great from a functionality and feature perspective, but pile that on with photo gallery and product management and things start to get slower and slower. Your new marketing manager has even more great ideas - but your site is already too slow and you know that slow loading sites are not good for Google *or* user conversions.
Your website served you well for a long time, but you can’t expect what you started with to continue serving you through this growth period in your business. Just like you upgrade phones and computers and processes, you need to upgrade your website framework and CMS. If you’re experiencing any of the above, it’s very likely that it’s time to upgrade from WordPress and hiring a skilled, experienced developer is gonna get you there.
It’s no secret that at deckerdevs we’re HubSpot advocates. We’ve invested a lot of time and funding into growing our knowledge base and experience in HubSpot. We’ve been around since the onset of this powerful automation software and as we continue to watch their CMS grow, we know we can count on the same boundary-pushing best practices, security, user friendliness and attention to detail they’ve always moved forward in their marketing software. Is HubSpot CMS the solution for every business that has outgrown WordPress? Not necessarily. But it might be.
What’s your WordPress struggle?
Let us know what you’re dealing with in the comments or book some time and let’s chat it out.
\n
WordPress CMS has always been a great way for a small business to develop a pretty customized website. You choose a theme or framework, add some plugins and you’re off to the races. Even a technically savvy small business owner could theoretically walk themselves through basic WordPress development - and many have (though we don’t recommend this).
The problem is, over time this piecemeal approach that served you well in your initial stages ends up cumbersome and doesn’t quite suit your business as it grows. Small businesses outgrow their initial Wordpress framework all the time and we help drive them to a custom solution. How do you know when your business has outgrown Wordpress, though?
WordPress CMS has always been a great way for a small business to develop a pretty customized website. You choose a theme or framework, add some plugins and you’re off to the races. Even a technically savvy small business owner could theoretically walk themselves through basic WordPress development - and many have (though we don’t recommend this).
The problem is, over time this piecemeal approach that served you well in your initial stages ends up cumbersome and doesn’t quite suit your business as it grows. Small businesses outgrow their initial Wordpress framework all the time and we help drive them to a custom solution. How do you know when your business has outgrown Wordpress, though?
Businesses grow. It’s what they’re all meant to do and it’s what we as business owners want. But as they grow, businesses and their teams add line of business applications, additional employees, marketing functions, content and additional functionality to the website. All of a sudden what used to work so well for your business is bogged down, barely keeping up and holding our marketing teams back from really leaping into digital marketing and turning the website into a lead generation tool.
If you’re starting to worry that your WordPress website is holding you back, here are a few signs that you might be outgrowing WordPress…
You find yourself compromising on what you want.
\nPlugins. Am I right? Plugins were always to website features what apps were to user needs with the iPhone. There was always a plugin that did what you needed. Fast forward a few years, and as more and more developers stop supporting their plugins, there are fewer secure options to get your goals accomplished inside WordPress. This means you’ve added multiple plugins to accomplish a goal or help with a workflow, resulting in piecemeal websites bogged down by plugins that aren’t properly supported which leads to security holes and slower load times.
\nYour site keeps getting hacked
\nThe security holes that come with outdated plugins really get you in trouble. The multitudes of WordPress plugins and the clunky way you piece together your website might’ve worked when you were just getting going, but once those plugins went out of date they opened huge security holes and it’s possible your site has been compromised. WordPress is well known for their vulnerability issues. While captcha and security tools can help, attacks can slip through from time to time, because the majority of the plugins hosted on WordPress are third party plugins.
\nUpdates break your website
\nWordPress core, themes, and plugins are almost constantly updating to make up for the security vulnerabilities and attacks, but every time they update to accommodate those security gaps, it has the potential to break your website, especially when the developers that created your theme or plugins may not be updating at the same rate that WordPress. Approaching these plugin updates reactively can mean that you experience downtime before your developer can get in to fix these items - and as a growing business, that downtime becomes more and more costly if you’re relying on your website for any kind of revenue.
But it’s not just outdated plugins that can cause your website to break, but misplaced code and styling within WordPress core, themes and plugins can cause updates to break your website as well. Oftentimes developers hack together CSS and HTML and put it in the wrong places or fail to create child themes and directly update the theme files, instead. They may also target part of the structure that shouldn’t be targeted within a theme or even modify core WordPress files. An example of this might be when you ask a developer to update your WordPress site, and after updating the styling is totally out of whack. Some WordPress themes have very specific rules around how the theme should be updated and developers don’t always follow them or leave behind appropriate documentation, which may work if they’re the only one updating the website long term, but if things are misplaced and themes aren’t treated with best practices, updates will inevitably break your site.
You’re exploring integrations
\nAs your business grows, you’ll find that the pieces of software that you use to manage your day to day items may not serve you as well. You might bring on more robust applications, and eventually you might even want to integrate those applications closely with your website. Customer portals, custom calculators, learning centers, the details of customer registration, event management or sales handoffs are just some of the integrations and applications that customers have approached us to design on their behalf. Integrating these applications or building integrations between an already bogged down website and business application needs to be considered carefully. Investing so heavily in advanced integrations should be part of a really comprehensive evaluation of all your technology - including your website.
\nYour site is slow AF
\nWe discuss the frustration associated with bogged down websites all the time - and it’s a huge segment of the reason that a lot of companies decide to completely overhaul their website. Piecing together functionality that you need using multiple plugins for form capture, graphic displays and chatbots for example is great from a functionality and feature perspective, but pile that on with photo gallery and product management and things start to get slower and slower. Your new marketing manager has even more great ideas - but your site is already too slow and you know that slow loading sites are not good for Google *or* user conversions.
Your website served you well for a long time, but you can’t expect what you started with to continue serving you through this growth period in your business. Just like you upgrade phones and computers and processes, you need to upgrade your website framework and CMS. If you’re experiencing any of the above, it’s very likely that it’s time to upgrade from WordPress and hiring a skilled, experienced developer is gonna get you there.
It’s no secret that at deckerdevs we’re HubSpot advocates. We’ve invested a lot of time and funding into growing our knowledge base and experience in HubSpot. We’ve been around since the onset of this powerful automation software and as we continue to watch their CMS grow, we know we can count on the same boundary-pushing best practices, security, user friendliness and attention to detail they’ve always moved forward in their marketing software. Is HubSpot CMS the solution for every business that has outgrown WordPress? Not necessarily. But it might be.
What’s your WordPress struggle?
Let us know what you’re dealing with in the comments or book some time and let’s chat it out.
\n
WordPress CMS has always been a great way for a small business to develop a pretty customized website. You choose a theme or framework, add some plugins and you’re off to the races. Even a technically savvy small business owner could theoretically walk themselves through basic WordPress development - and many have (though we don’t recommend this).
The problem is, over time this piecemeal approach that served you well in your initial stages ends up cumbersome and doesn’t quite suit your business as it grows. Small businesses outgrow their initial Wordpress framework all the time and we help drive them to a custom solution. How do you know when your business has outgrown Wordpress, though?
Businesses grow. It’s what they’re all meant to do and it’s what we as business owners want. But as they grow, businesses and their teams add line of business applications, additional employees, marketing functions, content and additional functionality to the website. All of a sudden what used to work so well for your business is bogged down, barely keeping up and holding our marketing teams back from really leaping into digital marketing and turning the website into a lead generation tool.
If you’re starting to worry that your WordPress website is holding you back, here are a few signs that you might be outgrowing WordPress…
You find yourself compromising on what you want.
\nPlugins. Am I right? Plugins were always to website features what apps were to user needs with the iPhone. There was always a plugin that did what you needed. Fast forward a few years, and as more and more developers stop supporting their plugins, there are fewer secure options to get your goals accomplished inside WordPress. This means you’ve added multiple plugins to accomplish a goal or help with a workflow, resulting in piecemeal websites bogged down by plugins that aren’t properly supported which leads to security holes and slower load times.
\nYour site keeps getting hacked
\nThe security holes that come with outdated plugins really get you in trouble. The multitudes of WordPress plugins and the clunky way you piece together your website might’ve worked when you were just getting going, but once those plugins went out of date they opened huge security holes and it’s possible your site has been compromised. WordPress is well known for their vulnerability issues. While captcha and security tools can help, attacks can slip through from time to time, because the majority of the plugins hosted on WordPress are third party plugins.
\nUpdates break your website
\nWordPress core, themes, and plugins are almost constantly updating to make up for the security vulnerabilities and attacks, but every time they update to accommodate those security gaps, it has the potential to break your website, especially when the developers that created your theme or plugins may not be updating at the same rate that WordPress. Approaching these plugin updates reactively can mean that you experience downtime before your developer can get in to fix these items - and as a growing business, that downtime becomes more and more costly if you’re relying on your website for any kind of revenue.
But it’s not just outdated plugins that can cause your website to break, but misplaced code and styling within WordPress core, themes and plugins can cause updates to break your website as well. Oftentimes developers hack together CSS and HTML and put it in the wrong places or fail to create child themes and directly update the theme files, instead. They may also target part of the structure that shouldn’t be targeted within a theme or even modify core WordPress files. An example of this might be when you ask a developer to update your WordPress site, and after updating the styling is totally out of whack. Some WordPress themes have very specific rules around how the theme should be updated and developers don’t always follow them or leave behind appropriate documentation, which may work if they’re the only one updating the website long term, but if things are misplaced and themes aren’t treated with best practices, updates will inevitably break your site.
You’re exploring integrations
\nAs your business grows, you’ll find that the pieces of software that you use to manage your day to day items may not serve you as well. You might bring on more robust applications, and eventually you might even want to integrate those applications closely with your website. Customer portals, custom calculators, learning centers, the details of customer registration, event management or sales handoffs are just some of the integrations and applications that customers have approached us to design on their behalf. Integrating these applications or building integrations between an already bogged down website and business application needs to be considered carefully. Investing so heavily in advanced integrations should be part of a really comprehensive evaluation of all your technology - including your website.
\nYour site is slow AF
\nWe discuss the frustration associated with bogged down websites all the time - and it’s a huge segment of the reason that a lot of companies decide to completely overhaul their website. Piecing together functionality that you need using multiple plugins for form capture, graphic displays and chatbots for example is great from a functionality and feature perspective, but pile that on with photo gallery and product management and things start to get slower and slower. Your new marketing manager has even more great ideas - but your site is already too slow and you know that slow loading sites are not good for Google *or* user conversions.
Your website served you well for a long time, but you can’t expect what you started with to continue serving you through this growth period in your business. Just like you upgrade phones and computers and processes, you need to upgrade your website framework and CMS. If you’re experiencing any of the above, it’s very likely that it’s time to upgrade from WordPress and hiring a skilled, experienced developer is gonna get you there.
It’s no secret that at deckerdevs we’re HubSpot advocates. We’ve invested a lot of time and funding into growing our knowledge base and experience in HubSpot. We’ve been around since the onset of this powerful automation software and as we continue to watch their CMS grow, we know we can count on the same boundary-pushing best practices, security, user friendliness and attention to detail they’ve always moved forward in their marketing software. Is HubSpot CMS the solution for every business that has outgrown WordPress? Not necessarily. But it might be.
What’s your WordPress struggle?
Let us know what you’re dealing with in the comments or book some time and let’s chat it out.
\n
WordPress CMS has always been a great way for a small business to develop a pretty customized website. You choose a theme or framework, add some plugins and you’re off to the races. Even a technically savvy small business owner could theoretically walk themselves through basic WordPress development - and many have (though we don’t recommend this).
The problem is, over time this piecemeal approach that served you well in your initial stages ends up cumbersome and doesn’t quite suit your business as it grows. Small businesses outgrow their initial Wordpress framework all the time and we help drive them to a custom solution. How do you know when your business has outgrown Wordpress, though?
WordPress CMS has always been a great way for a small business to develop a pretty customized website. You choose a theme or framework, add some plugins and you’re off to the races. Even a technically savvy small business owner could theoretically walk themselves through basic WordPress development - and many have (though we don’t recommend this).
The problem is, over time this piecemeal approach that served you well in your initial stages ends up cumbersome and doesn’t quite suit your business as it grows. Small businesses outgrow their initial Wordpress framework all the time and we help drive them to a custom solution. How do you know when your business has outgrown Wordpress, though?
WordPress CMS has always been a great way for a small business to develop a pretty customized website. You choose a theme or framework, add some plugins and you’re off to the races. Even a technically savvy small business owner could theoretically walk themselves through basic WordPress development - and many have (though we don’t recommend this).
The problem is, over time this piecemeal approach that served you well in your initial stages ends up cumbersome and doesn’t quite suit your business as it grows. Small businesses outgrow their initial Wordpress framework all the time and we help drive them to a custom solution. How do you know when your business has outgrown Wordpress, though?
WordPress CMS has always been a great way for a small business to develop a pretty customized website. You choose a theme or framework, add some plugins and you’re off to the races. Even a technically savvy small business owner could theoretically walk themselves through basic WordPress development - and many have (though we don’t recommend this).
The problem is, over time this piecemeal approach that served you well in your initial stages ends up cumbersome and doesn’t quite suit your business as it grows. Small businesses outgrow their initial Wordpress framework all the time and we help drive them to a custom solution. How do you know when your business has outgrown Wordpress, though?
WordPress CMS has always been a great way for a small business to develop a pretty customized website. You choose a theme or framework, add some plugins and you’re off to the races. Even a technically savvy small business owner could theoretically walk themselves through basic WordPress development - and many have (though we don’t recommend this).
The problem is, over time this piecemeal approach that served you well in your initial stages ends up cumbersome and doesn’t quite suit your business as it grows. Small businesses outgrow their initial Wordpress framework all the time and we help drive them to a custom solution. How do you know when your business has outgrown Wordpress, though?
WordPress CMS has always been a great way for a small business to develop a pretty customized website. You choose a theme or framework, add some plugins and you’re off to the races. Even a technically savvy small business owner could theoretically walk themselves through basic WordPress development - and many have (though we don’t recommend this).
The problem is, over time this piecemeal approach that served you well in your initial stages ends up cumbersome and doesn’t quite suit your business as it grows. Small businesses outgrow their initial Wordpress framework all the time and we help drive them to a custom solution. How do you know when your business has outgrown Wordpress, though?
Businesses grow. It’s what they’re all meant to do and it’s what we as business owners want. But as they grow, businesses and their teams add line of business applications, additional employees, marketing functions, content and additional functionality to the website. All of a sudden what used to work so well for your business is bogged down, barely keeping up and holding our marketing teams back from really leaping into digital marketing and turning the website into a lead generation tool.
If you’re starting to worry that your WordPress website is holding you back, here are a few signs that you might be outgrowing WordPress…
You find yourself compromising on what you want.
\nPlugins. Am I right? Plugins were always to website features what apps were to user needs with the iPhone. There was always a plugin that did what you needed. Fast forward a few years, and as more and more developers stop supporting their plugins, there are fewer secure options to get your goals accomplished inside WordPress. This means you’ve added multiple plugins to accomplish a goal or help with a workflow, resulting in piecemeal websites bogged down by plugins that aren’t properly supported which leads to security holes and slower load times.
\nYour site keeps getting hacked
\nThe security holes that come with outdated plugins really get you in trouble. The multitudes of WordPress plugins and the clunky way you piece together your website might’ve worked when you were just getting going, but once those plugins went out of date they opened huge security holes and it’s possible your site has been compromised. WordPress is well known for their vulnerability issues. While captcha and security tools can help, attacks can slip through from time to time, because the majority of the plugins hosted on WordPress are third party plugins.
\nUpdates break your website
\nWordPress core, themes, and plugins are almost constantly updating to make up for the security vulnerabilities and attacks, but every time they update to accommodate those security gaps, it has the potential to break your website, especially when the developers that created your theme or plugins may not be updating at the same rate that WordPress. Approaching these plugin updates reactively can mean that you experience downtime before your developer can get in to fix these items - and as a growing business, that downtime becomes more and more costly if you’re relying on your website for any kind of revenue.
But it’s not just outdated plugins that can cause your website to break, but misplaced code and styling within WordPress core, themes and plugins can cause updates to break your website as well. Oftentimes developers hack together CSS and HTML and put it in the wrong places or fail to create child themes and directly update the theme files, instead. They may also target part of the structure that shouldn’t be targeted within a theme or even modify core WordPress files. An example of this might be when you ask a developer to update your WordPress site, and after updating the styling is totally out of whack. Some WordPress themes have very specific rules around how the theme should be updated and developers don’t always follow them or leave behind appropriate documentation, which may work if they’re the only one updating the website long term, but if things are misplaced and themes aren’t treated with best practices, updates will inevitably break your site.
You’re exploring integrations
\nAs your business grows, you’ll find that the pieces of software that you use to manage your day to day items may not serve you as well. You might bring on more robust applications, and eventually you might even want to integrate those applications closely with your website. Customer portals, custom calculators, learning centers, the details of customer registration, event management or sales handoffs are just some of the integrations and applications that customers have approached us to design on their behalf. Integrating these applications or building integrations between an already bogged down website and business application needs to be considered carefully. Investing so heavily in advanced integrations should be part of a really comprehensive evaluation of all your technology - including your website.
\nYour site is slow AF
\nWe discuss the frustration associated with bogged down websites all the time - and it’s a huge segment of the reason that a lot of companies decide to completely overhaul their website. Piecing together functionality that you need using multiple plugins for form capture, graphic displays and chatbots for example is great from a functionality and feature perspective, but pile that on with photo gallery and product management and things start to get slower and slower. Your new marketing manager has even more great ideas - but your site is already too slow and you know that slow loading sites are not good for Google *or* user conversions.
Your website served you well for a long time, but you can’t expect what you started with to continue serving you through this growth period in your business. Just like you upgrade phones and computers and processes, you need to upgrade your website framework and CMS. If you’re experiencing any of the above, it’s very likely that it’s time to upgrade from WordPress and hiring a skilled, experienced developer is gonna get you there.
It’s no secret that at deckerdevs we’re HubSpot advocates. We’ve invested a lot of time and funding into growing our knowledge base and experience in HubSpot. We’ve been around since the onset of this powerful automation software and as we continue to watch their CMS grow, we know we can count on the same boundary-pushing best practices, security, user friendliness and attention to detail they’ve always moved forward in their marketing software. Is HubSpot CMS the solution for every business that has outgrown WordPress? Not necessarily. But it might be.
What’s your WordPress struggle?
Let us know what you’re dealing with in the comments or book some time and let’s chat it out.
\n
WordPress CMS has always been a great way for a small business to develop a pretty customized website. You choose a theme or framework, add some plugins and you’re off to the races. Even a technically savvy small business owner could theoretically walk themselves through basic WordPress development - and many have (though we don’t recommend this).
The problem is, over time this piecemeal approach that served you well in your initial stages ends up cumbersome and doesn’t quite suit your business as it grows. Small businesses outgrow their initial Wordpress framework all the time and we help drive them to a custom solution. How do you know when your business has outgrown Wordpress, though?
Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
\n\n![\"Dwight](\"https://www.officetally.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/card-would-an-idiot-do-that.jpg\")
It’s important to note that not every experience in Upwork or other web developer freelancing websites is a positive experience. In fact, more often than not, using Upwork developers can be a pretty big risk. We recently took on a project that came from an Upwork developer we lost a prospect to for budget reasons. The prospect resurfaced in the next few months, indicating that they’d selected an Upwork developer and the developer had gotten in over their head, oversold their services and wasn’t able to complete the Wordpress project as promised. Now they were out the majority of the initial budget and we have to work inside code that wasn’t ours, written by an inexperienced developer.
\n
RELATED: So, your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n\n
We don’t have egos when it comes to clients that choose other developers, but as a small business ourselves, it’s so unfortunate to watch the client pay two developers and then ultimately end up with an inferior project because they don’t have the capital to start from scratch. Hiring Upwork web developers is more of a gamble than people realize - and can seem a little like playing roulette.
\n\n
RELATED: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\nYou’ve lost the middle man.
\n\n
While you might be saving a load by managing the project yourself, odds are pretty good you haven’t managed a lot of website projects in the past. By saving money on the middle man, you can’t forget that you’re also losing the middle man.
You’re losing project oversight, the accountability of someone else to bother you about content, images, and timelines. You’ll often get stuck doing quality assurance testing yourself and may end up with an untested website that is full of errors and bugs as a result.
You hire experts not just to avoid doing the work yourself, but because you have your own business to run or job to do. Taking on the management of an entire website when you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
The odds aren’t in your favor.
\n\n
It’s very possible that you’ll find an incredible developer with the appropriate amount of experience in your industry that can manage a project and craft a vision and rabbit hole into the user experience as effectively as they can write code - but this is not the standard. When it comes to finding developers on Upwork and other web development outsourcing on websites, finding a developer that balances all of these skills that codes with attention to detail without bugs and with the user in mind - it’s not an easy task.
We’ve done a few different write ups on questions to ask when you’re interviewing web developers:
Part 1: Interview questions to ask your web developer
Part 2
Part 3
The interview questions above will prepare you well for your interview process with prospective developers for outsourcing.
\n
You have no idea what you’re getting.
\n\n
The freelance world can get a little wild. In theory you know what you’re paying for - websites like Upwork and Fiverr have review mechanisms, so at minimum you know that they’ve been successful before. We’ve also discussed the importance of requesting referrals and actually contacting those referrals.
Ultimately a developer can list that they have skills in different languages, different CMS platforms and their SEO expertise, but you won’t know exactly how much you’re missing out on until you delve deeply into the project. No one expects a new website project to go perfectly, but the more skilled and experienced your developer is, the smoother the process will go.
\n
RELATED: HubSpot CMS Developer Utopia - What to expect when developing a website
\n\n
Rather than going straight to Upwork or Fiverr to hire a freelance web developer, consider asking for referrals from trusted friends. If you’re a HubSpot user, you can usually ask your HubSpot rep for assistance with this. There is a robust network of professionals that account managers refer out when HubSpot users need assistance with redevelopment of their website.
Alternatively, if you’re looking to redesign a website hosted on Wordpress you can search on LinkedIn for prospective Wordpress developers as well.
Don’t end up like some of the prospects that come back to us to help bail them out of a sticky situation. While it might seem impossible to get a quality developer with a smaller website budget, it’s very possible if you’re willing to be patient. By establishing a larger budget that can be broken down over time and extending your timeline for launch, you can sustainably overhaul your website or execute your development project without sacrificing quality.
