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Some Recent Thoughts...
Juicy Tidbits Without the "Tech Speak"
A compilation of ramblings about everything from HubSpot CMS development to data architecture, integrations and all the tech stuff you never knew you needed to know.
memeify the blog!
Blogs Listing - UPDATE 2024 (Jordan)
Website Bounce Rate: 6 Things Sending People Away from Your Website
A high website bounce rate will tell you a lot about conversion opportunities. Here are 6 things that could be sending people away from your website:
Website Quality Assurance: You Need QA in HubSpot CMS Development
Website quality assurance matters! Here's why you can't afford NOT to have a QA process in HubSpot CMS Development projects.
It's Time to Leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS
WordPress has served us well for a long time, but it's time to switch to HubSpot CMS - here's why:
Growth-Driven Design: Why Your Website is Kinda Like Pokemon
Growth-Driven Design allows for a constant evolution of your website - much like pokemon. Learn more about the continuous improvement model...
HubSpot CMS Development Quality Assurance: Why We Love Pastel
When it comes to HubSpot CMS Development quality assurance, Pastel is the an amazing tool to make your life easier...
Agencies Should Pay More for Web Development Outsourcing
You get what you pay for. Here's the case for why you should invest a little more in HubSpot web development outsourcing.
Your HubSpot CMS Developer Ghosted You, Now What?
So, your HubSpot CMS developer ghosted you. It's going to be okay. Here's what you need to do next:
HubSpot CMS Developer Utopia: What to Expect When Developing a Website
HubSpot CMS Developer utopia looks a little like less worrying, more clarity, timelines that are honored and really, really quality work...
Growing Pains: 4 Problems with HubSpot Development Agencies That Grow Quickly
We've all experienced growing pains, but when HubSpot development agencies grow too quickly - sometimes clients feel it a little too much...
When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
\n\nYour bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that come to your website and take no other action before leaving. This is an indicator to search engines that the content they’ve clicked through isn’t valuable or relevant for what the user searched for, or your website isn’t the best source of information for that topic. This can happen for a number of reasons, but lowering that bounce rate is going to be really critical not only for search engine rankings but also to ensure you’re getting the most out of the traffic that you work so hard to funnel to your website to begin with.
\n\n
Why work on your bounce rate?
\n- \n
- The goal for more people is to have a large percentage of your website visitors taking an action on your website. \n
- One of the considerations for website rank by search engines is bounce rate. The lower your bounce rate, the better your potential to rank is. \n
Even the most savvy marketers can miss something when it comes to decreasing the bounce rate on their website. The intricacies of conversion can be a little daunting to master all at once, but with the right strategy, you can slowly bring down your website’s bounce rate.
Here are a few factors that contribute to an increased bounce rate on your website:
Not mobile-friendly
\n![\"deckerdevs-mobile](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/deckerdevs-mobile%20optimization-devices-1.svg\")
It is very rare that you’ll encounter a web developer that doesn’t leverage mobile-first design. In the design of your website, you should make sure that your developer either asks for your mobile design or insists that they establish the mobile design prior to beginning the development of the website.
\n
Understanding how elements on the page will shift as the browser size changes is critical to creating a good user experience for your website visitors. If images don’t properly shift above or below the words they support or the navigation doesn’t translate in a logical way to a smaller mobile browser, you could risk losing visitors to confusing mobile and tablet views.
Not only should your website developer be looking over your mobile design first, but they should be making intuitive suggestions for search options, filtering and other expert tips to make sure your website translates well to browsers on mobile devices.
Related: HubSpot Developer Utopia - 7 Things to Expert When Developing a HubSpot CMS Website
\nPoorly Planned Design
\n
UX, font size, ugly color contrasts, menu navigation that is too clunky or not intuitive - all of these things contribute to a poor user interface, which can annihilate a bounce rate. It seems logical, but users (especially in the ADD on-demand world we live in today) want to find the information they’re looking for easily, without extra work and without hurting their eyes.
As a rule of thumb, if a user can’t locate the information they want within 4 seconds of clicking on a page, they’re probably leaving for the next source of information. This means that you have to have a simple and intuitive design, fast loading pages, colors that are complementary but not too contrasting and navigation that is easy to understand.
A list of common issues with poorly designed websites?
- \n
- Fonts that are too big or too small \n
- Glaringly contrasting colors that are hard to read or look at \n
- Pages that have too many elements loading at the same time and take longer than 4 seconds to load \n
- Large useless animations \n
- Music that doesn’t allow the user to control the volume or plays the moment a page is clicked \n
- Irrelevant, obnoxious images \n
- Too many ads or banners popping up \n
- Chat or opt-in boxes that are relentless \n
- Layouts that shift as you move down the page \n
Some developers created the Big Ugly Website to give you a hint for the types of things that turn off a user. It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often things like font size, color and poor layout are encountered by users.
\n\n
We could go on and on, but those are just a few of the things that can easily frustrate users from a design perspective. You’ll want to minimize or avoid these things entirely to make sure that your users are getting exactly what they are looking for when it comes to your products and services.
Your page loads too slowly
\n
We already discussed the 4 second rule, but there’s a lot more to page load speed than most realize. From your website host and server to excessive plugins, large images, scripts and other elements - every second matters. In fact, according to websitesetup.org: 7 out of 10 people say that the speed of a website page affects their desire to buy from an online retailer. Not only that, but websites that take 5 seconds to load have a 90% bounce rate!