Just because you’re a smaller mid-sized business doesn’t mean that you can’t access the same resources without a little additional creativity. Vet your developer carefully and be prepared to pay a little extra so you can be situated as well as possible when your new website or project launches.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
","post_summary":"Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
\n","blog_post_schedule_task_uid":null,"blog_publish_to_social_media_task":"DONE_NOT_SENT","blog_publish_instant_email_task_uid":null,"blog_publish_instant_email_campaign_id":null,"blog_publish_instant_email_retry_count":null,"rss_body":"Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
\n\n
It’s important to note that not every experience in Upwork or other web developer freelancing websites is a positive experience. In fact, more often than not, using Upwork developers can be a pretty big risk. We recently took on a project that came from an Upwork developer we lost a prospect to for budget reasons. The prospect resurfaced in the next few months, indicating that they’d selected an Upwork developer and the developer had gotten in over their head, oversold their services and wasn’t able to complete the Wordpress project as promised. Now they were out the majority of the initial budget and we have to work inside code that wasn’t ours, written by an inexperienced developer.
\n
RELATED: So, your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n\n
We don’t have egos when it comes to clients that choose other developers, but as a small business ourselves, it’s so unfortunate to watch the client pay two developers and then ultimately end up with an inferior project because they don’t have the capital to start from scratch. Hiring Upwork web developers is more of a gamble than people realize - and can seem a little like playing roulette.
\n\n
RELATED: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\nYou’ve lost the middle man.
\n\n
While you might be saving a load by managing the project yourself, odds are pretty good you haven’t managed a lot of website projects in the past. By saving money on the middle man, you can’t forget that you’re also losing the middle man.
You’re losing project oversight, the accountability of someone else to bother you about content, images, and timelines. You’ll often get stuck doing quality assurance testing yourself and may end up with an untested website that is full of errors and bugs as a result.
You hire experts not just to avoid doing the work yourself, but because you have your own business to run or job to do. Taking on the management of an entire website when you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
The odds aren’t in your favor.
\n\n
It’s very possible that you’ll find an incredible developer with the appropriate amount of experience in your industry that can manage a project and craft a vision and rabbit hole into the user experience as effectively as they can write code - but this is not the standard. When it comes to finding developers on Upwork and other web development outsourcing on websites, finding a developer that balances all of these skills that codes with attention to detail without bugs and with the user in mind - it’s not an easy task.
We’ve done a few different write ups on questions to ask when you’re interviewing web developers:
Part 1: Interview questions to ask your web developer
Part 2
Part 3
The interview questions above will prepare you well for your interview process with prospective developers for outsourcing.
\n
You have no idea what you’re getting.
\n\n
The freelance world can get a little wild. In theory you know what you’re paying for - websites like Upwork and Fiverr have review mechanisms, so at minimum you know that they’ve been successful before. We’ve also discussed the importance of requesting referrals and actually contacting those referrals.
Ultimately a developer can list that they have skills in different languages, different CMS platforms and their SEO expertise, but you won’t know exactly how much you’re missing out on until you delve deeply into the project. No one expects a new website project to go perfectly, but the more skilled and experienced your developer is, the smoother the process will go.
\n
RELATED: HubSpot CMS Developer Utopia - What to expect when developing a website
\n\n
Rather than going straight to Upwork or Fiverr to hire a freelance web developer, consider asking for referrals from trusted friends. If you’re a HubSpot user, you can usually ask your HubSpot rep for assistance with this. There is a robust network of professionals that account managers refer out when HubSpot users need assistance with redevelopment of their website.
Alternatively, if you’re looking to redesign a website hosted on Wordpress you can search on LinkedIn for prospective Wordpress developers as well.
Don’t end up like some of the prospects that come back to us to help bail them out of a sticky situation. While it might seem impossible to get a quality developer with a smaller website budget, it’s very possible if you’re willing to be patient. By establishing a larger budget that can be broken down over time and extending your timeline for launch, you can sustainably overhaul your website or execute your development project without sacrificing quality.
Just because you’re a smaller mid-sized business doesn’t mean that you can’t access the same resources without a little additional creativity. Vet your developer carefully and be prepared to pay a little extra so you can be situated as well as possible when your new website or project launches.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
","rss_summary":"Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
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In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
\n\n
It’s important to note that not every experience in Upwork or other web developer freelancing websites is a positive experience. In fact, more often than not, using Upwork developers can be a pretty big risk. We recently took on a project that came from an Upwork developer we lost a prospect to for budget reasons. The prospect resurfaced in the next few months, indicating that they’d selected an Upwork developer and the developer had gotten in over their head, oversold their services and wasn’t able to complete the Wordpress project as promised. Now they were out the majority of the initial budget and we have to work inside code that wasn’t ours, written by an inexperienced developer.
\n
RELATED: So, your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n\n
We don’t have egos when it comes to clients that choose other developers, but as a small business ourselves, it’s so unfortunate to watch the client pay two developers and then ultimately end up with an inferior project because they don’t have the capital to start from scratch. Hiring Upwork web developers is more of a gamble than people realize - and can seem a little like playing roulette.
\n\n
RELATED: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\nYou’ve lost the middle man.
\n\n
While you might be saving a load by managing the project yourself, odds are pretty good you haven’t managed a lot of website projects in the past. By saving money on the middle man, you can’t forget that you’re also losing the middle man.
You’re losing project oversight, the accountability of someone else to bother you about content, images, and timelines. You’ll often get stuck doing quality assurance testing yourself and may end up with an untested website that is full of errors and bugs as a result.
You hire experts not just to avoid doing the work yourself, but because you have your own business to run or job to do. Taking on the management of an entire website when you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
The odds aren’t in your favor.
\n\n
It’s very possible that you’ll find an incredible developer with the appropriate amount of experience in your industry that can manage a project and craft a vision and rabbit hole into the user experience as effectively as they can write code - but this is not the standard. When it comes to finding developers on Upwork and other web development outsourcing on websites, finding a developer that balances all of these skills that codes with attention to detail without bugs and with the user in mind - it’s not an easy task.
We’ve done a few different write ups on questions to ask when you’re interviewing web developers:
Part 1: Interview questions to ask your web developer
Part 2
Part 3
The interview questions above will prepare you well for your interview process with prospective developers for outsourcing.
\n
You have no idea what you’re getting.
\n\n
The freelance world can get a little wild. In theory you know what you’re paying for - websites like Upwork and Fiverr have review mechanisms, so at minimum you know that they’ve been successful before. We’ve also discussed the importance of requesting referrals and actually contacting those referrals.
Ultimately a developer can list that they have skills in different languages, different CMS platforms and their SEO expertise, but you won’t know exactly how much you’re missing out on until you delve deeply into the project. No one expects a new website project to go perfectly, but the more skilled and experienced your developer is, the smoother the process will go.
\n
RELATED: HubSpot CMS Developer Utopia - What to expect when developing a website
\n\n
Rather than going straight to Upwork or Fiverr to hire a freelance web developer, consider asking for referrals from trusted friends. If you’re a HubSpot user, you can usually ask your HubSpot rep for assistance with this. There is a robust network of professionals that account managers refer out when HubSpot users need assistance with redevelopment of their website.
Alternatively, if you’re looking to redesign a website hosted on Wordpress you can search on LinkedIn for prospective Wordpress developers as well.
Don’t end up like some of the prospects that come back to us to help bail them out of a sticky situation. While it might seem impossible to get a quality developer with a smaller website budget, it’s very possible if you’re willing to be patient. By establishing a larger budget that can be broken down over time and extending your timeline for launch, you can sustainably overhaul your website or execute your development project without sacrificing quality.
Just because you’re a smaller mid-sized business doesn’t mean that you can’t access the same resources without a little additional creativity. Vet your developer carefully and be prepared to pay a little extra so you can be situated as well as possible when your new website or project launches.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
","postBodyRss":"Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
\n\n
It’s important to note that not every experience in Upwork or other web developer freelancing websites is a positive experience. In fact, more often than not, using Upwork developers can be a pretty big risk. We recently took on a project that came from an Upwork developer we lost a prospect to for budget reasons. The prospect resurfaced in the next few months, indicating that they’d selected an Upwork developer and the developer had gotten in over their head, oversold their services and wasn’t able to complete the Wordpress project as promised. Now they were out the majority of the initial budget and we have to work inside code that wasn’t ours, written by an inexperienced developer.
\n
RELATED: So, your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n\n
We don’t have egos when it comes to clients that choose other developers, but as a small business ourselves, it’s so unfortunate to watch the client pay two developers and then ultimately end up with an inferior project because they don’t have the capital to start from scratch. Hiring Upwork web developers is more of a gamble than people realize - and can seem a little like playing roulette.
\n\n
RELATED: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\nYou’ve lost the middle man.
\n\n
While you might be saving a load by managing the project yourself, odds are pretty good you haven’t managed a lot of website projects in the past. By saving money on the middle man, you can’t forget that you’re also losing the middle man.
You’re losing project oversight, the accountability of someone else to bother you about content, images, and timelines. You’ll often get stuck doing quality assurance testing yourself and may end up with an untested website that is full of errors and bugs as a result.
You hire experts not just to avoid doing the work yourself, but because you have your own business to run or job to do. Taking on the management of an entire website when you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
The odds aren’t in your favor.
\n\n
It’s very possible that you’ll find an incredible developer with the appropriate amount of experience in your industry that can manage a project and craft a vision and rabbit hole into the user experience as effectively as they can write code - but this is not the standard. When it comes to finding developers on Upwork and other web development outsourcing on websites, finding a developer that balances all of these skills that codes with attention to detail without bugs and with the user in mind - it’s not an easy task.
We’ve done a few different write ups on questions to ask when you’re interviewing web developers:
Part 1: Interview questions to ask your web developer
Part 2
Part 3
The interview questions above will prepare you well for your interview process with prospective developers for outsourcing.
\n
You have no idea what you’re getting.
\n\n
The freelance world can get a little wild. In theory you know what you’re paying for - websites like Upwork and Fiverr have review mechanisms, so at minimum you know that they’ve been successful before. We’ve also discussed the importance of requesting referrals and actually contacting those referrals.
Ultimately a developer can list that they have skills in different languages, different CMS platforms and their SEO expertise, but you won’t know exactly how much you’re missing out on until you delve deeply into the project. No one expects a new website project to go perfectly, but the more skilled and experienced your developer is, the smoother the process will go.
\n
RELATED: HubSpot CMS Developer Utopia - What to expect when developing a website
\n\n
Rather than going straight to Upwork or Fiverr to hire a freelance web developer, consider asking for referrals from trusted friends. If you’re a HubSpot user, you can usually ask your HubSpot rep for assistance with this. There is a robust network of professionals that account managers refer out when HubSpot users need assistance with redevelopment of their website.
Alternatively, if you’re looking to redesign a website hosted on Wordpress you can search on LinkedIn for prospective Wordpress developers as well.
Don’t end up like some of the prospects that come back to us to help bail them out of a sticky situation. While it might seem impossible to get a quality developer with a smaller website budget, it’s very possible if you’re willing to be patient. By establishing a larger budget that can be broken down over time and extending your timeline for launch, you can sustainably overhaul your website or execute your development project without sacrificing quality.
Just because you’re a smaller mid-sized business doesn’t mean that you can’t access the same resources without a little additional creativity. Vet your developer carefully and be prepared to pay a little extra so you can be situated as well as possible when your new website or project launches.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
","postEmailContent":"Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
","postFeaturedImageIfEnabled":"https://www.officetally.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/card-would-an-idiot-do-that.jpg","postListContent":"Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
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\n\n
It’s important to note that not every experience in Upwork or other web developer freelancing websites is a positive experience. In fact, more often than not, using Upwork developers can be a pretty big risk. We recently took on a project that came from an Upwork developer we lost a prospect to for budget reasons. The prospect resurfaced in the next few months, indicating that they’d selected an Upwork developer and the developer had gotten in over their head, oversold their services and wasn’t able to complete the Wordpress project as promised. Now they were out the majority of the initial budget and we have to work inside code that wasn’t ours, written by an inexperienced developer.
\n
RELATED: So, your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n\n
We don’t have egos when it comes to clients that choose other developers, but as a small business ourselves, it’s so unfortunate to watch the client pay two developers and then ultimately end up with an inferior project because they don’t have the capital to start from scratch. Hiring Upwork web developers is more of a gamble than people realize - and can seem a little like playing roulette.
\n\n
RELATED: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\nYou’ve lost the middle man.
\n\n
While you might be saving a load by managing the project yourself, odds are pretty good you haven’t managed a lot of website projects in the past. By saving money on the middle man, you can’t forget that you’re also losing the middle man.
You’re losing project oversight, the accountability of someone else to bother you about content, images, and timelines. You’ll often get stuck doing quality assurance testing yourself and may end up with an untested website that is full of errors and bugs as a result.
You hire experts not just to avoid doing the work yourself, but because you have your own business to run or job to do. Taking on the management of an entire website when you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
The odds aren’t in your favor.
\n\n
It’s very possible that you’ll find an incredible developer with the appropriate amount of experience in your industry that can manage a project and craft a vision and rabbit hole into the user experience as effectively as they can write code - but this is not the standard. When it comes to finding developers on Upwork and other web development outsourcing on websites, finding a developer that balances all of these skills that codes with attention to detail without bugs and with the user in mind - it’s not an easy task.
We’ve done a few different write ups on questions to ask when you’re interviewing web developers:
Part 1: Interview questions to ask your web developer
Part 2
Part 3
The interview questions above will prepare you well for your interview process with prospective developers for outsourcing.
\n
You have no idea what you’re getting.
\n\n
The freelance world can get a little wild. In theory you know what you’re paying for - websites like Upwork and Fiverr have review mechanisms, so at minimum you know that they’ve been successful before. We’ve also discussed the importance of requesting referrals and actually contacting those referrals.
Ultimately a developer can list that they have skills in different languages, different CMS platforms and their SEO expertise, but you won’t know exactly how much you’re missing out on until you delve deeply into the project. No one expects a new website project to go perfectly, but the more skilled and experienced your developer is, the smoother the process will go.
\n
RELATED: HubSpot CMS Developer Utopia - What to expect when developing a website
\n\n
Rather than going straight to Upwork or Fiverr to hire a freelance web developer, consider asking for referrals from trusted friends. If you’re a HubSpot user, you can usually ask your HubSpot rep for assistance with this. There is a robust network of professionals that account managers refer out when HubSpot users need assistance with redevelopment of their website.
Alternatively, if you’re looking to redesign a website hosted on Wordpress you can search on LinkedIn for prospective Wordpress developers as well.
Don’t end up like some of the prospects that come back to us to help bail them out of a sticky situation. While it might seem impossible to get a quality developer with a smaller website budget, it’s very possible if you’re willing to be patient. By establishing a larger budget that can be broken down over time and extending your timeline for launch, you can sustainably overhaul your website or execute your development project without sacrificing quality.
Just because you’re a smaller mid-sized business doesn’t mean that you can’t access the same resources without a little additional creativity. Vet your developer carefully and be prepared to pay a little extra so you can be situated as well as possible when your new website or project launches.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
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Every year at Inbound we’re left in awe from the speakers, the connections, the words from the HubSpot executive team and all of the exciting new features that are in the works. Inbound 22 was no exception and we’re crazy excited about what these updates mean for HubSpot customers (check out the full list of HubSpot updates from Inbound 22). One of these updates in particular piqued our interest quite a bit, and that’s giving SuperAdmin privileges to create custom objects. Custom objects were announced at Inbound 2020, but have always required the help of a developer. It was always in the plans to open up custom objects for any SuperAdmin in HubSpot to create. While we definitely love the idea of improved data association - with great power comes great responsibility.
![\"Explain](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/Explain%20like%20im%205.webp\")
In order to understand how you’ll be able to best take advantage of HubSpot’s announcement that custom objects will be able to be created by users in HubSpot, you’ll need to first understand more about objects.
If you’re not familiar with custom objects - here’s the rundown:
What are custom objects?
\nCustom objects allow you to store and structure any data that’s relevant to your business that might not already exist in HubSpot’s standard list of objects. It’s basically a way to customize HubSpot to suit the nuance of your business.
Objects, as defined by HubSpot, represent the different types of relationships and processes your business has. All HubSpot accounts use four standard objects: contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. Depending on your HubSpot subscription, there are other objects, such as calls, conversations, payments, products, quotes, and custom objects. All objects use the same framework, which enables you to segment or report on them.
Basically, objects allow you to assign contacts, companies, deals and tickets with associated data records. Each object has properties used to collect information about that object. In order to better integrate data and make intelligent decisions in your marketing and operations, storing more data is sometimes necessary. This can be done with custom objects.
Custom objects are only available for HubSpot customers with enterprise-level subscriptions, but the power in the data associations is significant. Custom objects increase flexibility and efficiency in your operations.
What can you do with custom objects?
\nCustom objects can
\n- \n
- create and update individual records in the interface \n
- associate with other existing records \n
- gain accuracy by including this information in reporting \n
- trigger automations and workflows \n
- integrate data between applications \n
- be used in automated emails \n
Previously objects were limited to contacts, companies, deals and tickets. However, when custom objects launched, it helped businesses further integrate and segment their data. Once a custom object has been defined, properties can be attached to it and it can be used to establish associations between objects.
\nHow do I create a custom object?
\nAt Inbound 2022, HubSpot released creating custom objects in Beta to their Enterprise subscription customers. In order to create a custom object, you must have an Enterprise subscription to one of the following HubSpot subscriptions:
\n- \n
- Marketing Hub \n
- Sales Hub \n
- CMS Hub \n
- Service Hub \n
- Operations Hub \n
You can find more detailed information about custom objects in HubSpot’s blog, but we’ve pulled the instructions for how to create a custom object directly from their Knowledge Center where HubSpot created an object for cars, something we’re all very familiar with that will help you understand how objects and object properties can be set up. This basic example will help you understand how objects have different object types like the model of a car.
“If you're a super admin, you can create a custom object in your HubSpot settings or via the API once you enable the beta.
To create a custom object in HubSpot:
\n- \n
- In your HubSpot account, click the settings settings icon in the main navigation bar.
- In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Objects > Custom Objects.
- Click the Create a custom object button. If you've previously created a custom object, the Create custom object button will appear in the top right.
- In the right panel, set up your custom object:\n
- \n
- To set your custom object's name:\n
- \n
- Object Name (Singular): enter the singular title for your custom object (e.g., Pet). \n
- Object Name (Plural): enter the plural title of your custom object (e.g., Pets). \n
\n - To create the object's primary display property:
\n- \n
- Primary display property: enter a label for the property used to name a record of your object (e.g., Pet name for Pets). This property is required to create a custom object record. \n
- Property type: select the type of your primary display property, either Single-line text or Number. \n
- Click the edit pencil below the label to edit the property's internal name, then click Save to confirm. The internal name is used by integrations or APIs, and cannot be edited once the object is created. \n
- Select the checkbox to require unique values for the primary display property. With this turned on, users will be unable to enter the same value for multiple records (e.g., for the object Orders, the primary property Order number should require unique values). \n
\n
\n - To set your custom object's name:\n
![](\"https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/oJGQ0I5c34K6UKowt9D4mSaVpywjiNmCjrN2zxeO4rkLDxatVWAOPwvVEqzpmKDNJieyT1Ym6ExlkHFeZxaZ_9kibb4PRse_FbtYvuywpF8ZWeKbdTopgi0oe1BhN2R9eydt9qspzXkI26RpcmxYNiTvH8zNaig7JzJQHb6uEZLdG1m1Q9NCXQcxbuu81Q\")
\n
- \n
- \n
- \n
- To create a secondary property for your custom object:\n
- \n
- Secondary display property: enter a label for the property that is displayed below the primary property on a record (e.g, Type of pet and Owner phone number for Pets). Secondary properties are not required to create a custom object record. \n
- Property type: the type of your secondary display property, either Single-line text or Number. \n
- Click the edit pencil below the label to edit the property's internal name, then click Save to confirm. The internal name is used by integrations or APIs, and cannot be edited once the object is created. \n
\n - To add an additional secondary display property, click + Add property. \n
- To remove a secondary property, click the delete delete icon next to the property. \n
\n - To create a secondary property for your custom object:\n
![](\"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/yJuNIy7qZCjdeLxcVDswiZ7A2JIpddX6VRE_Gu6lpqh6M1bAksRgqnpvAPsQtHSe3kGpliEWiO5o2Z-y-lk6Ym5roqQ7wQO0AQSr65OJxlolsw_pNFuqYLIttFDrVndw4ts-0cMKMF8_M8NOopMxjLPzPG3VfObVm206Yy_7LW4bwjcZA9zkHgFMvhWBlA\")
Once you're done, click Create at the bottom of the panel.”
What to expect:
\nWhile this new ability to custom objects without any code will open up a lot of opportunities for HubSpot customers, it’s also really important that you consider your use-case carefully and determine if a custom object is the best way to handle your data. Custom objects are an exceptional way to integrate more of the data that might otherwise be found in separate applications.
Some examples of use cases for custom objects:
- \n
- A realtor selling condominiums at different high rises in the area might want to create a custom object for each property or the individual listings and details about the listings within that property. \n
- A veterinarian might want to track the different types of animals owned by the patients in his practice (you could also create a child object to add treatments or medications) \n
- A school with online learning may want to track a student’s interest in different subjects or which courses they’ve completed. \n
- A retailer may want to keep track of shipping information for their customers. \n
- A car dealership may want to keep track of individual vehicles, vin numbers, mileage and associate those vehicle listings with sales (as you saw in the example above from HubSpot’s Knowledge Center) \n
You can see above that this is a game changer for pipeline tracking and really personalizing the marketing experience for a prospect or customer based on the custom objects that you create.
\nIn the past, a HubSpot user or marketer would have just resorted to adding a bunch of properties on the contact or company record. If you did this, say, with the example provided regarding online learning, a HubSpot admin might create 10 different properties for different interests associated with a contact record, but that doesn’t scale well if their interests are more diverse.
The same is true for the example of the veterinarian’s office. Depending on an individual, they might have a very exhaustive list of pets. A farmer would not only have multiple varieties of animals, but even different breeds of that specific species of animal. An animal rescue contact would have multiple animals of different breeds as well. Being able to keep track of complex information that translates into all of the different areas of HubSpot that your marketers, service teams and salespeople use is critical to your success.
The scalability of custom objects gets really exciting when you can associate multiple objects with with different contacts. The possibilities for personalized marketing associated with these objects are virtually endless. It can allow marketers to get super creative and really hone in on personalization and custom content. And when you get a developer involved? There are literally no limits to how empowered you can be with your marketing.
If you need to integrate data from an external database or need help creating a strategy surrounding custom objects, we highly recommend that you reach out to a skilled developer.
We’re obviously happy to help address any questions with custom objects and assist in setup training, strategy or integrating external data into HubSpot to help centralize everything.
Ready to dig into custom objects, but not sure where to start? We can help. Use the button below to book some time and chat about what custom objects can do for your business.
Every year at Inbound we’re left in awe from the speakers, the connections, the words from the HubSpot executive team and all of the exciting new features that are in the works. Inbound 22 was no exception and we’re crazy excited about what these updates mean for HubSpot customers (check out the full list of HubSpot updates from Inbound 22). One of these updates in particular piqued our interest quite a bit, and that’s giving SuperAdmin privileges to create custom objects. Custom objects were announced at Inbound 2020, but have always required the help of a developer. It was always in the plans to open up custom objects for any SuperAdmin in HubSpot to create. While we definitely love the idea of improved data association - with great power comes great responsibility.
In order to understand how you’ll be able to best take advantage of HubSpot’s announcement that custom objects will be able to be created by users in HubSpot, you’ll need to first understand more about objects.
If you’re not familiar with custom objects - here’s the rundown:
Every year at Inbound we’re left in awe from the speakers, the connections, the words from the HubSpot executive team and all of the exciting new features that are in the works. Inbound 22 was no exception and we’re crazy excited about what these updates mean for HubSpot customers (check out the full list of HubSpot updates from Inbound 22). One of these updates in particular piqued our interest quite a bit, and that’s giving SuperAdmin privileges to create custom objects. Custom objects were announced at Inbound 2020, but have always required the help of a developer. It was always in the plans to open up custom objects for any SuperAdmin in HubSpot to create. While we definitely love the idea of improved data association - with great power comes great responsibility.
In order to understand how you’ll be able to best take advantage of HubSpot’s announcement that custom objects will be able to be created by users in HubSpot, you’ll need to first understand more about objects.
If you’re not familiar with custom objects - here’s the rundown:
What are custom objects?
\nCustom objects allow you to store and structure any data that’s relevant to your business that might not already exist in HubSpot’s standard list of objects. It’s basically a way to customize HubSpot to suit the nuance of your business.
Objects, as defined by HubSpot, represent the different types of relationships and processes your business has. All HubSpot accounts use four standard objects: contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. Depending on your HubSpot subscription, there are other objects, such as calls, conversations, payments, products, quotes, and custom objects. All objects use the same framework, which enables you to segment or report on them.
Basically, objects allow you to assign contacts, companies, deals and tickets with associated data records. Each object has properties used to collect information about that object. In order to better integrate data and make intelligent decisions in your marketing and operations, storing more data is sometimes necessary. This can be done with custom objects.
Custom objects are only available for HubSpot customers with enterprise-level subscriptions, but the power in the data associations is significant. Custom objects increase flexibility and efficiency in your operations.
What can you do with custom objects?
\nCustom objects can
\n- \n
- create and update individual records in the interface \n
- associate with other existing records \n
- gain accuracy by including this information in reporting \n
- trigger automations and workflows \n
- integrate data between applications \n
- be used in automated emails \n
Previously objects were limited to contacts, companies, deals and tickets. However, when custom objects launched, it helped businesses further integrate and segment their data. Once a custom object has been defined, properties can be attached to it and it can be used to establish associations between objects.
\nHow do I create a custom object?
\nAt Inbound 2022, HubSpot released creating custom objects in Beta to their Enterprise subscription customers. In order to create a custom object, you must have an Enterprise subscription to one of the following HubSpot subscriptions:
\n- \n
- Marketing Hub \n
- Sales Hub \n
- CMS Hub \n
- Service Hub \n
- Operations Hub \n
You can find more detailed information about custom objects in HubSpot’s blog, but we’ve pulled the instructions for how to create a custom object directly from their Knowledge Center where HubSpot created an object for cars, something we’re all very familiar with that will help you understand how objects and object properties can be set up. This basic example will help you understand how objects have different object types like the model of a car.
“If you're a super admin, you can create a custom object in your HubSpot settings or via the API once you enable the beta.
To create a custom object in HubSpot:
\n- \n
- In your HubSpot account, click the settings settings icon in the main navigation bar.
- In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Objects > Custom Objects.
- Click the Create a custom object button. If you've previously created a custom object, the Create custom object button will appear in the top right.
- In the right panel, set up your custom object:\n
- \n
- To set your custom object's name:\n
- \n
- Object Name (Singular): enter the singular title for your custom object (e.g., Pet). \n
- Object Name (Plural): enter the plural title of your custom object (e.g., Pets). \n
\n - To create the object's primary display property:
\n- \n
- Primary display property: enter a label for the property used to name a record of your object (e.g., Pet name for Pets). This property is required to create a custom object record. \n
- Property type: select the type of your primary display property, either Single-line text or Number. \n
- Click the edit pencil below the label to edit the property's internal name, then click Save to confirm. The internal name is used by integrations or APIs, and cannot be edited once the object is created. \n
- Select the checkbox to require unique values for the primary display property. With this turned on, users will be unable to enter the same value for multiple records (e.g., for the object Orders, the primary property Order number should require unique values). \n
\n
\n - To set your custom object's name:\n
\n
- \n
- \n
- \n
- To create a secondary property for your custom object:\n
- \n
- Secondary display property: enter a label for the property that is displayed below the primary property on a record (e.g, Type of pet and Owner phone number for Pets). Secondary properties are not required to create a custom object record. \n
- Property type: the type of your secondary display property, either Single-line text or Number. \n
- Click the edit pencil below the label to edit the property's internal name, then click Save to confirm. The internal name is used by integrations or APIs, and cannot be edited once the object is created. \n
\n - To add an additional secondary display property, click + Add property. \n
- To remove a secondary property, click the delete delete icon next to the property. \n
\n - To create a secondary property for your custom object:\n
Once you're done, click Create at the bottom of the panel.”
What to expect:
\nWhile this new ability to custom objects without any code will open up a lot of opportunities for HubSpot customers, it’s also really important that you consider your use-case carefully and determine if a custom object is the best way to handle your data. Custom objects are an exceptional way to integrate more of the data that might otherwise be found in separate applications.
Some examples of use cases for custom objects:
- \n
- A realtor selling condominiums at different high rises in the area might want to create a custom object for each property or the individual listings and details about the listings within that property. \n
- A veterinarian might want to track the different types of animals owned by the patients in his practice (you could also create a child object to add treatments or medications) \n
- A school with online learning may want to track a student’s interest in different subjects or which courses they’ve completed. \n
- A retailer may want to keep track of shipping information for their customers. \n
- A car dealership may want to keep track of individual vehicles, vin numbers, mileage and associate those vehicle listings with sales (as you saw in the example above from HubSpot’s Knowledge Center) \n
You can see above that this is a game changer for pipeline tracking and really personalizing the marketing experience for a prospect or customer based on the custom objects that you create.
\nIn the past, a HubSpot user or marketer would have just resorted to adding a bunch of properties on the contact or company record. If you did this, say, with the example provided regarding online learning, a HubSpot admin might create 10 different properties for different interests associated with a contact record, but that doesn’t scale well if their interests are more diverse.
The same is true for the example of the veterinarian’s office. Depending on an individual, they might have a very exhaustive list of pets. A farmer would not only have multiple varieties of animals, but even different breeds of that specific species of animal. An animal rescue contact would have multiple animals of different breeds as well. Being able to keep track of complex information that translates into all of the different areas of HubSpot that your marketers, service teams and salespeople use is critical to your success.
The scalability of custom objects gets really exciting when you can associate multiple objects with with different contacts. The possibilities for personalized marketing associated with these objects are virtually endless. It can allow marketers to get super creative and really hone in on personalization and custom content. And when you get a developer involved? There are literally no limits to how empowered you can be with your marketing.
If you need to integrate data from an external database or need help creating a strategy surrounding custom objects, we highly recommend that you reach out to a skilled developer.
We’re obviously happy to help address any questions with custom objects and assist in setup training, strategy or integrating external data into HubSpot to help centralize everything.
Ready to dig into custom objects, but not sure where to start? We can help. Use the button below to book some time and chat about what custom objects can do for your business.
Every year at Inbound we’re left in awe from the speakers, the connections, the words from the HubSpot executive team and all of the exciting new features that are in the works. Inbound 22 was no exception and we’re crazy excited about what these updates mean for HubSpot customers (check out the full list of HubSpot updates from Inbound 22). One of these updates in particular piqued our interest quite a bit, and that’s giving SuperAdmin privileges to create custom objects. Custom objects were announced at Inbound 2020, but have always required the help of a developer. It was always in the plans to open up custom objects for any SuperAdmin in HubSpot to create. While we definitely love the idea of improved data association - with great power comes great responsibility.
In order to understand how you’ll be able to best take advantage of HubSpot’s announcement that custom objects will be able to be created by users in HubSpot, you’ll need to first understand more about objects.
If you’re not familiar with custom objects - here’s the rundown:
Every year at Inbound we’re left in awe from the speakers, the connections, the words from the HubSpot executive team and all of the exciting new features that are in the works. Inbound 22 was no exception and we’re crazy excited about what these updates mean for HubSpot customers (check out the full list of HubSpot updates from Inbound 22). One of these updates in particular piqued our interest quite a bit, and that’s giving SuperAdmin privileges to create custom objects. Custom objects were announced at Inbound 2020, but have always required the help of a developer. It was always in the plans to open up custom objects for any SuperAdmin in HubSpot to create. While we definitely love the idea of improved data association - with great power comes great responsibility.
In order to understand how you’ll be able to best take advantage of HubSpot’s announcement that custom objects will be able to be created by users in HubSpot, you’ll need to first understand more about objects.
If you’re not familiar with custom objects - here’s the rundown:
What are custom objects?
\nCustom objects allow you to store and structure any data that’s relevant to your business that might not already exist in HubSpot’s standard list of objects. It’s basically a way to customize HubSpot to suit the nuance of your business.
Objects, as defined by HubSpot, represent the different types of relationships and processes your business has. All HubSpot accounts use four standard objects: contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. Depending on your HubSpot subscription, there are other objects, such as calls, conversations, payments, products, quotes, and custom objects. All objects use the same framework, which enables you to segment or report on them.
Basically, objects allow you to assign contacts, companies, deals and tickets with associated data records. Each object has properties used to collect information about that object. In order to better integrate data and make intelligent decisions in your marketing and operations, storing more data is sometimes necessary. This can be done with custom objects.
Custom objects are only available for HubSpot customers with enterprise-level subscriptions, but the power in the data associations is significant. Custom objects increase flexibility and efficiency in your operations.
What can you do with custom objects?
\nCustom objects can
\n- \n
- create and update individual records in the interface \n
- associate with other existing records \n
- gain accuracy by including this information in reporting \n
- trigger automations and workflows \n
- integrate data between applications \n
- be used in automated emails \n
Previously objects were limited to contacts, companies, deals and tickets. However, when custom objects launched, it helped businesses further integrate and segment their data. Once a custom object has been defined, properties can be attached to it and it can be used to establish associations between objects.
\nHow do I create a custom object?
\nAt Inbound 2022, HubSpot released creating custom objects in Beta to their Enterprise subscription customers. In order to create a custom object, you must have an Enterprise subscription to one of the following HubSpot subscriptions:
\n- \n
- Marketing Hub \n
- Sales Hub \n
- CMS Hub \n
- Service Hub \n
- Operations Hub \n
You can find more detailed information about custom objects in HubSpot’s blog, but we’ve pulled the instructions for how to create a custom object directly from their Knowledge Center where HubSpot created an object for cars, something we’re all very familiar with that will help you understand how objects and object properties can be set up. This basic example will help you understand how objects have different object types like the model of a car.
“If you're a super admin, you can create a custom object in your HubSpot settings or via the API once you enable the beta.
To create a custom object in HubSpot:
\n- \n
- In your HubSpot account, click the settings settings icon in the main navigation bar.
- In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Objects > Custom Objects.
- Click the Create a custom object button. If you've previously created a custom object, the Create custom object button will appear in the top right.
- In the right panel, set up your custom object:\n
- \n
- To set your custom object's name:\n
- \n
- Object Name (Singular): enter the singular title for your custom object (e.g., Pet). \n
- Object Name (Plural): enter the plural title of your custom object (e.g., Pets). \n
\n - To create the object's primary display property:
\n- \n
- Primary display property: enter a label for the property used to name a record of your object (e.g., Pet name for Pets). This property is required to create a custom object record. \n
- Property type: select the type of your primary display property, either Single-line text or Number. \n
- Click the edit pencil below the label to edit the property's internal name, then click Save to confirm. The internal name is used by integrations or APIs, and cannot be edited once the object is created. \n
- Select the checkbox to require unique values for the primary display property. With this turned on, users will be unable to enter the same value for multiple records (e.g., for the object Orders, the primary property Order number should require unique values). \n
\n
\n - To set your custom object's name:\n
\n
- \n
- \n
- \n
- To create a secondary property for your custom object:\n
- \n
- Secondary display property: enter a label for the property that is displayed below the primary property on a record (e.g, Type of pet and Owner phone number for Pets). Secondary properties are not required to create a custom object record. \n
- Property type: the type of your secondary display property, either Single-line text or Number. \n
- Click the edit pencil below the label to edit the property's internal name, then click Save to confirm. The internal name is used by integrations or APIs, and cannot be edited once the object is created. \n
\n - To add an additional secondary display property, click + Add property. \n
- To remove a secondary property, click the delete delete icon next to the property. \n
\n - To create a secondary property for your custom object:\n
Once you're done, click Create at the bottom of the panel.”
What to expect:
\nWhile this new ability to custom objects without any code will open up a lot of opportunities for HubSpot customers, it’s also really important that you consider your use-case carefully and determine if a custom object is the best way to handle your data. Custom objects are an exceptional way to integrate more of the data that might otherwise be found in separate applications.
Some examples of use cases for custom objects:
- \n
- A realtor selling condominiums at different high rises in the area might want to create a custom object for each property or the individual listings and details about the listings within that property. \n
- A veterinarian might want to track the different types of animals owned by the patients in his practice (you could also create a child object to add treatments or medications) \n
- A school with online learning may want to track a student’s interest in different subjects or which courses they’ve completed. \n
- A retailer may want to keep track of shipping information for their customers. \n
- A car dealership may want to keep track of individual vehicles, vin numbers, mileage and associate those vehicle listings with sales (as you saw in the example above from HubSpot’s Knowledge Center) \n
You can see above that this is a game changer for pipeline tracking and really personalizing the marketing experience for a prospect or customer based on the custom objects that you create.
\nIn the past, a HubSpot user or marketer would have just resorted to adding a bunch of properties on the contact or company record. If you did this, say, with the example provided regarding online learning, a HubSpot admin might create 10 different properties for different interests associated with a contact record, but that doesn’t scale well if their interests are more diverse.
The same is true for the example of the veterinarian’s office. Depending on an individual, they might have a very exhaustive list of pets. A farmer would not only have multiple varieties of animals, but even different breeds of that specific species of animal. An animal rescue contact would have multiple animals of different breeds as well. Being able to keep track of complex information that translates into all of the different areas of HubSpot that your marketers, service teams and salespeople use is critical to your success.
The scalability of custom objects gets really exciting when you can associate multiple objects with with different contacts. The possibilities for personalized marketing associated with these objects are virtually endless. It can allow marketers to get super creative and really hone in on personalization and custom content. And when you get a developer involved? There are literally no limits to how empowered you can be with your marketing.
If you need to integrate data from an external database or need help creating a strategy surrounding custom objects, we highly recommend that you reach out to a skilled developer.
We’re obviously happy to help address any questions with custom objects and assist in setup training, strategy or integrating external data into HubSpot to help centralize everything.
Ready to dig into custom objects, but not sure where to start? We can help. Use the button below to book some time and chat about what custom objects can do for your business.
Every year at Inbound we’re left in awe from the speakers, the connections, the words from the HubSpot executive team and all of the exciting new features that are in the works. Inbound 22 was no exception and we’re crazy excited about what these updates mean for HubSpot customers (check out the full list of HubSpot updates from Inbound 22). One of these updates in particular piqued our interest quite a bit, and that’s giving SuperAdmin privileges to create custom objects. Custom objects were announced at Inbound 2020, but have always required the help of a developer. It was always in the plans to open up custom objects for any SuperAdmin in HubSpot to create. While we definitely love the idea of improved data association - with great power comes great responsibility.
In order to understand how you’ll be able to best take advantage of HubSpot’s announcement that custom objects will be able to be created by users in HubSpot, you’ll need to first understand more about objects.
If you’re not familiar with custom objects - here’s the rundown:
What are custom objects?
\nCustom objects allow you to store and structure any data that’s relevant to your business that might not already exist in HubSpot’s standard list of objects. It’s basically a way to customize HubSpot to suit the nuance of your business.
Objects, as defined by HubSpot, represent the different types of relationships and processes your business has. All HubSpot accounts use four standard objects: contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. Depending on your HubSpot subscription, there are other objects, such as calls, conversations, payments, products, quotes, and custom objects. All objects use the same framework, which enables you to segment or report on them.
Basically, objects allow you to assign contacts, companies, deals and tickets with associated data records. Each object has properties used to collect information about that object. In order to better integrate data and make intelligent decisions in your marketing and operations, storing more data is sometimes necessary. This can be done with custom objects.
Custom objects are only available for HubSpot customers with enterprise-level subscriptions, but the power in the data associations is significant. Custom objects increase flexibility and efficiency in your operations.
What can you do with custom objects?
\nCustom objects can
\n- \n
- create and update individual records in the interface \n
- associate with other existing records \n
- gain accuracy by including this information in reporting \n
- trigger automations and workflows \n
- integrate data between applications \n
- be used in automated emails \n
Previously objects were limited to contacts, companies, deals and tickets. However, when custom objects launched, it helped businesses further integrate and segment their data. Once a custom object has been defined, properties can be attached to it and it can be used to establish associations between objects.
\nHow do I create a custom object?
\nAt Inbound 2022, HubSpot released creating custom objects in Beta to their Enterprise subscription customers. In order to create a custom object, you must have an Enterprise subscription to one of the following HubSpot subscriptions:
\n- \n
- Marketing Hub \n
- Sales Hub \n
- CMS Hub \n
- Service Hub \n
- Operations Hub \n
You can find more detailed information about custom objects in HubSpot’s blog, but we’ve pulled the instructions for how to create a custom object directly from their Knowledge Center where HubSpot created an object for cars, something we’re all very familiar with that will help you understand how objects and object properties can be set up. This basic example will help you understand how objects have different object types like the model of a car.
“If you're a super admin, you can create a custom object in your HubSpot settings or via the API once you enable the beta.
To create a custom object in HubSpot:
\n- \n
- In your HubSpot account, click the settings settings icon in the main navigation bar.
- In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Objects > Custom Objects.
- Click the Create a custom object button. If you've previously created a custom object, the Create custom object button will appear in the top right.
- In the right panel, set up your custom object:\n
- \n
- To set your custom object's name:\n
- \n
- Object Name (Singular): enter the singular title for your custom object (e.g., Pet). \n
- Object Name (Plural): enter the plural title of your custom object (e.g., Pets). \n
\n - To create the object's primary display property:
\n- \n
- Primary display property: enter a label for the property used to name a record of your object (e.g., Pet name for Pets). This property is required to create a custom object record. \n
- Property type: select the type of your primary display property, either Single-line text or Number. \n
- Click the edit pencil below the label to edit the property's internal name, then click Save to confirm. The internal name is used by integrations or APIs, and cannot be edited once the object is created. \n
- Select the checkbox to require unique values for the primary display property. With this turned on, users will be unable to enter the same value for multiple records (e.g., for the object Orders, the primary property Order number should require unique values). \n
\n
\n - To set your custom object's name:\n
\n
- \n
- \n
- \n
- To create a secondary property for your custom object:\n
- \n
- Secondary display property: enter a label for the property that is displayed below the primary property on a record (e.g, Type of pet and Owner phone number for Pets). Secondary properties are not required to create a custom object record. \n
- Property type: the type of your secondary display property, either Single-line text or Number. \n
- Click the edit pencil below the label to edit the property's internal name, then click Save to confirm. The internal name is used by integrations or APIs, and cannot be edited once the object is created. \n
\n - To add an additional secondary display property, click + Add property. \n
- To remove a secondary property, click the delete delete icon next to the property. \n
\n - To create a secondary property for your custom object:\n
Once you're done, click Create at the bottom of the panel.”
What to expect:
\nWhile this new ability to custom objects without any code will open up a lot of opportunities for HubSpot customers, it’s also really important that you consider your use-case carefully and determine if a custom object is the best way to handle your data. Custom objects are an exceptional way to integrate more of the data that might otherwise be found in separate applications.
Some examples of use cases for custom objects:
- \n
- A realtor selling condominiums at different high rises in the area might want to create a custom object for each property or the individual listings and details about the listings within that property. \n
- A veterinarian might want to track the different types of animals owned by the patients in his practice (you could also create a child object to add treatments or medications) \n
- A school with online learning may want to track a student’s interest in different subjects or which courses they’ve completed. \n
- A retailer may want to keep track of shipping information for their customers. \n
- A car dealership may want to keep track of individual vehicles, vin numbers, mileage and associate those vehicle listings with sales (as you saw in the example above from HubSpot’s Knowledge Center) \n
You can see above that this is a game changer for pipeline tracking and really personalizing the marketing experience for a prospect or customer based on the custom objects that you create.
\nIn the past, a HubSpot user or marketer would have just resorted to adding a bunch of properties on the contact or company record. If you did this, say, with the example provided regarding online learning, a HubSpot admin might create 10 different properties for different interests associated with a contact record, but that doesn’t scale well if their interests are more diverse.
The same is true for the example of the veterinarian’s office. Depending on an individual, they might have a very exhaustive list of pets. A farmer would not only have multiple varieties of animals, but even different breeds of that specific species of animal. An animal rescue contact would have multiple animals of different breeds as well. Being able to keep track of complex information that translates into all of the different areas of HubSpot that your marketers, service teams and salespeople use is critical to your success.
The scalability of custom objects gets really exciting when you can associate multiple objects with with different contacts. The possibilities for personalized marketing associated with these objects are virtually endless. It can allow marketers to get super creative and really hone in on personalization and custom content. And when you get a developer involved? There are literally no limits to how empowered you can be with your marketing.
If you need to integrate data from an external database or need help creating a strategy surrounding custom objects, we highly recommend that you reach out to a skilled developer.
We’re obviously happy to help address any questions with custom objects and assist in setup training, strategy or integrating external data into HubSpot to help centralize everything.
Ready to dig into custom objects, but not sure where to start? We can help. Use the button below to book some time and chat about what custom objects can do for your business.
Every year at Inbound we’re left in awe from the speakers, the connections, the words from the HubSpot executive team and all of the exciting new features that are in the works. Inbound 22 was no exception and we’re crazy excited about what these updates mean for HubSpot customers (check out the full list of HubSpot updates from Inbound 22). One of these updates in particular piqued our interest quite a bit, and that’s giving SuperAdmin privileges to create custom objects. Custom objects were announced at Inbound 2020, but have always required the help of a developer. It was always in the plans to open up custom objects for any SuperAdmin in HubSpot to create. While we definitely love the idea of improved data association - with great power comes great responsibility.
In order to understand how you’ll be able to best take advantage of HubSpot’s announcement that custom objects will be able to be created by users in HubSpot, you’ll need to first understand more about objects.
If you’re not familiar with custom objects - here’s the rundown:
Every year at Inbound we’re left in awe from the speakers, the connections, the words from the HubSpot executive team and all of the exciting new features that are in the works. Inbound 22 was no exception and we’re crazy excited about what these updates mean for HubSpot customers (check out the full list of HubSpot updates from Inbound 22). One of these updates in particular piqued our interest quite a bit, and that’s giving SuperAdmin privileges to create custom objects. Custom objects were announced at Inbound 2020, but have always required the help of a developer. It was always in the plans to open up custom objects for any SuperAdmin in HubSpot to create. While we definitely love the idea of improved data association - with great power comes great responsibility.
In order to understand how you’ll be able to best take advantage of HubSpot’s announcement that custom objects will be able to be created by users in HubSpot, you’ll need to first understand more about objects.
If you’re not familiar with custom objects - here’s the rundown:
Every year at Inbound we’re left in awe from the speakers, the connections, the words from the HubSpot executive team and all of the exciting new features that are in the works. Inbound 22 was no exception and we’re crazy excited about what these updates mean for HubSpot customers (check out the full list of HubSpot updates from Inbound 22). One of these updates in particular piqued our interest quite a bit, and that’s giving SuperAdmin privileges to create custom objects. Custom objects were announced at Inbound 2020, but have always required the help of a developer. It was always in the plans to open up custom objects for any SuperAdmin in HubSpot to create. While we definitely love the idea of improved data association - with great power comes great responsibility.
In order to understand how you’ll be able to best take advantage of HubSpot’s announcement that custom objects will be able to be created by users in HubSpot, you’ll need to first understand more about objects.
If you’re not familiar with custom objects - here’s the rundown:
Every year at Inbound we’re left in awe from the speakers, the connections, the words from the HubSpot executive team and all of the exciting new features that are in the works. Inbound 22 was no exception and we’re crazy excited about what these updates mean for HubSpot customers (check out the full list of HubSpot updates from Inbound 22). One of these updates in particular piqued our interest quite a bit, and that’s giving SuperAdmin privileges to create custom objects. Custom objects were announced at Inbound 2020, but have always required the help of a developer. It was always in the plans to open up custom objects for any SuperAdmin in HubSpot to create. While we definitely love the idea of improved data association - with great power comes great responsibility.
In order to understand how you’ll be able to best take advantage of HubSpot’s announcement that custom objects will be able to be created by users in HubSpot, you’ll need to first understand more about objects.
If you’re not familiar with custom objects - here’s the rundown:
Every year at Inbound we’re left in awe from the speakers, the connections, the words from the HubSpot executive team and all of the exciting new features that are in the works. Inbound 22 was no exception and we’re crazy excited about what these updates mean for HubSpot customers (check out the full list of HubSpot updates from Inbound 22). One of these updates in particular piqued our interest quite a bit, and that’s giving SuperAdmin privileges to create custom objects. Custom objects were announced at Inbound 2020, but have always required the help of a developer. It was always in the plans to open up custom objects for any SuperAdmin in HubSpot to create. While we definitely love the idea of improved data association - with great power comes great responsibility.
In order to understand how you’ll be able to best take advantage of HubSpot’s announcement that custom objects will be able to be created by users in HubSpot, you’ll need to first understand more about objects.
If you’re not familiar with custom objects - here’s the rundown:
Every year at Inbound we’re left in awe from the speakers, the connections, the words from the HubSpot executive team and all of the exciting new features that are in the works. Inbound 22 was no exception and we’re crazy excited about what these updates mean for HubSpot customers (check out the full list of HubSpot updates from Inbound 22). One of these updates in particular piqued our interest quite a bit, and that’s giving SuperAdmin privileges to create custom objects. Custom objects were announced at Inbound 2020, but have always required the help of a developer. It was always in the plans to open up custom objects for any SuperAdmin in HubSpot to create. While we definitely love the idea of improved data association - with great power comes great responsibility.
In order to understand how you’ll be able to best take advantage of HubSpot’s announcement that custom objects will be able to be created by users in HubSpot, you’ll need to first understand more about objects.
If you’re not familiar with custom objects - here’s the rundown:
What are custom objects?
\nCustom objects allow you to store and structure any data that’s relevant to your business that might not already exist in HubSpot’s standard list of objects. It’s basically a way to customize HubSpot to suit the nuance of your business.
Objects, as defined by HubSpot, represent the different types of relationships and processes your business has. All HubSpot accounts use four standard objects: contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. Depending on your HubSpot subscription, there are other objects, such as calls, conversations, payments, products, quotes, and custom objects. All objects use the same framework, which enables you to segment or report on them.
Basically, objects allow you to assign contacts, companies, deals and tickets with associated data records. Each object has properties used to collect information about that object. In order to better integrate data and make intelligent decisions in your marketing and operations, storing more data is sometimes necessary. This can be done with custom objects.
Custom objects are only available for HubSpot customers with enterprise-level subscriptions, but the power in the data associations is significant. Custom objects increase flexibility and efficiency in your operations.
What can you do with custom objects?
\nCustom objects can
\n- \n
- create and update individual records in the interface \n
- associate with other existing records \n
- gain accuracy by including this information in reporting \n
- trigger automations and workflows \n
- integrate data between applications \n
- be used in automated emails \n
Previously objects were limited to contacts, companies, deals and tickets. However, when custom objects launched, it helped businesses further integrate and segment their data. Once a custom object has been defined, properties can be attached to it and it can be used to establish associations between objects.
\nHow do I create a custom object?
\nAt Inbound 2022, HubSpot released creating custom objects in Beta to their Enterprise subscription customers. In order to create a custom object, you must have an Enterprise subscription to one of the following HubSpot subscriptions:
\n- \n
- Marketing Hub \n
- Sales Hub \n
- CMS Hub \n
- Service Hub \n
- Operations Hub \n
You can find more detailed information about custom objects in HubSpot’s blog, but we’ve pulled the instructions for how to create a custom object directly from their Knowledge Center where HubSpot created an object for cars, something we’re all very familiar with that will help you understand how objects and object properties can be set up. This basic example will help you understand how objects have different object types like the model of a car.
“If you're a super admin, you can create a custom object in your HubSpot settings or via the API once you enable the beta.
To create a custom object in HubSpot:
\n- \n
- In your HubSpot account, click the settings settings icon in the main navigation bar.
- In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Objects > Custom Objects.
- Click the Create a custom object button. If you've previously created a custom object, the Create custom object button will appear in the top right.
- In the right panel, set up your custom object:\n
- \n
- To set your custom object's name:\n
- \n
- Object Name (Singular): enter the singular title for your custom object (e.g., Pet). \n
- Object Name (Plural): enter the plural title of your custom object (e.g., Pets). \n
\n - To create the object's primary display property:
\n- \n
- Primary display property: enter a label for the property used to name a record of your object (e.g., Pet name for Pets). This property is required to create a custom object record. \n
- Property type: select the type of your primary display property, either Single-line text or Number. \n
- Click the edit pencil below the label to edit the property's internal name, then click Save to confirm. The internal name is used by integrations or APIs, and cannot be edited once the object is created. \n
- Select the checkbox to require unique values for the primary display property. With this turned on, users will be unable to enter the same value for multiple records (e.g., for the object Orders, the primary property Order number should require unique values). \n
\n
\n - To set your custom object's name:\n
\n
- \n
- \n
- \n
- To create a secondary property for your custom object:\n
- \n
- Secondary display property: enter a label for the property that is displayed below the primary property on a record (e.g, Type of pet and Owner phone number for Pets). Secondary properties are not required to create a custom object record. \n
- Property type: the type of your secondary display property, either Single-line text or Number. \n
- Click the edit pencil below the label to edit the property's internal name, then click Save to confirm. The internal name is used by integrations or APIs, and cannot be edited once the object is created. \n
\n - To add an additional secondary display property, click + Add property. \n
- To remove a secondary property, click the delete delete icon next to the property. \n
\n - To create a secondary property for your custom object:\n
Once you're done, click Create at the bottom of the panel.”
What to expect:
\nWhile this new ability to custom objects without any code will open up a lot of opportunities for HubSpot customers, it’s also really important that you consider your use-case carefully and determine if a custom object is the best way to handle your data. Custom objects are an exceptional way to integrate more of the data that might otherwise be found in separate applications.
Some examples of use cases for custom objects:
- \n
- A realtor selling condominiums at different high rises in the area might want to create a custom object for each property or the individual listings and details about the listings within that property. \n
- A veterinarian might want to track the different types of animals owned by the patients in his practice (you could also create a child object to add treatments or medications) \n
- A school with online learning may want to track a student’s interest in different subjects or which courses they’ve completed. \n
- A retailer may want to keep track of shipping information for their customers. \n
- A car dealership may want to keep track of individual vehicles, vin numbers, mileage and associate those vehicle listings with sales (as you saw in the example above from HubSpot’s Knowledge Center) \n
You can see above that this is a game changer for pipeline tracking and really personalizing the marketing experience for a prospect or customer based on the custom objects that you create.
\nIn the past, a HubSpot user or marketer would have just resorted to adding a bunch of properties on the contact or company record. If you did this, say, with the example provided regarding online learning, a HubSpot admin might create 10 different properties for different interests associated with a contact record, but that doesn’t scale well if their interests are more diverse.
The same is true for the example of the veterinarian’s office. Depending on an individual, they might have a very exhaustive list of pets. A farmer would not only have multiple varieties of animals, but even different breeds of that specific species of animal. An animal rescue contact would have multiple animals of different breeds as well. Being able to keep track of complex information that translates into all of the different areas of HubSpot that your marketers, service teams and salespeople use is critical to your success.
The scalability of custom objects gets really exciting when you can associate multiple objects with with different contacts. The possibilities for personalized marketing associated with these objects are virtually endless. It can allow marketers to get super creative and really hone in on personalization and custom content. And when you get a developer involved? There are literally no limits to how empowered you can be with your marketing.
If you need to integrate data from an external database or need help creating a strategy surrounding custom objects, we highly recommend that you reach out to a skilled developer.
We’re obviously happy to help address any questions with custom objects and assist in setup training, strategy or integrating external data into HubSpot to help centralize everything.
Ready to dig into custom objects, but not sure where to start? We can help. Use the button below to book some time and chat about what custom objects can do for your business.
Every year at Inbound we’re left in awe from the speakers, the connections, the words from the HubSpot executive team and all of the exciting new features that are in the works. Inbound 22 was no exception and we’re crazy excited about what these updates mean for HubSpot customers (check out the full list of HubSpot updates from Inbound 22). One of these updates in particular piqued our interest quite a bit, and that’s giving SuperAdmin privileges to create custom objects. Custom objects were announced at Inbound 2020, but have always required the help of a developer. It was always in the plans to open up custom objects for any SuperAdmin in HubSpot to create. While we definitely love the idea of improved data association - with great power comes great responsibility.
In order to understand how you’ll be able to best take advantage of HubSpot’s announcement that custom objects will be able to be created by users in HubSpot, you’ll need to first understand more about objects.
If you’re not familiar with custom objects - here’s the rundown:
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
![\"no](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/no%20limit.webp\")
Here are a few ways that your web development budget restrictions can potentially hold you back:
Under-budgeting your website is a growth handicap.
\n
Not having the budget you need for the goals you have for your website is probably the biggest problem we run into when we receive new proposal requests. Before you start the process of vetting developers and requesting proposals, you’ll want to identify what your goals are by asking some important questions:
What are your expectations for your website performance from a lead generation perspective?
Are you a small business that just desires a simple, informative website or do you want your website to be a lead generation machine?
Is your website a hub of information?
Does it need to operate as its own location and generate revenue with a retail store presence?
These are incredibly important questions that will help you determine the best platform and host for your website. Choosing a platform and infrastructure that can grow with your needs over time is the best route. Starting with a “low budget” website and then having to switch platforms or code from scratch because you hired an inexperienced developer will just end up costing you more in the long run.
One of the things that drives us crazy is clients approaching us with a tiny budget and big dreams. Do we wish you could have everything you want for the price you’ve imagined? Of course. But we live in the real world where an equitable energetic exchange is required to get the things that you want and need. We don’t mean to sound insensitive, but it’s just the harsh reality. Quality comes at a price. Do yourself and your organization a favor by not tossing out random numbers before you’ve clearly communicated your wants, needs and goals to a skilled web developer. Talking through your list with a developer will help you balance your business’ budget with the realities of your needs as a business owner and marketer.
Once you have a better idea of your total investment to achieve your goals, you can break that down into the appropriate timeline to help bridge the gap between your budget and the website that you want without compromising features or the integrity of the framework that you’re building from.
RELATED: The problem with cheap outsourced web development
\nHiring low budget talent yields low budget results.
\n
A website that takes forever to load due to poorly written code.
A website that is ranking poorly because the developer didn’t populate meta descriptions or other SEO data.
A website whose media library is too big, because the developer failed to resize images.
A website with no capabilities to easy generate content or conversion opportunities.
Did you know that a bounce rate increases by 123% if page loading time takes more than 1 second?
If your website is taking a long time to load, you’re missing opportunity.
Every millisecond matters. An increased bounce rate means less website conversions, which means less sales.
Hiring an inexperienced web developer can literally cost you tens to hundreds of thousands over the lifetime of that website - and you’re going to let a few thousand dollars keep you from the prospect of exponential sales growth?
That’s a lot of power in the hands of your developer and for that reason you should hire an expert.
Some web developers are order takers, but we’ve written about it before: your website isn’t a sub sandwich. You need a web developer that can proactively plan your website with your goals in mind, that understands the complex needs of businesses and the marketers that serve them. Websites go beyond aesthetics and gifted developers understand that the bones and the intricacies of clean code, a kick ass user experience and a back end that marketers love is the secret recipe to meeting your website goals.
Lack of experience can cost you employee productivity.
\n
Just because they didn’t abandon the project and might have taken your website to launch, doesn’t mean your developer served you well. Far too often in the development process, businesses and marketing agencies look at the aesthetics of the front end, but none of the back end user interface.
RELATED: So your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n
Their outsourced developer or freelancer partner will launch the site and make the interface impossible to use for the marketer. The content is all too often not easily modified, or requires some level of coding knowledge to update.
A website should not just be easy for a user to navigate that is considering your products and services, but it also needs to be easy to update. So often we encounter prospects that need better access to their websites or need us to edit or modify things that they cannot access that should have easily been granted to the marketers before the website launched. Lack of access and a poor back end experience lead to frustrated, disengaged marketers.
Why is this a problem?
According to VentureBeat.com, not only are 91% of employees already frustrated with workplace technology but, “a staggering 71% of leaders acknowledge that employees will consider looking for a new job if their current employer does not provide access to the tools, technology or information they need to do their jobs well.” Every new piece of software or technology that you introduce for your marketing team to use should be simpler, user-friendly and efficient. And the top complaint? 51% of the top complaints were related to slow speeds. Frustrated marketers are less efficient. Happy marketers are more productive. Not investing in the right developer can be very costly.
By working with a talented developer, they can proactively discuss what back-end options you’d like to see during the design phase so that once your website is launched you have more flexibility to test different options, change colors, add filters or change content in a truly customizable way. This gives your marketing team flexibility and allows you to create the experience they’re looking for by partnering with a developer that knows how to do that.
RELATED: Developer Utopia - What to expect when you hire an experienced HubSpot Developer
\nBudget efficiency matters.
\n
We want to finish with this one, because we cannot express enough how important it is for you to understand that estimated hours from two different developers are not an apples to apples comparison. What one developer estimates as taking an hour might not include extensive browser and device testing or adding the types of features that marketers like to see in the back end. Effectively you’ve paid for an aesthetic product, but not received one that is also functional for both your customers and prospects and the team that is creating content within it.
The same idea applies to per-hour rates. A developer charging less per hour likely has less experience than a seasoned developer that can code more cleanly with less bugs and still provide you with better functionality that you didn’t even realize you needed.
Losing prospects to budget restrictions is tough for any web development agency, but what’s tougher is when they come back and have to spend even more starting from scratch, or worse, have run out of money and are forced to work with a mess that was left behind by an inexperienced web developer.
Balancing budget in a small business can be difficult, but investing into a powerful, functional website that serves your needs in the long term is incredibly important. There are many ways that websites can be phased over time to accommodate small business budgets and still allow you to hire talented developers.
When you choose your web developer based on experience rather than budget, you set yourself up for success and build the foundation of a powerful website that your customers, employees and executive team will thank you for later.
Don’t know the right questions to ask when you’re vetting developers for your next website project in HubSpot or Wordpress? Check out our blog offering insight on questions to ask when interviewing website developers.
","post_summary":"
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
Here are a few ways that your web development budget restrictions can potentially hold you back:
Under-budgeting your website is a growth handicap.
\n
Not having the budget you need for the goals you have for your website is probably the biggest problem we run into when we receive new proposal requests. Before you start the process of vetting developers and requesting proposals, you’ll want to identify what your goals are by asking some important questions:
What are your expectations for your website performance from a lead generation perspective?
Are you a small business that just desires a simple, informative website or do you want your website to be a lead generation machine?
Is your website a hub of information?
Does it need to operate as its own location and generate revenue with a retail store presence?
These are incredibly important questions that will help you determine the best platform and host for your website. Choosing a platform and infrastructure that can grow with your needs over time is the best route. Starting with a “low budget” website and then having to switch platforms or code from scratch because you hired an inexperienced developer will just end up costing you more in the long run.
One of the things that drives us crazy is clients approaching us with a tiny budget and big dreams. Do we wish you could have everything you want for the price you’ve imagined? Of course. But we live in the real world where an equitable energetic exchange is required to get the things that you want and need. We don’t mean to sound insensitive, but it’s just the harsh reality. Quality comes at a price. Do yourself and your organization a favor by not tossing out random numbers before you’ve clearly communicated your wants, needs and goals to a skilled web developer. Talking through your list with a developer will help you balance your business’ budget with the realities of your needs as a business owner and marketer.
Once you have a better idea of your total investment to achieve your goals, you can break that down into the appropriate timeline to help bridge the gap between your budget and the website that you want without compromising features or the integrity of the framework that you’re building from.
RELATED: The problem with cheap outsourced web development
\nHiring low budget talent yields low budget results.
\n
A website that takes forever to load due to poorly written code.
A website that is ranking poorly because the developer didn’t populate meta descriptions or other SEO data.
A website whose media library is too big, because the developer failed to resize images.
A website with no capabilities to easy generate content or conversion opportunities.
Did you know that a bounce rate increases by 123% if page loading time takes more than 1 second?
If your website is taking a long time to load, you’re missing opportunity.
Every millisecond matters. An increased bounce rate means less website conversions, which means less sales.
Hiring an inexperienced web developer can literally cost you tens to hundreds of thousands over the lifetime of that website - and you’re going to let a few thousand dollars keep you from the prospect of exponential sales growth?
That’s a lot of power in the hands of your developer and for that reason you should hire an expert.
Some web developers are order takers, but we’ve written about it before: your website isn’t a sub sandwich. You need a web developer that can proactively plan your website with your goals in mind, that understands the complex needs of businesses and the marketers that serve them. Websites go beyond aesthetics and gifted developers understand that the bones and the intricacies of clean code, a kick ass user experience and a back end that marketers love is the secret recipe to meeting your website goals.
Lack of experience can cost you employee productivity.
\n
Just because they didn’t abandon the project and might have taken your website to launch, doesn’t mean your developer served you well. Far too often in the development process, businesses and marketing agencies look at the aesthetics of the front end, but none of the back end user interface.
RELATED: So your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n
Their outsourced developer or freelancer partner will launch the site and make the interface impossible to use for the marketer. The content is all too often not easily modified, or requires some level of coding knowledge to update.
A website should not just be easy for a user to navigate that is considering your products and services, but it also needs to be easy to update. So often we encounter prospects that need better access to their websites or need us to edit or modify things that they cannot access that should have easily been granted to the marketers before the website launched. Lack of access and a poor back end experience lead to frustrated, disengaged marketers.
Why is this a problem?
According to VentureBeat.com, not only are 91% of employees already frustrated with workplace technology but, “a staggering 71% of leaders acknowledge that employees will consider looking for a new job if their current employer does not provide access to the tools, technology or information they need to do their jobs well.” Every new piece of software or technology that you introduce for your marketing team to use should be simpler, user-friendly and efficient. And the top complaint? 51% of the top complaints were related to slow speeds. Frustrated marketers are less efficient. Happy marketers are more productive. Not investing in the right developer can be very costly.
By working with a talented developer, they can proactively discuss what back-end options you’d like to see during the design phase so that once your website is launched you have more flexibility to test different options, change colors, add filters or change content in a truly customizable way. This gives your marketing team flexibility and allows you to create the experience they’re looking for by partnering with a developer that knows how to do that.
RELATED: Developer Utopia - What to expect when you hire an experienced HubSpot Developer
\nBudget efficiency matters.
\n
We want to finish with this one, because we cannot express enough how important it is for you to understand that estimated hours from two different developers are not an apples to apples comparison. What one developer estimates as taking an hour might not include extensive browser and device testing or adding the types of features that marketers like to see in the back end. Effectively you’ve paid for an aesthetic product, but not received one that is also functional for both your customers and prospects and the team that is creating content within it.
The same idea applies to per-hour rates. A developer charging less per hour likely has less experience than a seasoned developer that can code more cleanly with less bugs and still provide you with better functionality that you didn’t even realize you needed.
Losing prospects to budget restrictions is tough for any web development agency, but what’s tougher is when they come back and have to spend even more starting from scratch, or worse, have run out of money and are forced to work with a mess that was left behind by an inexperienced web developer.
Balancing budget in a small business can be difficult, but investing into a powerful, functional website that serves your needs in the long term is incredibly important. There are many ways that websites can be phased over time to accommodate small business budgets and still allow you to hire talented developers.
When you choose your web developer based on experience rather than budget, you set yourself up for success and build the foundation of a powerful website that your customers, employees and executive team will thank you for later.
Don’t know the right questions to ask when you’re vetting developers for your next website project in HubSpot or Wordpress? Check out our blog offering insight on questions to ask when interviewing website developers.
","rss_summary":"
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
Here are a few ways that your web development budget restrictions can potentially hold you back:
Under-budgeting your website is a growth handicap.
\n
Not having the budget you need for the goals you have for your website is probably the biggest problem we run into when we receive new proposal requests. Before you start the process of vetting developers and requesting proposals, you’ll want to identify what your goals are by asking some important questions:
What are your expectations for your website performance from a lead generation perspective?
Are you a small business that just desires a simple, informative website or do you want your website to be a lead generation machine?
Is your website a hub of information?
Does it need to operate as its own location and generate revenue with a retail store presence?
These are incredibly important questions that will help you determine the best platform and host for your website. Choosing a platform and infrastructure that can grow with your needs over time is the best route. Starting with a “low budget” website and then having to switch platforms or code from scratch because you hired an inexperienced developer will just end up costing you more in the long run.
One of the things that drives us crazy is clients approaching us with a tiny budget and big dreams. Do we wish you could have everything you want for the price you’ve imagined? Of course. But we live in the real world where an equitable energetic exchange is required to get the things that you want and need. We don’t mean to sound insensitive, but it’s just the harsh reality. Quality comes at a price. Do yourself and your organization a favor by not tossing out random numbers before you’ve clearly communicated your wants, needs and goals to a skilled web developer. Talking through your list with a developer will help you balance your business’ budget with the realities of your needs as a business owner and marketer.
Once you have a better idea of your total investment to achieve your goals, you can break that down into the appropriate timeline to help bridge the gap between your budget and the website that you want without compromising features or the integrity of the framework that you’re building from.
RELATED: The problem with cheap outsourced web development
\nHiring low budget talent yields low budget results.
\n
A website that takes forever to load due to poorly written code.
A website that is ranking poorly because the developer didn’t populate meta descriptions or other SEO data.
A website whose media library is too big, because the developer failed to resize images.
A website with no capabilities to easy generate content or conversion opportunities.
Did you know that a bounce rate increases by 123% if page loading time takes more than 1 second?
If your website is taking a long time to load, you’re missing opportunity.
Every millisecond matters. An increased bounce rate means less website conversions, which means less sales.
Hiring an inexperienced web developer can literally cost you tens to hundreds of thousands over the lifetime of that website - and you’re going to let a few thousand dollars keep you from the prospect of exponential sales growth?
That’s a lot of power in the hands of your developer and for that reason you should hire an expert.
Some web developers are order takers, but we’ve written about it before: your website isn’t a sub sandwich. You need a web developer that can proactively plan your website with your goals in mind, that understands the complex needs of businesses and the marketers that serve them. Websites go beyond aesthetics and gifted developers understand that the bones and the intricacies of clean code, a kick ass user experience and a back end that marketers love is the secret recipe to meeting your website goals.
Lack of experience can cost you employee productivity.
\n
Just because they didn’t abandon the project and might have taken your website to launch, doesn’t mean your developer served you well. Far too often in the development process, businesses and marketing agencies look at the aesthetics of the front end, but none of the back end user interface.
RELATED: So your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n
Their outsourced developer or freelancer partner will launch the site and make the interface impossible to use for the marketer. The content is all too often not easily modified, or requires some level of coding knowledge to update.
A website should not just be easy for a user to navigate that is considering your products and services, but it also needs to be easy to update. So often we encounter prospects that need better access to their websites or need us to edit or modify things that they cannot access that should have easily been granted to the marketers before the website launched. Lack of access and a poor back end experience lead to frustrated, disengaged marketers.
Why is this a problem?
According to VentureBeat.com, not only are 91% of employees already frustrated with workplace technology but, “a staggering 71% of leaders acknowledge that employees will consider looking for a new job if their current employer does not provide access to the tools, technology or information they need to do their jobs well.” Every new piece of software or technology that you introduce for your marketing team to use should be simpler, user-friendly and efficient. And the top complaint? 51% of the top complaints were related to slow speeds. Frustrated marketers are less efficient. Happy marketers are more productive. Not investing in the right developer can be very costly.
By working with a talented developer, they can proactively discuss what back-end options you’d like to see during the design phase so that once your website is launched you have more flexibility to test different options, change colors, add filters or change content in a truly customizable way. This gives your marketing team flexibility and allows you to create the experience they’re looking for by partnering with a developer that knows how to do that.
RELATED: Developer Utopia - What to expect when you hire an experienced HubSpot Developer
\nBudget efficiency matters.
\n
We want to finish with this one, because we cannot express enough how important it is for you to understand that estimated hours from two different developers are not an apples to apples comparison. What one developer estimates as taking an hour might not include extensive browser and device testing or adding the types of features that marketers like to see in the back end. Effectively you’ve paid for an aesthetic product, but not received one that is also functional for both your customers and prospects and the team that is creating content within it.
The same idea applies to per-hour rates. A developer charging less per hour likely has less experience than a seasoned developer that can code more cleanly with less bugs and still provide you with better functionality that you didn’t even realize you needed.
Losing prospects to budget restrictions is tough for any web development agency, but what’s tougher is when they come back and have to spend even more starting from scratch, or worse, have run out of money and are forced to work with a mess that was left behind by an inexperienced web developer.
Balancing budget in a small business can be difficult, but investing into a powerful, functional website that serves your needs in the long term is incredibly important. There are many ways that websites can be phased over time to accommodate small business budgets and still allow you to hire talented developers.
When you choose your web developer based on experience rather than budget, you set yourself up for success and build the foundation of a powerful website that your customers, employees and executive team will thank you for later.
Don’t know the right questions to ask when you’re vetting developers for your next website project in HubSpot or Wordpress? Check out our blog offering insight on questions to ask when interviewing website developers.
","postBodyRss":"
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
Here are a few ways that your web development budget restrictions can potentially hold you back:
Under-budgeting your website is a growth handicap.
\n
Not having the budget you need for the goals you have for your website is probably the biggest problem we run into when we receive new proposal requests. Before you start the process of vetting developers and requesting proposals, you’ll want to identify what your goals are by asking some important questions:
What are your expectations for your website performance from a lead generation perspective?
Are you a small business that just desires a simple, informative website or do you want your website to be a lead generation machine?
Is your website a hub of information?
Does it need to operate as its own location and generate revenue with a retail store presence?
These are incredibly important questions that will help you determine the best platform and host for your website. Choosing a platform and infrastructure that can grow with your needs over time is the best route. Starting with a “low budget” website and then having to switch platforms or code from scratch because you hired an inexperienced developer will just end up costing you more in the long run.
One of the things that drives us crazy is clients approaching us with a tiny budget and big dreams. Do we wish you could have everything you want for the price you’ve imagined? Of course. But we live in the real world where an equitable energetic exchange is required to get the things that you want and need. We don’t mean to sound insensitive, but it’s just the harsh reality. Quality comes at a price. Do yourself and your organization a favor by not tossing out random numbers before you’ve clearly communicated your wants, needs and goals to a skilled web developer. Talking through your list with a developer will help you balance your business’ budget with the realities of your needs as a business owner and marketer.
Once you have a better idea of your total investment to achieve your goals, you can break that down into the appropriate timeline to help bridge the gap between your budget and the website that you want without compromising features or the integrity of the framework that you’re building from.
RELATED: The problem with cheap outsourced web development
\nHiring low budget talent yields low budget results.
\n
A website that takes forever to load due to poorly written code.
A website that is ranking poorly because the developer didn’t populate meta descriptions or other SEO data.
A website whose media library is too big, because the developer failed to resize images.
A website with no capabilities to easy generate content or conversion opportunities.
Did you know that a bounce rate increases by 123% if page loading time takes more than 1 second?
If your website is taking a long time to load, you’re missing opportunity.
Every millisecond matters. An increased bounce rate means less website conversions, which means less sales.
Hiring an inexperienced web developer can literally cost you tens to hundreds of thousands over the lifetime of that website - and you’re going to let a few thousand dollars keep you from the prospect of exponential sales growth?
That’s a lot of power in the hands of your developer and for that reason you should hire an expert.
Some web developers are order takers, but we’ve written about it before: your website isn’t a sub sandwich. You need a web developer that can proactively plan your website with your goals in mind, that understands the complex needs of businesses and the marketers that serve them. Websites go beyond aesthetics and gifted developers understand that the bones and the intricacies of clean code, a kick ass user experience and a back end that marketers love is the secret recipe to meeting your website goals.
Lack of experience can cost you employee productivity.
\n
Just because they didn’t abandon the project and might have taken your website to launch, doesn’t mean your developer served you well. Far too often in the development process, businesses and marketing agencies look at the aesthetics of the front end, but none of the back end user interface.
RELATED: So your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n
Their outsourced developer or freelancer partner will launch the site and make the interface impossible to use for the marketer. The content is all too often not easily modified, or requires some level of coding knowledge to update.
A website should not just be easy for a user to navigate that is considering your products and services, but it also needs to be easy to update. So often we encounter prospects that need better access to their websites or need us to edit or modify things that they cannot access that should have easily been granted to the marketers before the website launched. Lack of access and a poor back end experience lead to frustrated, disengaged marketers.
Why is this a problem?
According to VentureBeat.com, not only are 91% of employees already frustrated with workplace technology but, “a staggering 71% of leaders acknowledge that employees will consider looking for a new job if their current employer does not provide access to the tools, technology or information they need to do their jobs well.” Every new piece of software or technology that you introduce for your marketing team to use should be simpler, user-friendly and efficient. And the top complaint? 51% of the top complaints were related to slow speeds. Frustrated marketers are less efficient. Happy marketers are more productive. Not investing in the right developer can be very costly.
By working with a talented developer, they can proactively discuss what back-end options you’d like to see during the design phase so that once your website is launched you have more flexibility to test different options, change colors, add filters or change content in a truly customizable way. This gives your marketing team flexibility and allows you to create the experience they’re looking for by partnering with a developer that knows how to do that.
RELATED: Developer Utopia - What to expect when you hire an experienced HubSpot Developer
\nBudget efficiency matters.
\n
We want to finish with this one, because we cannot express enough how important it is for you to understand that estimated hours from two different developers are not an apples to apples comparison. What one developer estimates as taking an hour might not include extensive browser and device testing or adding the types of features that marketers like to see in the back end. Effectively you’ve paid for an aesthetic product, but not received one that is also functional for both your customers and prospects and the team that is creating content within it.
The same idea applies to per-hour rates. A developer charging less per hour likely has less experience than a seasoned developer that can code more cleanly with less bugs and still provide you with better functionality that you didn’t even realize you needed.
Losing prospects to budget restrictions is tough for any web development agency, but what’s tougher is when they come back and have to spend even more starting from scratch, or worse, have run out of money and are forced to work with a mess that was left behind by an inexperienced web developer.
Balancing budget in a small business can be difficult, but investing into a powerful, functional website that serves your needs in the long term is incredibly important. There are many ways that websites can be phased over time to accommodate small business budgets and still allow you to hire talented developers.
When you choose your web developer based on experience rather than budget, you set yourself up for success and build the foundation of a powerful website that your customers, employees and executive team will thank you for later.
Don’t know the right questions to ask when you’re vetting developers for your next website project in HubSpot or Wordpress? Check out our blog offering insight on questions to ask when interviewing website developers.
","postEmailContent":"
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
Here are a few ways that your web development budget restrictions can potentially hold you back:
Under-budgeting your website is a growth handicap.
\n
Not having the budget you need for the goals you have for your website is probably the biggest problem we run into when we receive new proposal requests. Before you start the process of vetting developers and requesting proposals, you’ll want to identify what your goals are by asking some important questions:
What are your expectations for your website performance from a lead generation perspective?
Are you a small business that just desires a simple, informative website or do you want your website to be a lead generation machine?
Is your website a hub of information?
Does it need to operate as its own location and generate revenue with a retail store presence?
These are incredibly important questions that will help you determine the best platform and host for your website. Choosing a platform and infrastructure that can grow with your needs over time is the best route. Starting with a “low budget” website and then having to switch platforms or code from scratch because you hired an inexperienced developer will just end up costing you more in the long run.
One of the things that drives us crazy is clients approaching us with a tiny budget and big dreams. Do we wish you could have everything you want for the price you’ve imagined? Of course. But we live in the real world where an equitable energetic exchange is required to get the things that you want and need. We don’t mean to sound insensitive, but it’s just the harsh reality. Quality comes at a price. Do yourself and your organization a favor by not tossing out random numbers before you’ve clearly communicated your wants, needs and goals to a skilled web developer. Talking through your list with a developer will help you balance your business’ budget with the realities of your needs as a business owner and marketer.
Once you have a better idea of your total investment to achieve your goals, you can break that down into the appropriate timeline to help bridge the gap between your budget and the website that you want without compromising features or the integrity of the framework that you’re building from.
RELATED: The problem with cheap outsourced web development
\nHiring low budget talent yields low budget results.
\n
A website that takes forever to load due to poorly written code.
A website that is ranking poorly because the developer didn’t populate meta descriptions or other SEO data.
A website whose media library is too big, because the developer failed to resize images.
A website with no capabilities to easy generate content or conversion opportunities.
Did you know that a bounce rate increases by 123% if page loading time takes more than 1 second?
If your website is taking a long time to load, you’re missing opportunity.
Every millisecond matters. An increased bounce rate means less website conversions, which means less sales.
Hiring an inexperienced web developer can literally cost you tens to hundreds of thousands over the lifetime of that website - and you’re going to let a few thousand dollars keep you from the prospect of exponential sales growth?
That’s a lot of power in the hands of your developer and for that reason you should hire an expert.
Some web developers are order takers, but we’ve written about it before: your website isn’t a sub sandwich. You need a web developer that can proactively plan your website with your goals in mind, that understands the complex needs of businesses and the marketers that serve them. Websites go beyond aesthetics and gifted developers understand that the bones and the intricacies of clean code, a kick ass user experience and a back end that marketers love is the secret recipe to meeting your website goals.
Lack of experience can cost you employee productivity.
\n
Just because they didn’t abandon the project and might have taken your website to launch, doesn’t mean your developer served you well. Far too often in the development process, businesses and marketing agencies look at the aesthetics of the front end, but none of the back end user interface.
RELATED: So your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n
Their outsourced developer or freelancer partner will launch the site and make the interface impossible to use for the marketer. The content is all too often not easily modified, or requires some level of coding knowledge to update.
A website should not just be easy for a user to navigate that is considering your products and services, but it also needs to be easy to update. So often we encounter prospects that need better access to their websites or need us to edit or modify things that they cannot access that should have easily been granted to the marketers before the website launched. Lack of access and a poor back end experience lead to frustrated, disengaged marketers.
Why is this a problem?
According to VentureBeat.com, not only are 91% of employees already frustrated with workplace technology but, “a staggering 71% of leaders acknowledge that employees will consider looking for a new job if their current employer does not provide access to the tools, technology or information they need to do their jobs well.” Every new piece of software or technology that you introduce for your marketing team to use should be simpler, user-friendly and efficient. And the top complaint? 51% of the top complaints were related to slow speeds. Frustrated marketers are less efficient. Happy marketers are more productive. Not investing in the right developer can be very costly.
By working with a talented developer, they can proactively discuss what back-end options you’d like to see during the design phase so that once your website is launched you have more flexibility to test different options, change colors, add filters or change content in a truly customizable way. This gives your marketing team flexibility and allows you to create the experience they’re looking for by partnering with a developer that knows how to do that.
RELATED: Developer Utopia - What to expect when you hire an experienced HubSpot Developer
\nBudget efficiency matters.
\n
We want to finish with this one, because we cannot express enough how important it is for you to understand that estimated hours from two different developers are not an apples to apples comparison. What one developer estimates as taking an hour might not include extensive browser and device testing or adding the types of features that marketers like to see in the back end. Effectively you’ve paid for an aesthetic product, but not received one that is also functional for both your customers and prospects and the team that is creating content within it.
The same idea applies to per-hour rates. A developer charging less per hour likely has less experience than a seasoned developer that can code more cleanly with less bugs and still provide you with better functionality that you didn’t even realize you needed.
Losing prospects to budget restrictions is tough for any web development agency, but what’s tougher is when they come back and have to spend even more starting from scratch, or worse, have run out of money and are forced to work with a mess that was left behind by an inexperienced web developer.
Balancing budget in a small business can be difficult, but investing into a powerful, functional website that serves your needs in the long term is incredibly important. There are many ways that websites can be phased over time to accommodate small business budgets and still allow you to hire talented developers.
When you choose your web developer based on experience rather than budget, you set yourself up for success and build the foundation of a powerful website that your customers, employees and executive team will thank you for later.
Don’t know the right questions to ask when you’re vetting developers for your next website project in HubSpot or Wordpress? Check out our blog offering insight on questions to ask when interviewing website developers.
","rssSummary":"
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
There are so many things you should know when delving into web development for SMBs. We see so many clients that get caught up in how they want their website to look, but many seem to ignore how the interface they are envisioning will work best for the website visitors that they attract. Statistics surrounding user behavior and trends associated with this behavior are important for you to understand how to best engage users on your new website. When it comes to web development for SMBs, a mobile-first approach to web design is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Your new website should be fast to load, easy to navigate, with navigation and graphic elements that intentionally move the reader to the information they’re seeking - and in a world that’s operating at a breakneck speed, you’ve got to do it quickly. ![\"mobile-first-mobile-last-meme\"](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/mobile-first-mobile-last-meme.jpg\")
According to a Think with Google interview of Mobile Specialists from Google Central Europe, as user expectations increase, many companies lose revenue due to non-performing mobile sites:
“Mobile users have two main needs: They want simplicity and also want to use web pages as intuitively as they are used to on the desktop PC. The customer wants to perform a desired action on the page as quickly as possible, for example, to place an order.”
We’ve gathered up a pretty solid list of user behavior statistics for you to peruse and get an idea of what your prospects might be looking for that supports mobile-first design and web applications.
A better user experience is essential:
\n42% of people will leave a website because of poor functionality (Top Design Firms 2021)
\nPeople want what they want when they want it. According to HubSpot, Google doesn’t share its search volume data. However, it’s estimated Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year. The average person conducts between three and four searches each day. The competition to be placed on the first page of those queries is tight. Imagine reaching the top only to realize that the user experience on your website is pushing half of your audience away?
We discuss it extensively in our blog about website quality assurance testing. Your developer should check and double check every page and every link on your website for functionality to make sure it goes to the right place, no forms are glitching, and everything is rendering properly on multiple different browsers and devices.
A working website is the most basic starting point for businesses, but you should go farther than that to create a website that actually converts by testing your website BEFORE you launch it.
You should run new website concepts through user testing or a platform like Attention Insight to get preliminary data on how users will interact with your design. Attention Insight is an artificial intelligence program that helps determine the prospective performance of a website’s initial design using AI-generated attention analytics. Using AI, you can determine where a user’s attention is going and if the intended CTAs and most important website elements are really the focus based on more than 30,000 images from eye tracking studies.
It might seem like a tedious extra step to have to analyze UX so deeply, but it’s a great way to get insight on preliminary designs and go beyond aesthetics and into functionality.
It doesn’t take much to push away website prospects that you’ve worked hard to get to your site in the first place, so make sure you do what you can to keep them there.
Mobile-first isn’t an option, it’s a requirement.
\nAccording to StatCounter, 60.43% of website traffic was from mobile phones in May 2022. That’s up more than 4% from 2021.
\nFor many years designers utilized a desktop-first approach when they designed websites. The assumption was that most people accessed websites with desktop computers (which was the case for a very long time). This approach worked fine when there wasn’t such a large majority of traffic with expectations for accessing a fully functional version of a website from their mobile devices.
Now, with so many accessing websites remotely and on the go, mobile-first design is the expectation.
Our designers use a mobile-first approach to web design when creating websites for clients. While this is considered best practice, there are still a lot of prospects that come to us to help them get their website to the finish line with websites that already have a desktop design, but no mobile design. While we have accommodated these in the past, we much prefer to design the mobile experience first so that we can easily scale up having more space rather than doing the opposite and cramming all the elements from desktop design into a smaller space.
Here’s what Google Expert Julius Schroder had to say:
Desktop web pages can not and should not just be recreated one to one for mobile devices. Because desktop works very differently – be it with forms, questionnaires, the number of fields or buttons. With mobile, all the relevant features have to be accommodated on a much smaller screen, while at the same time the website needs to be fast and the design user-friendly. It is called with all these factors: Mobile first! Because the first impression counts: A majority of the online buyers, 79%, does not return to the respective website after a bad user experience.
Native apps aren’t always the best approach.
\n
According to Top Design Firms, 32% of businesses already have a mobile app and 42% plan to build one in the future.
However, according to a Google/Ipsos study from 2021, 50% of smartphone users would rather use a mobile site when browsing or shopping than download a mobile app.
\n
We can relate.
Who wants to crowd their home screen with one more app on their phone used every now and then?
Rather than cluttering up the screens of your users, consider a really heavy focus on mobile-first design. Create special navigation, eliminate unnecessary elements and design a functional, yet beautiful interface for your customers to get everything they need and nothing they don’t. This will not only keep people on your website for longer, but very likely increase conversions.
Web Applications are a great way to deliver an app experience through a mobile browser. We’ve developed many different web apps for our customers, including calculators, online shops, message boards, learning centers and more. Maintenance and development time for web apps are much shorter than native apps.
When it comes to creating the experience your clients and customers are looking for, a fast loading website with mobile-first design are probably the two most important aspects of your website redesign. Be strategic about how you approach your online presence and plan web applications in tandem with your website, even if you have to do your development in phases. A phased approach will allow you to extend your budget further and ensure you’re able to take the appropriate time to do UX testing, user surveys and collect other data to make sure that you’re delivering the type of experience that your customers need on their mobile devices when interacting with your brand.
What’s the worst mobile website experience you’ve encountered? Share it in the comments.
There are so many things you should know when delving into web development for SMBs. We see so many clients that get caught up in how they want their website to look, but many seem to ignore how the interface they are envisioning will work best for the website visitors that they attract. Statistics surrounding user behavior and trends associated with this behavior are important for you to understand how to best engage users on your new website. When it comes to web development for SMBs, a mobile-first approach to web design is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Your new website should be fast to load, easy to navigate, with navigation and graphic elements that intentionally move the reader to the information they’re seeking - and in a world that’s operating at a breakneck speed, you’ve got to do it quickly.
According to a Think with Google interview of Mobile Specialists from Google Central Europe, as user expectations increase, many companies lose revenue due to non-performing mobile sites:
“Mobile users have two main needs: They want simplicity and also want to use web pages as intuitively as they are used to on the desktop PC. The customer wants to perform a desired action on the page as quickly as possible, for example, to place an order.”
We’ve gathered up a pretty solid list of user behavior statistics for you to peruse and get an idea of what your prospects might be looking for that supports mobile-first design and web applications.
There are so many things you should know when delving into web development for SMBs. We see so many clients that get caught up in how they want their website to look, but many seem to ignore how the interface they are envisioning will work best for the website visitors that they attract. Statistics surrounding user behavior and trends associated with this behavior are important for you to understand how to best engage users on your new website. When it comes to web development for SMBs, a mobile-first approach to web design is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Your new website should be fast to load, easy to navigate, with navigation and graphic elements that intentionally move the reader to the information they’re seeking - and in a world that’s operating at a breakneck speed, you’ve got to do it quickly.
According to a Think with Google interview of Mobile Specialists from Google Central Europe, as user expectations increase, many companies lose revenue due to non-performing mobile sites:
“Mobile users have two main needs: They want simplicity and also want to use web pages as intuitively as they are used to on the desktop PC. The customer wants to perform a desired action on the page as quickly as possible, for example, to place an order.”
We’ve gathered up a pretty solid list of user behavior statistics for you to peruse and get an idea of what your prospects might be looking for that supports mobile-first design and web applications.
A better user experience is essential:
\n42% of people will leave a website because of poor functionality (Top Design Firms 2021)
\nPeople want what they want when they want it. According to HubSpot, Google doesn’t share its search volume data. However, it’s estimated Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year. The average person conducts between three and four searches each day. The competition to be placed on the first page of those queries is tight. Imagine reaching the top only to realize that the user experience on your website is pushing half of your audience away?
We discuss it extensively in our blog about website quality assurance testing. Your developer should check and double check every page and every link on your website for functionality to make sure it goes to the right place, no forms are glitching, and everything is rendering properly on multiple different browsers and devices.
A working website is the most basic starting point for businesses, but you should go farther than that to create a website that actually converts by testing your website BEFORE you launch it.
You should run new website concepts through user testing or a platform like Attention Insight to get preliminary data on how users will interact with your design. Attention Insight is an artificial intelligence program that helps determine the prospective performance of a website’s initial design using AI-generated attention analytics. Using AI, you can determine where a user’s attention is going and if the intended CTAs and most important website elements are really the focus based on more than 30,000 images from eye tracking studies.
It might seem like a tedious extra step to have to analyze UX so deeply, but it’s a great way to get insight on preliminary designs and go beyond aesthetics and into functionality.
It doesn’t take much to push away website prospects that you’ve worked hard to get to your site in the first place, so make sure you do what you can to keep them there.
Mobile-first isn’t an option, it’s a requirement.
\nAccording to StatCounter, 60.43% of website traffic was from mobile phones in May 2022. That’s up more than 4% from 2021.
\nFor many years designers utilized a desktop-first approach when they designed websites. The assumption was that most people accessed websites with desktop computers (which was the case for a very long time). This approach worked fine when there wasn’t such a large majority of traffic with expectations for accessing a fully functional version of a website from their mobile devices.
Now, with so many accessing websites remotely and on the go, mobile-first design is the expectation.
Our designers use a mobile-first approach to web design when creating websites for clients. While this is considered best practice, there are still a lot of prospects that come to us to help them get their website to the finish line with websites that already have a desktop design, but no mobile design. While we have accommodated these in the past, we much prefer to design the mobile experience first so that we can easily scale up having more space rather than doing the opposite and cramming all the elements from desktop design into a smaller space.
Here’s what Google Expert Julius Schroder had to say:
Desktop web pages can not and should not just be recreated one to one for mobile devices. Because desktop works very differently – be it with forms, questionnaires, the number of fields or buttons. With mobile, all the relevant features have to be accommodated on a much smaller screen, while at the same time the website needs to be fast and the design user-friendly. It is called with all these factors: Mobile first! Because the first impression counts: A majority of the online buyers, 79%, does not return to the respective website after a bad user experience.
Native apps aren’t always the best approach.
\n
According to Top Design Firms, 32% of businesses already have a mobile app and 42% plan to build one in the future.
However, according to a Google/Ipsos study from 2021, 50% of smartphone users would rather use a mobile site when browsing or shopping than download a mobile app.
\n
We can relate.
Who wants to crowd their home screen with one more app on their phone used every now and then?
Rather than cluttering up the screens of your users, consider a really heavy focus on mobile-first design. Create special navigation, eliminate unnecessary elements and design a functional, yet beautiful interface for your customers to get everything they need and nothing they don’t. This will not only keep people on your website for longer, but very likely increase conversions.
Web Applications are a great way to deliver an app experience through a mobile browser. We’ve developed many different web apps for our customers, including calculators, online shops, message boards, learning centers and more. Maintenance and development time for web apps are much shorter than native apps.
When it comes to creating the experience your clients and customers are looking for, a fast loading website with mobile-first design are probably the two most important aspects of your website redesign. Be strategic about how you approach your online presence and plan web applications in tandem with your website, even if you have to do your development in phases. A phased approach will allow you to extend your budget further and ensure you’re able to take the appropriate time to do UX testing, user surveys and collect other data to make sure that you’re delivering the type of experience that your customers need on their mobile devices when interacting with your brand.
What’s the worst mobile website experience you’ve encountered? Share it in the comments.
There are so many things you should know when delving into web development for SMBs. We see so many clients that get caught up in how they want their website to look, but many seem to ignore how the interface they are envisioning will work best for the website visitors that they attract. Statistics surrounding user behavior and trends associated with this behavior are important for you to understand how to best engage users on your new website. When it comes to web development for SMBs, a mobile-first approach to web design is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Your new website should be fast to load, easy to navigate, with navigation and graphic elements that intentionally move the reader to the information they’re seeking - and in a world that’s operating at a breakneck speed, you’ve got to do it quickly.
According to a Think with Google interview of Mobile Specialists from Google Central Europe, as user expectations increase, many companies lose revenue due to non-performing mobile sites:
“Mobile users have two main needs: They want simplicity and also want to use web pages as intuitively as they are used to on the desktop PC. The customer wants to perform a desired action on the page as quickly as possible, for example, to place an order.”
We’ve gathered up a pretty solid list of user behavior statistics for you to peruse and get an idea of what your prospects might be looking for that supports mobile-first design and web applications.
There are so many things you should know when delving into web development for SMBs. We see so many clients that get caught up in how they want their website to look, but many seem to ignore how the interface they are envisioning will work best for the website visitors that they attract. Statistics surrounding user behavior and trends associated with this behavior are important for you to understand how to best engage users on your new website. When it comes to web development for SMBs, a mobile-first approach to web design is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Your new website should be fast to load, easy to navigate, with navigation and graphic elements that intentionally move the reader to the information they’re seeking - and in a world that’s operating at a breakneck speed, you’ve got to do it quickly.
According to a Think with Google interview of Mobile Specialists from Google Central Europe, as user expectations increase, many companies lose revenue due to non-performing mobile sites:
“Mobile users have two main needs: They want simplicity and also want to use web pages as intuitively as they are used to on the desktop PC. The customer wants to perform a desired action on the page as quickly as possible, for example, to place an order.”
We’ve gathered up a pretty solid list of user behavior statistics for you to peruse and get an idea of what your prospects might be looking for that supports mobile-first design and web applications.
A better user experience is essential:
\n42% of people will leave a website because of poor functionality (Top Design Firms 2021)
\nPeople want what they want when they want it. According to HubSpot, Google doesn’t share its search volume data. However, it’s estimated Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year. The average person conducts between three and four searches each day. The competition to be placed on the first page of those queries is tight. Imagine reaching the top only to realize that the user experience on your website is pushing half of your audience away?
We discuss it extensively in our blog about website quality assurance testing. Your developer should check and double check every page and every link on your website for functionality to make sure it goes to the right place, no forms are glitching, and everything is rendering properly on multiple different browsers and devices.
A working website is the most basic starting point for businesses, but you should go farther than that to create a website that actually converts by testing your website BEFORE you launch it.
You should run new website concepts through user testing or a platform like Attention Insight to get preliminary data on how users will interact with your design. Attention Insight is an artificial intelligence program that helps determine the prospective performance of a website’s initial design using AI-generated attention analytics. Using AI, you can determine where a user’s attention is going and if the intended CTAs and most important website elements are really the focus based on more than 30,000 images from eye tracking studies.
It might seem like a tedious extra step to have to analyze UX so deeply, but it’s a great way to get insight on preliminary designs and go beyond aesthetics and into functionality.
It doesn’t take much to push away website prospects that you’ve worked hard to get to your site in the first place, so make sure you do what you can to keep them there.
Mobile-first isn’t an option, it’s a requirement.
\nAccording to StatCounter, 60.43% of website traffic was from mobile phones in May 2022. That’s up more than 4% from 2021.
\nFor many years designers utilized a desktop-first approach when they designed websites. The assumption was that most people accessed websites with desktop computers (which was the case for a very long time). This approach worked fine when there wasn’t such a large majority of traffic with expectations for accessing a fully functional version of a website from their mobile devices.
Now, with so many accessing websites remotely and on the go, mobile-first design is the expectation.
Our designers use a mobile-first approach to web design when creating websites for clients. While this is considered best practice, there are still a lot of prospects that come to us to help them get their website to the finish line with websites that already have a desktop design, but no mobile design. While we have accommodated these in the past, we much prefer to design the mobile experience first so that we can easily scale up having more space rather than doing the opposite and cramming all the elements from desktop design into a smaller space.
Here’s what Google Expert Julius Schroder had to say:
Desktop web pages can not and should not just be recreated one to one for mobile devices. Because desktop works very differently – be it with forms, questionnaires, the number of fields or buttons. With mobile, all the relevant features have to be accommodated on a much smaller screen, while at the same time the website needs to be fast and the design user-friendly. It is called with all these factors: Mobile first! Because the first impression counts: A majority of the online buyers, 79%, does not return to the respective website after a bad user experience.
Native apps aren’t always the best approach.
\n
According to Top Design Firms, 32% of businesses already have a mobile app and 42% plan to build one in the future.
However, according to a Google/Ipsos study from 2021, 50% of smartphone users would rather use a mobile site when browsing or shopping than download a mobile app.
\n
We can relate.
Who wants to crowd their home screen with one more app on their phone used every now and then?
Rather than cluttering up the screens of your users, consider a really heavy focus on mobile-first design. Create special navigation, eliminate unnecessary elements and design a functional, yet beautiful interface for your customers to get everything they need and nothing they don’t. This will not only keep people on your website for longer, but very likely increase conversions.
Web Applications are a great way to deliver an app experience through a mobile browser. We’ve developed many different web apps for our customers, including calculators, online shops, message boards, learning centers and more. Maintenance and development time for web apps are much shorter than native apps.
When it comes to creating the experience your clients and customers are looking for, a fast loading website with mobile-first design are probably the two most important aspects of your website redesign. Be strategic about how you approach your online presence and plan web applications in tandem with your website, even if you have to do your development in phases. A phased approach will allow you to extend your budget further and ensure you’re able to take the appropriate time to do UX testing, user surveys and collect other data to make sure that you’re delivering the type of experience that your customers need on their mobile devices when interacting with your brand.
What’s the worst mobile website experience you’ve encountered? Share it in the comments.
There are so many things you should know when delving into web development for SMBs. We see so many clients that get caught up in how they want their website to look, but many seem to ignore how the interface they are envisioning will work best for the website visitors that they attract. Statistics surrounding user behavior and trends associated with this behavior are important for you to understand how to best engage users on your new website. When it comes to web development for SMBs, a mobile-first approach to web design is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Your new website should be fast to load, easy to navigate, with navigation and graphic elements that intentionally move the reader to the information they’re seeking - and in a world that’s operating at a breakneck speed, you’ve got to do it quickly.
According to a Think with Google interview of Mobile Specialists from Google Central Europe, as user expectations increase, many companies lose revenue due to non-performing mobile sites:
“Mobile users have two main needs: They want simplicity and also want to use web pages as intuitively as they are used to on the desktop PC. The customer wants to perform a desired action on the page as quickly as possible, for example, to place an order.”
We’ve gathered up a pretty solid list of user behavior statistics for you to peruse and get an idea of what your prospects might be looking for that supports mobile-first design and web applications.
A better user experience is essential:
\n42% of people will leave a website because of poor functionality (Top Design Firms 2021)
\nPeople want what they want when they want it. According to HubSpot, Google doesn’t share its search volume data. However, it’s estimated Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year. The average person conducts between three and four searches each day. The competition to be placed on the first page of those queries is tight. Imagine reaching the top only to realize that the user experience on your website is pushing half of your audience away?
We discuss it extensively in our blog about website quality assurance testing. Your developer should check and double check every page and every link on your website for functionality to make sure it goes to the right place, no forms are glitching, and everything is rendering properly on multiple different browsers and devices.
A working website is the most basic starting point for businesses, but you should go farther than that to create a website that actually converts by testing your website BEFORE you launch it.
You should run new website concepts through user testing or a platform like Attention Insight to get preliminary data on how users will interact with your design. Attention Insight is an artificial intelligence program that helps determine the prospective performance of a website’s initial design using AI-generated attention analytics. Using AI, you can determine where a user’s attention is going and if the intended CTAs and most important website elements are really the focus based on more than 30,000 images from eye tracking studies.
It might seem like a tedious extra step to have to analyze UX so deeply, but it’s a great way to get insight on preliminary designs and go beyond aesthetics and into functionality.
It doesn’t take much to push away website prospects that you’ve worked hard to get to your site in the first place, so make sure you do what you can to keep them there.
Mobile-first isn’t an option, it’s a requirement.
\nAccording to StatCounter, 60.43% of website traffic was from mobile phones in May 2022. That’s up more than 4% from 2021.
\nFor many years designers utilized a desktop-first approach when they designed websites. The assumption was that most people accessed websites with desktop computers (which was the case for a very long time). This approach worked fine when there wasn’t such a large majority of traffic with expectations for accessing a fully functional version of a website from their mobile devices.
Now, with so many accessing websites remotely and on the go, mobile-first design is the expectation.
Our designers use a mobile-first approach to web design when creating websites for clients. While this is considered best practice, there are still a lot of prospects that come to us to help them get their website to the finish line with websites that already have a desktop design, but no mobile design. While we have accommodated these in the past, we much prefer to design the mobile experience first so that we can easily scale up having more space rather than doing the opposite and cramming all the elements from desktop design into a smaller space.
Here’s what Google Expert Julius Schroder had to say:
Desktop web pages can not and should not just be recreated one to one for mobile devices. Because desktop works very differently – be it with forms, questionnaires, the number of fields or buttons. With mobile, all the relevant features have to be accommodated on a much smaller screen, while at the same time the website needs to be fast and the design user-friendly. It is called with all these factors: Mobile first! Because the first impression counts: A majority of the online buyers, 79%, does not return to the respective website after a bad user experience.
Native apps aren’t always the best approach.
\n
According to Top Design Firms, 32% of businesses already have a mobile app and 42% plan to build one in the future.
However, according to a Google/Ipsos study from 2021, 50% of smartphone users would rather use a mobile site when browsing or shopping than download a mobile app.
\n
We can relate.
Who wants to crowd their home screen with one more app on their phone used every now and then?
Rather than cluttering up the screens of your users, consider a really heavy focus on mobile-first design. Create special navigation, eliminate unnecessary elements and design a functional, yet beautiful interface for your customers to get everything they need and nothing they don’t. This will not only keep people on your website for longer, but very likely increase conversions.
Web Applications are a great way to deliver an app experience through a mobile browser. We’ve developed many different web apps for our customers, including calculators, online shops, message boards, learning centers and more. Maintenance and development time for web apps are much shorter than native apps.
When it comes to creating the experience your clients and customers are looking for, a fast loading website with mobile-first design are probably the two most important aspects of your website redesign. Be strategic about how you approach your online presence and plan web applications in tandem with your website, even if you have to do your development in phases. A phased approach will allow you to extend your budget further and ensure you’re able to take the appropriate time to do UX testing, user surveys and collect other data to make sure that you’re delivering the type of experience that your customers need on their mobile devices when interacting with your brand.
What’s the worst mobile website experience you’ve encountered? Share it in the comments.
There are so many things you should know when delving into web development for SMBs. We see so many clients that get caught up in how they want their website to look, but many seem to ignore how the interface they are envisioning will work best for the website visitors that they attract. Statistics surrounding user behavior and trends associated with this behavior are important for you to understand how to best engage users on your new website. When it comes to web development for SMBs, a mobile-first approach to web design is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Your new website should be fast to load, easy to navigate, with navigation and graphic elements that intentionally move the reader to the information they’re seeking - and in a world that’s operating at a breakneck speed, you’ve got to do it quickly.
According to a Think with Google interview of Mobile Specialists from Google Central Europe, as user expectations increase, many companies lose revenue due to non-performing mobile sites:
“Mobile users have two main needs: They want simplicity and also want to use web pages as intuitively as they are used to on the desktop PC. The customer wants to perform a desired action on the page as quickly as possible, for example, to place an order.”
We’ve gathered up a pretty solid list of user behavior statistics for you to peruse and get an idea of what your prospects might be looking for that supports mobile-first design and web applications.
There are so many things you should know when delving into web development for SMBs. We see so many clients that get caught up in how they want their website to look, but many seem to ignore how the interface they are envisioning will work best for the website visitors that they attract. Statistics surrounding user behavior and trends associated with this behavior are important for you to understand how to best engage users on your new website. When it comes to web development for SMBs, a mobile-first approach to web design is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Your new website should be fast to load, easy to navigate, with navigation and graphic elements that intentionally move the reader to the information they’re seeking - and in a world that’s operating at a breakneck speed, you’ve got to do it quickly.
According to a Think with Google interview of Mobile Specialists from Google Central Europe, as user expectations increase, many companies lose revenue due to non-performing mobile sites:
“Mobile users have two main needs: They want simplicity and also want to use web pages as intuitively as they are used to on the desktop PC. The customer wants to perform a desired action on the page as quickly as possible, for example, to place an order.”
We’ve gathered up a pretty solid list of user behavior statistics for you to peruse and get an idea of what your prospects might be looking for that supports mobile-first design and web applications.
There are so many things you should know when delving into web development for SMBs. We see so many clients that get caught up in how they want their website to look, but many seem to ignore how the interface they are envisioning will work best for the website visitors that they attract. Statistics surrounding user behavior and trends associated with this behavior are important for you to understand how to best engage users on your new website. When it comes to web development for SMBs, a mobile-first approach to web design is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Your new website should be fast to load, easy to navigate, with navigation and graphic elements that intentionally move the reader to the information they’re seeking - and in a world that’s operating at a breakneck speed, you’ve got to do it quickly.
According to a Think with Google interview of Mobile Specialists from Google Central Europe, as user expectations increase, many companies lose revenue due to non-performing mobile sites:
“Mobile users have two main needs: They want simplicity and also want to use web pages as intuitively as they are used to on the desktop PC. The customer wants to perform a desired action on the page as quickly as possible, for example, to place an order.”
We’ve gathered up a pretty solid list of user behavior statistics for you to peruse and get an idea of what your prospects might be looking for that supports mobile-first design and web applications.
There are so many things you should know when delving into web development for SMBs. We see so many clients that get caught up in how they want their website to look, but many seem to ignore how the interface they are envisioning will work best for the website visitors that they attract. Statistics surrounding user behavior and trends associated with this behavior are important for you to understand how to best engage users on your new website. When it comes to web development for SMBs, a mobile-first approach to web design is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Your new website should be fast to load, easy to navigate, with navigation and graphic elements that intentionally move the reader to the information they’re seeking - and in a world that’s operating at a breakneck speed, you’ve got to do it quickly.
According to a Think with Google interview of Mobile Specialists from Google Central Europe, as user expectations increase, many companies lose revenue due to non-performing mobile sites:
“Mobile users have two main needs: They want simplicity and also want to use web pages as intuitively as they are used to on the desktop PC. The customer wants to perform a desired action on the page as quickly as possible, for example, to place an order.”
We’ve gathered up a pretty solid list of user behavior statistics for you to peruse and get an idea of what your prospects might be looking for that supports mobile-first design and web applications.
There are so many things you should know when delving into web development for SMBs. We see so many clients that get caught up in how they want their website to look, but many seem to ignore how the interface they are envisioning will work best for the website visitors that they attract. Statistics surrounding user behavior and trends associated with this behavior are important for you to understand how to best engage users on your new website. When it comes to web development for SMBs, a mobile-first approach to web design is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Your new website should be fast to load, easy to navigate, with navigation and graphic elements that intentionally move the reader to the information they’re seeking - and in a world that’s operating at a breakneck speed, you’ve got to do it quickly.
According to a Think with Google interview of Mobile Specialists from Google Central Europe, as user expectations increase, many companies lose revenue due to non-performing mobile sites:
“Mobile users have two main needs: They want simplicity and also want to use web pages as intuitively as they are used to on the desktop PC. The customer wants to perform a desired action on the page as quickly as possible, for example, to place an order.”
We’ve gathered up a pretty solid list of user behavior statistics for you to peruse and get an idea of what your prospects might be looking for that supports mobile-first design and web applications.
There are so many things you should know when delving into web development for SMBs. We see so many clients that get caught up in how they want their website to look, but many seem to ignore how the interface they are envisioning will work best for the website visitors that they attract. Statistics surrounding user behavior and trends associated with this behavior are important for you to understand how to best engage users on your new website. When it comes to web development for SMBs, a mobile-first approach to web design is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Your new website should be fast to load, easy to navigate, with navigation and graphic elements that intentionally move the reader to the information they’re seeking - and in a world that’s operating at a breakneck speed, you’ve got to do it quickly.
According to a Think with Google interview of Mobile Specialists from Google Central Europe, as user expectations increase, many companies lose revenue due to non-performing mobile sites:
“Mobile users have two main needs: They want simplicity and also want to use web pages as intuitively as they are used to on the desktop PC. The customer wants to perform a desired action on the page as quickly as possible, for example, to place an order.”
We’ve gathered up a pretty solid list of user behavior statistics for you to peruse and get an idea of what your prospects might be looking for that supports mobile-first design and web applications.
A better user experience is essential:
\n42% of people will leave a website because of poor functionality (Top Design Firms 2021)
\nPeople want what they want when they want it. According to HubSpot, Google doesn’t share its search volume data. However, it’s estimated Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year. The average person conducts between three and four searches each day. The competition to be placed on the first page of those queries is tight. Imagine reaching the top only to realize that the user experience on your website is pushing half of your audience away?
We discuss it extensively in our blog about website quality assurance testing. Your developer should check and double check every page and every link on your website for functionality to make sure it goes to the right place, no forms are glitching, and everything is rendering properly on multiple different browsers and devices.
A working website is the most basic starting point for businesses, but you should go farther than that to create a website that actually converts by testing your website BEFORE you launch it.
You should run new website concepts through user testing or a platform like Attention Insight to get preliminary data on how users will interact with your design. Attention Insight is an artificial intelligence program that helps determine the prospective performance of a website’s initial design using AI-generated attention analytics. Using AI, you can determine where a user’s attention is going and if the intended CTAs and most important website elements are really the focus based on more than 30,000 images from eye tracking studies.
It might seem like a tedious extra step to have to analyze UX so deeply, but it’s a great way to get insight on preliminary designs and go beyond aesthetics and into functionality.
It doesn’t take much to push away website prospects that you’ve worked hard to get to your site in the first place, so make sure you do what you can to keep them there.
Mobile-first isn’t an option, it’s a requirement.
\nAccording to StatCounter, 60.43% of website traffic was from mobile phones in May 2022. That’s up more than 4% from 2021.
\nFor many years designers utilized a desktop-first approach when they designed websites. The assumption was that most people accessed websites with desktop computers (which was the case for a very long time). This approach worked fine when there wasn’t such a large majority of traffic with expectations for accessing a fully functional version of a website from their mobile devices.
Now, with so many accessing websites remotely and on the go, mobile-first design is the expectation.
Our designers use a mobile-first approach to web design when creating websites for clients. While this is considered best practice, there are still a lot of prospects that come to us to help them get their website to the finish line with websites that already have a desktop design, but no mobile design. While we have accommodated these in the past, we much prefer to design the mobile experience first so that we can easily scale up having more space rather than doing the opposite and cramming all the elements from desktop design into a smaller space.
Here’s what Google Expert Julius Schroder had to say:
Desktop web pages can not and should not just be recreated one to one for mobile devices. Because desktop works very differently – be it with forms, questionnaires, the number of fields or buttons. With mobile, all the relevant features have to be accommodated on a much smaller screen, while at the same time the website needs to be fast and the design user-friendly. It is called with all these factors: Mobile first! Because the first impression counts: A majority of the online buyers, 79%, does not return to the respective website after a bad user experience.
Native apps aren’t always the best approach.
\n
According to Top Design Firms, 32% of businesses already have a mobile app and 42% plan to build one in the future.
However, according to a Google/Ipsos study from 2021, 50% of smartphone users would rather use a mobile site when browsing or shopping than download a mobile app.
\n
We can relate.
Who wants to crowd their home screen with one more app on their phone used every now and then?
Rather than cluttering up the screens of your users, consider a really heavy focus on mobile-first design. Create special navigation, eliminate unnecessary elements and design a functional, yet beautiful interface for your customers to get everything they need and nothing they don’t. This will not only keep people on your website for longer, but very likely increase conversions.
Web Applications are a great way to deliver an app experience through a mobile browser. We’ve developed many different web apps for our customers, including calculators, online shops, message boards, learning centers and more. Maintenance and development time for web apps are much shorter than native apps.
When it comes to creating the experience your clients and customers are looking for, a fast loading website with mobile-first design are probably the two most important aspects of your website redesign. Be strategic about how you approach your online presence and plan web applications in tandem with your website, even if you have to do your development in phases. A phased approach will allow you to extend your budget further and ensure you’re able to take the appropriate time to do UX testing, user surveys and collect other data to make sure that you’re delivering the type of experience that your customers need on their mobile devices when interacting with your brand.
What’s the worst mobile website experience you’ve encountered? Share it in the comments.
There are so many things you should know when delving into web development for SMBs. We see so many clients that get caught up in how they want their website to look, but many seem to ignore how the interface they are envisioning will work best for the website visitors that they attract. Statistics surrounding user behavior and trends associated with this behavior are important for you to understand how to best engage users on your new website. When it comes to web development for SMBs, a mobile-first approach to web design is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Your new website should be fast to load, easy to navigate, with navigation and graphic elements that intentionally move the reader to the information they’re seeking - and in a world that’s operating at a breakneck speed, you’ve got to do it quickly.
According to a Think with Google interview of Mobile Specialists from Google Central Europe, as user expectations increase, many companies lose revenue due to non-performing mobile sites:
“Mobile users have two main needs: They want simplicity and also want to use web pages as intuitively as they are used to on the desktop PC. The customer wants to perform a desired action on the page as quickly as possible, for example, to place an order.”
We’ve gathered up a pretty solid list of user behavior statistics for you to peruse and get an idea of what your prospects might be looking for that supports mobile-first design and web applications.
As we continue our long road to recovery from Hurricane Ian in Southwest Florida, it occurred to us that our own funds can only travel so far.
\n\nWatching the community come together and doing our part to help has been incredible, but we know that our local resources in both manpower and financial assistance are becoming exhausted. With that said, we’re reaching out to our own network of professionals and clients located throughout the country to help.
\n![\"Heights08\"](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/Heights%20Blog/Heights08.webp\")
How we can work together to help:
\ndeckerdevs is doing a donation matching campaign to assist The Heights Foundation in offering much needed assistance to the residents of Harlem Heights, an underprivileged black community in South Fort Myers that was significantly impacted by the hurricane. Most of these residents don't have insurance, savings or any other means to recover their belongings. Most of their vehicles are inoperable and they're actively seeking donations of bikes so residents can go to work and continue to bring income into their homes.
\nFor every dollar you give to this campaign we’ll match it up to $3,000.00 total for the month of October. Simply forward your donation confirmation e-mail that you receive from the Heights Foundation for donations from October 10th - October 31st and we'll tally them up and make a matching contribution!
\nA word from the Heights Foundation
\n![\"Heights04-scaled\"](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/Heights%20Blog/Heights04-scaled.webp\")
“There is much suffering from significant trauma,” said Kathryn Kelly, CEO, president and founder of The Heights Foundation/The Heights Center. “I spoke with a family who thought they could ride out the storm in their home. They crawled out of a window as the waters rose. None of them could swim. They waded to the Kelly field complex and stood on a concrete slab for the remainder of the storm. They lost everything. Both mom and dad work on Fort Myers Beach in the service industry and those jobs are gone for the foreseeable future. There are many stories similar to this one. The residents of Harlem Heights are suffering and need our help.”
\nThe Foundation is monitoring the needs of the community and responding as best as they can. The initial need was food, water and basic supplies. They are now working on helping the families clear the debris from their homes and make them livable, and to connect residents with critical services. The Foundation is asking for cleaning supplies, linens, air mattresses with manual pumps, and bicycles in working condition for adults who have lost their vehicles.
\nThis is an extended effort. It will take a long time for the community to rebuild and The Heights Foundation will be there for families every step of the way.
\nA big need is financial contributions, which gives the Foundation the opportunity to target the areas of most need and respond quickly. You can click here to make a donation online.
\nAbout The Heights Foundation
\nHarlem Heights was originally settled as a rural agricultural community. Approximately 780 children live in a mixture of single-family homes and multi-family apartments. Demographically, the population is approximately 70% Hispanic, 20% African-American, and 8% Caucasian. The poverty rate for children in Harlem Heights is more than twice the county average, with family income 40% below the county average. Families cannot easily access family support services in downtown Fort Myers and benefit greatly from programs within the neighborhood.
\nThe Heights Foundation works to build self-sufficient families in the Harlem Heights neighborhood. The Foundation’s mission is to support education and wellness, promote family and community development, and provide the benefits of enrichment and the arts. The Heights Center, supported by The Heights Foundation, is a place for Education, Opportunity, and Enrichment. Heights Early Learning serves more than 80 babies through 4 years old. The Heights Center serves 150 children in AfterSchool and SummerCamp. The Harlem Heights Community Charter School serves 180 children from kindergarten through fifth grade.
\nMany of the families in Harlem Heights were devastated by the hurricane. Parents have worked hard to have a home and care for their children, and now their lives have been flipped upside down. They have lost their homes, their cars, and their jobs. Many have no savings, no food, no transportation, and no support systems.
\n![\"Heights13-scaled\"](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/Heights%20Blog/Heights13-scaled.webp\")
Image Credit: Kinfay Moroti / Hopeful Images
\nOur community that raised us and that we live and work within is so important, your support of it and us means the world during this.
\n11/17/22
\nUPDATE:
\nWe raised a total of $1900 with our matching donation! These funds will go a long way to helping The Heights Foundation situate the residents of the Harlem Heights community in the coming months.
\nSpecial thanks to the individuals and clients that made donations to help Southwest Florida recover from Hurricane Ian.
\nImportant instructions to ensure your donation is matched:
\n\n
**IN ORDER FOR YOUR DONATION TO BE MATCHED, PLEASE FORWARD YOUR CONFIRMATION E-MAIL TO GIVEBACK@DECKERDEVS.COM***
\n
As we continue our long road to recovery from Hurricane Ian in Southwest Florida, it occurred to us that our own funds can only travel so far.
\n","blog_post_schedule_task_uid":null,"blog_publish_to_social_media_task":"DONE_NOT_SENT","blog_publish_instant_email_task_uid":null,"blog_publish_instant_email_campaign_id":null,"blog_publish_instant_email_retry_count":null,"rss_body":"As we continue our long road to recovery from Hurricane Ian in Southwest Florida, it occurred to us that our own funds can only travel so far.
\n\nWatching the community come together and doing our part to help has been incredible, but we know that our local resources in both manpower and financial assistance are becoming exhausted. With that said, we’re reaching out to our own network of professionals and clients located throughout the country to help.
\n
How we can work together to help:
\ndeckerdevs is doing a donation matching campaign to assist The Heights Foundation in offering much needed assistance to the residents of Harlem Heights, an underprivileged black community in South Fort Myers that was significantly impacted by the hurricane. Most of these residents don't have insurance, savings or any other means to recover their belongings. Most of their vehicles are inoperable and they're actively seeking donations of bikes so residents can go to work and continue to bring income into their homes.
\nFor every dollar you give to this campaign we’ll match it up to $3,000.00 total for the month of October. Simply forward your donation confirmation e-mail that you receive from the Heights Foundation for donations from October 10th - October 31st and we'll tally them up and make a matching contribution!
\nA word from the Heights Foundation
\n
“There is much suffering from significant trauma,” said Kathryn Kelly, CEO, president and founder of The Heights Foundation/The Heights Center. “I spoke with a family who thought they could ride out the storm in their home. They crawled out of a window as the waters rose. None of them could swim. They waded to the Kelly field complex and stood on a concrete slab for the remainder of the storm. They lost everything. Both mom and dad work on Fort Myers Beach in the service industry and those jobs are gone for the foreseeable future. There are many stories similar to this one. The residents of Harlem Heights are suffering and need our help.”
\nThe Foundation is monitoring the needs of the community and responding as best as they can. The initial need was food, water and basic supplies. They are now working on helping the families clear the debris from their homes and make them livable, and to connect residents with critical services. The Foundation is asking for cleaning supplies, linens, air mattresses with manual pumps, and bicycles in working condition for adults who have lost their vehicles.
\nThis is an extended effort. It will take a long time for the community to rebuild and The Heights Foundation will be there for families every step of the way.
\nA big need is financial contributions, which gives the Foundation the opportunity to target the areas of most need and respond quickly. You can click here to make a donation online.
\nAbout The Heights Foundation
\nHarlem Heights was originally settled as a rural agricultural community. Approximately 780 children live in a mixture of single-family homes and multi-family apartments. Demographically, the population is approximately 70% Hispanic, 20% African-American, and 8% Caucasian. The poverty rate for children in Harlem Heights is more than twice the county average, with family income 40% below the county average. Families cannot easily access family support services in downtown Fort Myers and benefit greatly from programs within the neighborhood.
\nThe Heights Foundation works to build self-sufficient families in the Harlem Heights neighborhood. The Foundation’s mission is to support education and wellness, promote family and community development, and provide the benefits of enrichment and the arts. The Heights Center, supported by The Heights Foundation, is a place for Education, Opportunity, and Enrichment. Heights Early Learning serves more than 80 babies through 4 years old. The Heights Center serves 150 children in AfterSchool and SummerCamp. The Harlem Heights Community Charter School serves 180 children from kindergarten through fifth grade.
\nMany of the families in Harlem Heights were devastated by the hurricane. Parents have worked hard to have a home and care for their children, and now their lives have been flipped upside down. They have lost their homes, their cars, and their jobs. Many have no savings, no food, no transportation, and no support systems.
\n
Image Credit: Kinfay Moroti / Hopeful Images
\nOur community that raised us and that we live and work within is so important, your support of it and us means the world during this.
\n11/17/22
\nUPDATE:
\nWe raised a total of $1900 with our matching donation! These funds will go a long way to helping The Heights Foundation situate the residents of the Harlem Heights community in the coming months.
\nSpecial thanks to the individuals and clients that made donations to help Southwest Florida recover from Hurricane Ian.
\nImportant instructions to ensure your donation is matched:
\n\n
**IN ORDER FOR YOUR DONATION TO BE MATCHED, PLEASE FORWARD YOUR CONFIRMATION E-MAIL TO GIVEBACK@DECKERDEVS.COM***
\n
As we continue our long road to recovery from Hurricane Ian in Southwest Florida, it occurred to us that our own funds can only travel so far.
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","metaKeywords":null,"name":"Hurricane Ian - The Heights Foundation Matching Donation Drive","nextPostFeaturedImage":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/Hurricane%20Ian.webp","nextPostFeaturedImageAltText":"","nextPostName":"Hurricane Ian Update: How you Can Help","nextPostSlug":"blogs/hurricane-ian-update-how-you-can-help","pageExpiryDate":null,"pageExpiryEnabled":null,"pageExpiryRedirectId":null,"pageExpiryRedirectUrl":null,"pageRedirected":false,"pageTitle":"Hurricane Ian - The Heights Foundation Matching Donation Drive","parentBlog":{"absoluteUrl":"https://deckerdevs.com/blogs","allowComments":true,"ampBodyColor":"#404040","ampBodyFont":"'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif","ampBodyFontSize":"18","ampCustomCss":"","ampHeaderBackgroundColor":"#ffffff","ampHeaderColor":"#1e1e1e","ampHeaderFont":"'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif","ampHeaderFontSize":"36","ampLinkColor":"#416bb3","ampLogoAlt":"","ampLogoHeight":0,"ampLogoSrc":"","ampLogoWidth":0,"analyticsPageId":62179259185,"attachedStylesheets":[],"audienceAccess":"PUBLIC","businessUnitId":null,"captchaAfterDays":7,"captchaAlways":false,"categoryId":3,"cdnPurgeEmbargoTime":null,"closeCommentsOlder":0,"commentDateFormat":"medium","commentFormGuid":"cb653aa1-3db4-4167-9b59-744c46d49682","commentMaxThreadDepth":3,"commentModeration":false,"commentNotificationEmails":["nicholas@deckerdevs.com","jessica@deckerdevs.com"],"commentShouldCreateContact":true,"commentVerificationText":"Thanks for participating in this conversation! 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\n\nWatching the community come together and doing our part to help has been incredible, but we know that our local resources in both manpower and financial assistance are becoming exhausted. With that said, we’re reaching out to our own network of professionals and clients located throughout the country to help.
\n
How we can work together to help:
\ndeckerdevs is doing a donation matching campaign to assist The Heights Foundation in offering much needed assistance to the residents of Harlem Heights, an underprivileged black community in South Fort Myers that was significantly impacted by the hurricane. Most of these residents don't have insurance, savings or any other means to recover their belongings. Most of their vehicles are inoperable and they're actively seeking donations of bikes so residents can go to work and continue to bring income into their homes.
\nFor every dollar you give to this campaign we’ll match it up to $3,000.00 total for the month of October. Simply forward your donation confirmation e-mail that you receive from the Heights Foundation for donations from October 10th - October 31st and we'll tally them up and make a matching contribution!
\nA word from the Heights Foundation
\n
“There is much suffering from significant trauma,” said Kathryn Kelly, CEO, president and founder of The Heights Foundation/The Heights Center. “I spoke with a family who thought they could ride out the storm in their home. They crawled out of a window as the waters rose. None of them could swim. They waded to the Kelly field complex and stood on a concrete slab for the remainder of the storm. They lost everything. Both mom and dad work on Fort Myers Beach in the service industry and those jobs are gone for the foreseeable future. There are many stories similar to this one. The residents of Harlem Heights are suffering and need our help.”
\nThe Foundation is monitoring the needs of the community and responding as best as they can. The initial need was food, water and basic supplies. They are now working on helping the families clear the debris from their homes and make them livable, and to connect residents with critical services. The Foundation is asking for cleaning supplies, linens, air mattresses with manual pumps, and bicycles in working condition for adults who have lost their vehicles.
\nThis is an extended effort. It will take a long time for the community to rebuild and The Heights Foundation will be there for families every step of the way.
\nA big need is financial contributions, which gives the Foundation the opportunity to target the areas of most need and respond quickly. You can click here to make a donation online.
\nAbout The Heights Foundation
\nHarlem Heights was originally settled as a rural agricultural community. Approximately 780 children live in a mixture of single-family homes and multi-family apartments. Demographically, the population is approximately 70% Hispanic, 20% African-American, and 8% Caucasian. The poverty rate for children in Harlem Heights is more than twice the county average, with family income 40% below the county average. Families cannot easily access family support services in downtown Fort Myers and benefit greatly from programs within the neighborhood.
\nThe Heights Foundation works to build self-sufficient families in the Harlem Heights neighborhood. The Foundation’s mission is to support education and wellness, promote family and community development, and provide the benefits of enrichment and the arts. The Heights Center, supported by The Heights Foundation, is a place for Education, Opportunity, and Enrichment. Heights Early Learning serves more than 80 babies through 4 years old. The Heights Center serves 150 children in AfterSchool and SummerCamp. The Harlem Heights Community Charter School serves 180 children from kindergarten through fifth grade.
\nMany of the families in Harlem Heights were devastated by the hurricane. Parents have worked hard to have a home and care for their children, and now their lives have been flipped upside down. They have lost their homes, their cars, and their jobs. Many have no savings, no food, no transportation, and no support systems.
\n
Image Credit: Kinfay Moroti / Hopeful Images
\nOur community that raised us and that we live and work within is so important, your support of it and us means the world during this.
\n11/17/22
\nUPDATE:
\nWe raised a total of $1900 with our matching donation! These funds will go a long way to helping The Heights Foundation situate the residents of the Harlem Heights community in the coming months.
\nSpecial thanks to the individuals and clients that made donations to help Southwest Florida recover from Hurricane Ian.
\nImportant instructions to ensure your donation is matched:
\n\n
**IN ORDER FOR YOUR DONATION TO BE MATCHED, PLEASE FORWARD YOUR CONFIRMATION E-MAIL TO GIVEBACK@DECKERDEVS.COM***
\n
As we continue our long road to recovery from Hurricane Ian in Southwest Florida, it occurred to us that our own funds can only travel so far.
\n\nWatching the community come together and doing our part to help has been incredible, but we know that our local resources in both manpower and financial assistance are becoming exhausted. With that said, we’re reaching out to our own network of professionals and clients located throughout the country to help.
\n
How we can work together to help:
\ndeckerdevs is doing a donation matching campaign to assist The Heights Foundation in offering much needed assistance to the residents of Harlem Heights, an underprivileged black community in South Fort Myers that was significantly impacted by the hurricane. Most of these residents don't have insurance, savings or any other means to recover their belongings. Most of their vehicles are inoperable and they're actively seeking donations of bikes so residents can go to work and continue to bring income into their homes.
\nFor every dollar you give to this campaign we’ll match it up to $3,000.00 total for the month of October. Simply forward your donation confirmation e-mail that you receive from the Heights Foundation for donations from October 10th - October 31st and we'll tally them up and make a matching contribution!
\nA word from the Heights Foundation
\n
“There is much suffering from significant trauma,” said Kathryn Kelly, CEO, president and founder of The Heights Foundation/The Heights Center. “I spoke with a family who thought they could ride out the storm in their home. They crawled out of a window as the waters rose. None of them could swim. They waded to the Kelly field complex and stood on a concrete slab for the remainder of the storm. They lost everything. Both mom and dad work on Fort Myers Beach in the service industry and those jobs are gone for the foreseeable future. There are many stories similar to this one. The residents of Harlem Heights are suffering and need our help.”
\nThe Foundation is monitoring the needs of the community and responding as best as they can. The initial need was food, water and basic supplies. They are now working on helping the families clear the debris from their homes and make them livable, and to connect residents with critical services. The Foundation is asking for cleaning supplies, linens, air mattresses with manual pumps, and bicycles in working condition for adults who have lost their vehicles.
\nThis is an extended effort. It will take a long time for the community to rebuild and The Heights Foundation will be there for families every step of the way.
\nA big need is financial contributions, which gives the Foundation the opportunity to target the areas of most need and respond quickly. You can click here to make a donation online.
\nAbout The Heights Foundation
\nHarlem Heights was originally settled as a rural agricultural community. Approximately 780 children live in a mixture of single-family homes and multi-family apartments. Demographically, the population is approximately 70% Hispanic, 20% African-American, and 8% Caucasian. The poverty rate for children in Harlem Heights is more than twice the county average, with family income 40% below the county average. Families cannot easily access family support services in downtown Fort Myers and benefit greatly from programs within the neighborhood.
\nThe Heights Foundation works to build self-sufficient families in the Harlem Heights neighborhood. The Foundation’s mission is to support education and wellness, promote family and community development, and provide the benefits of enrichment and the arts. The Heights Center, supported by The Heights Foundation, is a place for Education, Opportunity, and Enrichment. Heights Early Learning serves more than 80 babies through 4 years old. The Heights Center serves 150 children in AfterSchool and SummerCamp. The Harlem Heights Community Charter School serves 180 children from kindergarten through fifth grade.
\nMany of the families in Harlem Heights were devastated by the hurricane. Parents have worked hard to have a home and care for their children, and now their lives have been flipped upside down. They have lost their homes, their cars, and their jobs. Many have no savings, no food, no transportation, and no support systems.
\n
Image Credit: Kinfay Moroti / Hopeful Images
\nOur community that raised us and that we live and work within is so important, your support of it and us means the world during this.
\n11/17/22
\nUPDATE:
\nWe raised a total of $1900 with our matching donation! These funds will go a long way to helping The Heights Foundation situate the residents of the Harlem Heights community in the coming months.
\nSpecial thanks to the individuals and clients that made donations to help Southwest Florida recover from Hurricane Ian.
\nImportant instructions to ensure your donation is matched:
\n\n
**IN ORDER FOR YOUR DONATION TO BE MATCHED, PLEASE FORWARD YOUR CONFIRMATION E-MAIL TO GIVEBACK@DECKERDEVS.COM***
\n
As we continue our long road to recovery from Hurricane Ian in Southwest Florida, it occurred to us that our own funds can only travel so far.
","postFeaturedImageIfEnabled":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/Heights%20Blog/Heights13-scaled.webp","postListContent":"As we continue our long road to recovery from Hurricane Ian in Southwest Florida, it occurred to us that our own funds can only travel so far.
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","postRssSummaryFeaturedImage":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/Heights%20Blog/Heights13-scaled.webp","postSummary":"As we continue our long road to recovery from Hurricane Ian in Southwest Florida, it occurred to us that our own funds can only travel so far.
\n","postSummaryRss":"As we continue our long road to recovery from Hurricane Ian in Southwest Florida, it occurred to us that our own funds can only travel so far.
","postTemplate":"deckerdevs-theme/templates/blog-content.html","previewImageSrc":null,"previewKey":"JuBoCQtO","previousPostFeaturedImage":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/mobile-first-mobile-last-meme.jpg","previousPostFeaturedImageAltText":"mobile-first web design","previousPostName":"Web Development for SMBs: A Mobile-First Approach to Web Design","previousPostSlug":"blogs/web-development-for-smb-a-mobile-first-approach-to-web-design","processingStatus":"PUBLISHED","propertyForDynamicPageCanonicalUrl":null,"propertyForDynamicPageFeaturedImage":null,"propertyForDynamicPageMetaDescription":null,"propertyForDynamicPageSlug":null,"propertyForDynamicPageTitle":null,"publicAccessRules":[],"publicAccessRulesEnabled":false,"publishDate":1665502333000,"publishDateLocalTime":1665502333000,"publishDateLocalized":{"date":1665502333000,"format":"medium","language":null},"publishImmediately":true,"publishTimezoneOffset":null,"publishedAt":1692279820923,"publishedByEmail":null,"publishedById":27630257,"publishedByName":null,"publishedUrl":"https://deckerdevs.com/blogs/hurricane-ian-the-heights-foundation-matching-donation-drive","resolvedDomain":"deckerdevs.com","resolvedLanguage":null,"rssBody":"As we continue our long road to recovery from Hurricane Ian in Southwest Florida, it occurred to us that our own funds can only travel so far.
\n\nWatching the community come together and doing our part to help has been incredible, but we know that our local resources in both manpower and financial assistance are becoming exhausted. With that said, we’re reaching out to our own network of professionals and clients located throughout the country to help.
\n
How we can work together to help:
\ndeckerdevs is doing a donation matching campaign to assist The Heights Foundation in offering much needed assistance to the residents of Harlem Heights, an underprivileged black community in South Fort Myers that was significantly impacted by the hurricane. Most of these residents don't have insurance, savings or any other means to recover their belongings. Most of their vehicles are inoperable and they're actively seeking donations of bikes so residents can go to work and continue to bring income into their homes.
\nFor every dollar you give to this campaign we’ll match it up to $3,000.00 total for the month of October. Simply forward your donation confirmation e-mail that you receive from the Heights Foundation for donations from October 10th - October 31st and we'll tally them up and make a matching contribution!
\nA word from the Heights Foundation
\n
“There is much suffering from significant trauma,” said Kathryn Kelly, CEO, president and founder of The Heights Foundation/The Heights Center. “I spoke with a family who thought they could ride out the storm in their home. They crawled out of a window as the waters rose. None of them could swim. They waded to the Kelly field complex and stood on a concrete slab for the remainder of the storm. They lost everything. Both mom and dad work on Fort Myers Beach in the service industry and those jobs are gone for the foreseeable future. There are many stories similar to this one. The residents of Harlem Heights are suffering and need our help.”
\nThe Foundation is monitoring the needs of the community and responding as best as they can. The initial need was food, water and basic supplies. They are now working on helping the families clear the debris from their homes and make them livable, and to connect residents with critical services. The Foundation is asking for cleaning supplies, linens, air mattresses with manual pumps, and bicycles in working condition for adults who have lost their vehicles.
\nThis is an extended effort. It will take a long time for the community to rebuild and The Heights Foundation will be there for families every step of the way.
\nA big need is financial contributions, which gives the Foundation the opportunity to target the areas of most need and respond quickly. You can click here to make a donation online.
\nAbout The Heights Foundation
\nHarlem Heights was originally settled as a rural agricultural community. Approximately 780 children live in a mixture of single-family homes and multi-family apartments. Demographically, the population is approximately 70% Hispanic, 20% African-American, and 8% Caucasian. The poverty rate for children in Harlem Heights is more than twice the county average, with family income 40% below the county average. Families cannot easily access family support services in downtown Fort Myers and benefit greatly from programs within the neighborhood.
\nThe Heights Foundation works to build self-sufficient families in the Harlem Heights neighborhood. The Foundation’s mission is to support education and wellness, promote family and community development, and provide the benefits of enrichment and the arts. The Heights Center, supported by The Heights Foundation, is a place for Education, Opportunity, and Enrichment. Heights Early Learning serves more than 80 babies through 4 years old. The Heights Center serves 150 children in AfterSchool and SummerCamp. The Harlem Heights Community Charter School serves 180 children from kindergarten through fifth grade.
\nMany of the families in Harlem Heights were devastated by the hurricane. Parents have worked hard to have a home and care for their children, and now their lives have been flipped upside down. They have lost their homes, their cars, and their jobs. Many have no savings, no food, no transportation, and no support systems.
\n
Image Credit: Kinfay Moroti / Hopeful Images
\nOur community that raised us and that we live and work within is so important, your support of it and us means the world during this.
\n11/17/22
\nUPDATE:
\nWe raised a total of $1900 with our matching donation! These funds will go a long way to helping The Heights Foundation situate the residents of the Harlem Heights community in the coming months.
\nSpecial thanks to the individuals and clients that made donations to help Southwest Florida recover from Hurricane Ian.
\nImportant instructions to ensure your donation is matched:
\n\n
**IN ORDER FOR YOUR DONATION TO BE MATCHED, PLEASE FORWARD YOUR CONFIRMATION E-MAIL TO GIVEBACK@DECKERDEVS.COM***
\n
As we continue our long road to recovery from Hurricane Ian in Southwest Florida, it occurred to us that our own funds can only travel so far.
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Ian Update: How you Can Help","id":87215817732,"includeDefaultCustomCss":null,"isCaptchaRequired":true,"isCrawlableByBots":false,"isDraft":false,"isInstanceLayoutPage":false,"isInstantEmailEnabled":false,"isPublished":true,"isSocialPublishingEnabled":false,"keywords":[],"label":"Hurricane Ian Update: How you Can Help","language":"en","lastEditSessionId":null,"lastEditUpdateId":null,"layoutSections":{},"legacyBlogTabid":null,"legacyId":null,"legacyPostGuid":null,"linkRelCanonicalUrl":null,"listTemplate":"","liveDomain":"deckerdevs.com","mab":false,"mabExperimentId":null,"mabMaster":false,"mabVariant":false,"meta":{"use_featured_image":true,"post_body":"We’re still in shock at the magnitude of the damage our area of #SWFL is dealing with. While we evacuated safely to the East Coast, we’ve been giving money and resources to those with feet on the ground.
\n\n![\"Hurricane](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/Hurricane%20Ian.webp\")
We were lucky enough to come out of this storm relatively unscathed, but the damage throughout the area is jarring to say the least. Many close friends and family members are without a home due to storm surge flooding, and too many lost loved ones or their lives. Our beautiful beaches are decimated and it is still unknown as to when the residents will recover and businesses rebuilt.
While the majority of power has been restored to the area, there are still thousands of residents without power, and almost all of Lee County is without clean running water 8 days after the storm.
\nEven worse, there are others in the area in underprivileged neighborhoods like Harlem Heights and Suncoast Estates that are still flooded with almost no resources available to them.
\nLocal charities have stepped up take care of these people and the rest of the community and supplies have been coming in waves from people out of the area, residents making trips outside Southwest Florida to get supplies and finally, large relief organizations and corporations lending a hand with resources.
\nThere is still much work to be done, and while we are very lucky the majority of our dev team is remote and still plugging away hard at our work, we find it increasingly hard to ignore the needs around us while we are lucky enough to continue to be in business with minimal hurricane damage and the resources to get what we need.
\nHow you can help:
\nThat said, we hope our friends, clients and fellow HubSpot partners will step up to help our area. There are a number of ways that you can give:
\n- \n
- The Community Cooperative. This organization regularly feeds the residents of Southwest Florida that are struggling and they were one of the first organizations to move after the storm providing meals and supplies to all of the Southwest Florida area.
They have stations set up in almost every area of Southwest Florida where they are distributing supplies like food, water, baby formula, diapers, wipes, clothing, toys, batteries, construction supplies and more to needy residents that are without.
You can give back to Community Cooperative to help them keep giving to the community by donating here:
https://communitycooperative.com/donate/ \n - The Heights Foundation. Harlem Heights is an underprivileged neighborhood in Fort Myers that suffered extensive flooding. While the majority of the water has receded, standing water filled with sewage and bacteria is still in many of the homes.
Heights Foundation and their volunteers have been lucky enough to receive extensive supply donations from the community, but this week they’ve been in the homes in Heights ripping out drywall, moving out ruined personal items and trying to salvage what they can for residents. If you have the resources to organize construction supplies like drywall, tarps, tools, pressure washers, gloves, cleaning products and construction debris bags - these are invaluable for them right now. These can also be sent to their address using Amazon:
The Heights Foundation
15570 Hagie Dr
Fort Myers, FL 33908
Learn more about the foundation and donate here:
https://heightsfoundation.org/hurricanerelief/?fbclid=IwAR3I2hj8_tWCy0cCDrzGquoVjO-Ld-I90HPVHTWSs91QuRAX2az2hUeEnOI \n
Wink News has compiled this list of other local organizations that are working around the clock to provide aide in many different ways. Please review these organizations and give back to one that resounds with you:
\nhttps://www.winknews.com/2022/10/04/heres-how-you-can-help-southwest-floridians-affected-by-ian/
\n*Please note supply donation needs vary by the day and this article was last updated two days ago*
\nWe hope that you’ll consider helping our community during this time.
\nWe’re still in shock at the magnitude of the damage our area of #SWFL is dealing with. While we evacuated safely to the East Coast, we’ve been giving money and resources to those with feet on the ground.
\n","blog_post_schedule_task_uid":null,"blog_publish_to_social_media_task":"DONE_NOT_SENT","blog_publish_instant_email_task_uid":null,"blog_publish_instant_email_campaign_id":null,"blog_publish_instant_email_retry_count":null,"rss_body":"We’re still in shock at the magnitude of the damage our area of #SWFL is dealing with. While we evacuated safely to the East Coast, we’ve been giving money and resources to those with feet on the ground.
\n\nWe were lucky enough to come out of this storm relatively unscathed, but the damage throughout the area is jarring to say the least. Many close friends and family members are without a home due to storm surge flooding, and too many lost loved ones or their lives. Our beautiful beaches are decimated and it is still unknown as to when the residents will recover and businesses rebuilt.
While the majority of power has been restored to the area, there are still thousands of residents without power, and almost all of Lee County is without clean running water 8 days after the storm.
\nEven worse, there are others in the area in underprivileged neighborhoods like Harlem Heights and Suncoast Estates that are still flooded with almost no resources available to them.
\nLocal charities have stepped up take care of these people and the rest of the community and supplies have been coming in waves from people out of the area, residents making trips outside Southwest Florida to get supplies and finally, large relief organizations and corporations lending a hand with resources.
\nThere is still much work to be done, and while we are very lucky the majority of our dev team is remote and still plugging away hard at our work, we find it increasingly hard to ignore the needs around us while we are lucky enough to continue to be in business with minimal hurricane damage and the resources to get what we need.
\nHow you can help:
\nThat said, we hope our friends, clients and fellow HubSpot partners will step up to help our area. There are a number of ways that you can give:
\n- \n
- The Community Cooperative. This organization regularly feeds the residents of Southwest Florida that are struggling and they were one of the first organizations to move after the storm providing meals and supplies to all of the Southwest Florida area.
They have stations set up in almost every area of Southwest Florida where they are distributing supplies like food, water, baby formula, diapers, wipes, clothing, toys, batteries, construction supplies and more to needy residents that are without.
You can give back to Community Cooperative to help them keep giving to the community by donating here:
https://communitycooperative.com/donate/ \n - The Heights Foundation. Harlem Heights is an underprivileged neighborhood in Fort Myers that suffered extensive flooding. While the majority of the water has receded, standing water filled with sewage and bacteria is still in many of the homes.
Heights Foundation and their volunteers have been lucky enough to receive extensive supply donations from the community, but this week they’ve been in the homes in Heights ripping out drywall, moving out ruined personal items and trying to salvage what they can for residents. If you have the resources to organize construction supplies like drywall, tarps, tools, pressure washers, gloves, cleaning products and construction debris bags - these are invaluable for them right now. These can also be sent to their address using Amazon:
The Heights Foundation
15570 Hagie Dr
Fort Myers, FL 33908
Learn more about the foundation and donate here:
https://heightsfoundation.org/hurricanerelief/?fbclid=IwAR3I2hj8_tWCy0cCDrzGquoVjO-Ld-I90HPVHTWSs91QuRAX2az2hUeEnOI \n
Wink News has compiled this list of other local organizations that are working around the clock to provide aide in many different ways. Please review these organizations and give back to one that resounds with you:
\nhttps://www.winknews.com/2022/10/04/heres-how-you-can-help-southwest-floridians-affected-by-ian/
\n*Please note supply donation needs vary by the day and this article was last updated two days ago*
\nWe hope that you’ll consider helping our community during this time.
\nWe’re still in shock at the magnitude of the damage our area of #SWFL is dealing with. While we evacuated safely to the East Coast, we’ve been giving money and resources to those with feet on the ground.
\n","keywords":[],"enable_google_amp_output_override":false,"generate_json_ld_enabled":true,"composition_id":0,"is_crawlable_by_bots":false,"tag_ids":[],"topic_ids":[],"public_access_rules":[],"public_access_rules_enabled":false,"html_title":"Hurricane Ian Update: How you Can Help","enable_layout_stylesheets":null,"tweet":null,"tweet_at":null,"campaign_name":null,"campaign_utm":null,"meta_keywords":null,"meta_description":"As Southwest Florida residents, its been difficult to focus on anything besides Hurricane Ian. Here's how you can help. 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While we evacuated safely to the East Coast, we’ve been giving money and resources to those with feet on the ground.
\n\nWe were lucky enough to come out of this storm relatively unscathed, but the damage throughout the area is jarring to say the least. Many close friends and family members are without a home due to storm surge flooding, and too many lost loved ones or their lives. Our beautiful beaches are decimated and it is still unknown as to when the residents will recover and businesses rebuilt.
While the majority of power has been restored to the area, there are still thousands of residents without power, and almost all of Lee County is without clean running water 8 days after the storm.
\nEven worse, there are others in the area in underprivileged neighborhoods like Harlem Heights and Suncoast Estates that are still flooded with almost no resources available to them.
\nLocal charities have stepped up take care of these people and the rest of the community and supplies have been coming in waves from people out of the area, residents making trips outside Southwest Florida to get supplies and finally, large relief organizations and corporations lending a hand with resources.
\nThere is still much work to be done, and while we are very lucky the majority of our dev team is remote and still plugging away hard at our work, we find it increasingly hard to ignore the needs around us while we are lucky enough to continue to be in business with minimal hurricane damage and the resources to get what we need.
\nHow you can help:
\nThat said, we hope our friends, clients and fellow HubSpot partners will step up to help our area. There are a number of ways that you can give:
\n- \n
- The Community Cooperative. This organization regularly feeds the residents of Southwest Florida that are struggling and they were one of the first organizations to move after the storm providing meals and supplies to all of the Southwest Florida area.
They have stations set up in almost every area of Southwest Florida where they are distributing supplies like food, water, baby formula, diapers, wipes, clothing, toys, batteries, construction supplies and more to needy residents that are without.
You can give back to Community Cooperative to help them keep giving to the community by donating here:
https://communitycooperative.com/donate/ \n - The Heights Foundation. Harlem Heights is an underprivileged neighborhood in Fort Myers that suffered extensive flooding. While the majority of the water has receded, standing water filled with sewage and bacteria is still in many of the homes.
Heights Foundation and their volunteers have been lucky enough to receive extensive supply donations from the community, but this week they’ve been in the homes in Heights ripping out drywall, moving out ruined personal items and trying to salvage what they can for residents. If you have the resources to organize construction supplies like drywall, tarps, tools, pressure washers, gloves, cleaning products and construction debris bags - these are invaluable for them right now. These can also be sent to their address using Amazon:
The Heights Foundation
15570 Hagie Dr
Fort Myers, FL 33908
Learn more about the foundation and donate here:
https://heightsfoundation.org/hurricanerelief/?fbclid=IwAR3I2hj8_tWCy0cCDrzGquoVjO-Ld-I90HPVHTWSs91QuRAX2az2hUeEnOI \n
Wink News has compiled this list of other local organizations that are working around the clock to provide aide in many different ways. Please review these organizations and give back to one that resounds with you:
\nhttps://www.winknews.com/2022/10/04/heres-how-you-can-help-southwest-floridians-affected-by-ian/
\n*Please note supply donation needs vary by the day and this article was last updated two days ago*
\nWe hope that you’ll consider helping our community during this time.
\nWe’re still in shock at the magnitude of the damage our area of #SWFL is dealing with. While we evacuated safely to the East Coast, we’ve been giving money and resources to those with feet on the ground.
\n\nWe were lucky enough to come out of this storm relatively unscathed, but the damage throughout the area is jarring to say the least. Many close friends and family members are without a home due to storm surge flooding, and too many lost loved ones or their lives. Our beautiful beaches are decimated and it is still unknown as to when the residents will recover and businesses rebuilt.
While the majority of power has been restored to the area, there are still thousands of residents without power, and almost all of Lee County is without clean running water 8 days after the storm.
\nEven worse, there are others in the area in underprivileged neighborhoods like Harlem Heights and Suncoast Estates that are still flooded with almost no resources available to them.
\nLocal charities have stepped up take care of these people and the rest of the community and supplies have been coming in waves from people out of the area, residents making trips outside Southwest Florida to get supplies and finally, large relief organizations and corporations lending a hand with resources.
\nThere is still much work to be done, and while we are very lucky the majority of our dev team is remote and still plugging away hard at our work, we find it increasingly hard to ignore the needs around us while we are lucky enough to continue to be in business with minimal hurricane damage and the resources to get what we need.
\nHow you can help:
\nThat said, we hope our friends, clients and fellow HubSpot partners will step up to help our area. There are a number of ways that you can give:
\n- \n
- The Community Cooperative. This organization regularly feeds the residents of Southwest Florida that are struggling and they were one of the first organizations to move after the storm providing meals and supplies to all of the Southwest Florida area.
They have stations set up in almost every area of Southwest Florida where they are distributing supplies like food, water, baby formula, diapers, wipes, clothing, toys, batteries, construction supplies and more to needy residents that are without.
You can give back to Community Cooperative to help them keep giving to the community by donating here:
https://communitycooperative.com/donate/ \n - The Heights Foundation. Harlem Heights is an underprivileged neighborhood in Fort Myers that suffered extensive flooding. While the majority of the water has receded, standing water filled with sewage and bacteria is still in many of the homes.
Heights Foundation and their volunteers have been lucky enough to receive extensive supply donations from the community, but this week they’ve been in the homes in Heights ripping out drywall, moving out ruined personal items and trying to salvage what they can for residents. If you have the resources to organize construction supplies like drywall, tarps, tools, pressure washers, gloves, cleaning products and construction debris bags - these are invaluable for them right now. These can also be sent to their address using Amazon:
The Heights Foundation
15570 Hagie Dr
Fort Myers, FL 33908
Learn more about the foundation and donate here:
https://heightsfoundation.org/hurricanerelief/?fbclid=IwAR3I2hj8_tWCy0cCDrzGquoVjO-Ld-I90HPVHTWSs91QuRAX2az2hUeEnOI \n
Wink News has compiled this list of other local organizations that are working around the clock to provide aide in many different ways. Please review these organizations and give back to one that resounds with you:
\nhttps://www.winknews.com/2022/10/04/heres-how-you-can-help-southwest-floridians-affected-by-ian/
\n*Please note supply donation needs vary by the day and this article was last updated two days ago*
\nWe hope that you’ll consider helping our community during this time.
\nWe’re still in shock at the magnitude of the damage our area of #SWFL is dealing with. While we evacuated safely to the East Coast, we’ve been giving money and resources to those with feet on the ground.
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While the majority of power has been restored to the area, there are still thousands of residents without power, and almost all of Lee County is without clean running water 8 days after the storm.
\nEven worse, there are others in the area in underprivileged neighborhoods like Harlem Heights and Suncoast Estates that are still flooded with almost no resources available to them.
\nLocal charities have stepped up take care of these people and the rest of the community and supplies have been coming in waves from people out of the area, residents making trips outside Southwest Florida to get supplies and finally, large relief organizations and corporations lending a hand with resources.
\nThere is still much work to be done, and while we are very lucky the majority of our dev team is remote and still plugging away hard at our work, we find it increasingly hard to ignore the needs around us while we are lucky enough to continue to be in business with minimal hurricane damage and the resources to get what we need.
\nHow you can help:
\nThat said, we hope our friends, clients and fellow HubSpot partners will step up to help our area. There are a number of ways that you can give:
\n- \n
- The Community Cooperative. This organization regularly feeds the residents of Southwest Florida that are struggling and they were one of the first organizations to move after the storm providing meals and supplies to all of the Southwest Florida area.
They have stations set up in almost every area of Southwest Florida where they are distributing supplies like food, water, baby formula, diapers, wipes, clothing, toys, batteries, construction supplies and more to needy residents that are without.
You can give back to Community Cooperative to help them keep giving to the community by donating here:
https://communitycooperative.com/donate/ \n - The Heights Foundation. Harlem Heights is an underprivileged neighborhood in Fort Myers that suffered extensive flooding. While the majority of the water has receded, standing water filled with sewage and bacteria is still in many of the homes.
Heights Foundation and their volunteers have been lucky enough to receive extensive supply donations from the community, but this week they’ve been in the homes in Heights ripping out drywall, moving out ruined personal items and trying to salvage what they can for residents. If you have the resources to organize construction supplies like drywall, tarps, tools, pressure washers, gloves, cleaning products and construction debris bags - these are invaluable for them right now. These can also be sent to their address using Amazon:
The Heights Foundation
15570 Hagie Dr
Fort Myers, FL 33908
Learn more about the foundation and donate here:
https://heightsfoundation.org/hurricanerelief/?fbclid=IwAR3I2hj8_tWCy0cCDrzGquoVjO-Ld-I90HPVHTWSs91QuRAX2az2hUeEnOI \n
Wink News has compiled this list of other local organizations that are working around the clock to provide aide in many different ways. Please review these organizations and give back to one that resounds with you:
\nhttps://www.winknews.com/2022/10/04/heres-how-you-can-help-southwest-floridians-affected-by-ian/
\n*Please note supply donation needs vary by the day and this article was last updated two days ago*
\nWe hope that you’ll consider helping our community during this time.
\nWe’re still in shock at the magnitude of the damage our area of #SWFL is dealing with. While we evacuated safely to the East Coast, we’ve been giving money and resources to those with feet on the ground.
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