Page load speed matters more than you realize. A few tenths of a second may not seem like much, but if it puts you over that critical threshold, you’re handicapping your ability to convert your visitors and sending your bounce rate up. In the retail industry, decreasing your load time by just one tenth of a second can result in 8.4% increase in conversion rates! That’s HUGE! The same article states that that same .1 second decrease in load speed also yielded 9.2% increase in order size and page view per session by 8.6%
Things like image size and optimization, scripts and old code, fonts and icons, videos and hosting are the biggest culprits for bogging down load speed. We’ve got a write up on page speed optimization that includes 5 factors that could be bogging down your website that you should definitely check out.
Your title tag and meta description may be misleading
\n
In the age of click-bait articles, so many news outlets and blogs are using their title tag and meta description to get people to click through. But when it comes to reducing your bounce rate, relevance matters. You want your user to know in as few words as possible what the information they’re about to click through includes while still ensuring the description is as compelling as possible. A gifted copywriter will be able to assist with this.
For SEO purposes, make sure that your Title Tag is 60 characters or less (or that the most important information is included within those 60 characters) and that your Meta Description is 160 characters or less.
It should be a relevant description of what the user hopes to gain and the keyword that you’re optimizing that particular website page or blog for should be relevant to the topic you’re discussing. Oftentimes a local business makes an effort to optimize their website for a certain product type or service offering and includes that keyword in a blog title that may not be perfectly relevant for that topic.
When it comes to planning your content, it’s most important to offer valuable information without being misleading, spamming keywords or trying to weave in keywords that don’t entirely fit the topic of the blog post or website page.
Remember: Google is trying to deliver the most relevant information to help answer a user's question. The more you focus on the user, the better off you’ll be and the more people will engage with the content that you’re putting out, resulting in lower bounce rates.
Poor quality referrals
\n
Inbound links are a great way to get traffic to your site and increase your credibility with search engines - to a point. You want to make sure that you’re not just listing your business in any irrelevant directory that you can and that every inbound link actually makes sense for the types of people that you’re looking for.
What are good ways to get quality inbound links and referral traffic?
- \n
- Industry specific directories. Are there directories specifically for your industry and offerings? You should be there. As a HubSpot CMS Developer, we’ve become a HubSpot Partner and are now listed in their Partner Marketplace, which has actually been a source of a few great leads for us. Do some research on listings that are relevant to you and see if you can get listed there. It’s a simple and easy way to get qualified referral traffic sent to your site.
- Guest blogging for other websites is a great way to get relevant inbound links to your site. Align yourself with industries that you serve, other authorities in your space and create partnerships with businesses whose products and services cater to a similar audience.
- Keep writing original, quality content. Performing your own research can be a great way to get linked to or even just having original thoughts about problems that your prospects and customers relate to. Don’t underestimate the value of a quality content creator and strategist and NEVER use a bot or AI software to write your blog articles. Your content is the most important way to keep your visitors engaged and you want to make sure it holds plenty of value and thought leadership for web visitors. \n
For most businesses, the goal of your website is to attract visitors and keep them on your website until they make a conversion decision. If a poor design, low quality content, slow loading pages or other elements of your website are pushing them away before they take any desired actions, you need to take action to help keep them on your site and reduce your bounce rate. Installing a heat map software like HotJar is a great start. This will help you to understand what users are doing on your website, optimize the most common actions and eliminate any elements of your site that appear to be confusing to your website visitors.
Using a tool like HotJar in tandem with an experienced web developer will help you understand what actions can be taken to make your website more successful in converting your visitors and keeping them on your page for longer. An experienced website developer will know what features can be added and how to best shift elements around, change typography and best optimize UX to create a positive experience for your users.
What are some thing you've noticed about websites that have made you want to leave? You can even post a link with examples!
When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
\n","rss_body":"When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
\n\nYour bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that come to your website and take no other action before leaving. This is an indicator to search engines that the content they’ve clicked through isn’t valuable or relevant for what the user searched for, or your website isn’t the best source of information for that topic. This can happen for a number of reasons, but lowering that bounce rate is going to be really critical not only for search engine rankings but also to ensure you’re getting the most out of the traffic that you work so hard to funnel to your website to begin with.
\n\n
Why work on your bounce rate?
\n- \n
- The goal for more people is to have a large percentage of your website visitors taking an action on your website. \n
- One of the considerations for website rank by search engines is bounce rate. The lower your bounce rate, the better your potential to rank is. \n
Even the most savvy marketers can miss something when it comes to decreasing the bounce rate on their website. The intricacies of conversion can be a little daunting to master all at once, but with the right strategy, you can slowly bring down your website’s bounce rate.
Here are a few factors that contribute to an increased bounce rate on your website:
Not mobile-friendly
\nIt is very rare that you’ll encounter a web developer that doesn’t leverage mobile-first design. In the design of your website, you should make sure that your developer either asks for your mobile design or insists that they establish the mobile design prior to beginning the development of the website.
\n
Understanding how elements on the page will shift as the browser size changes is critical to creating a good user experience for your website visitors. If images don’t properly shift above or below the words they support or the navigation doesn’t translate in a logical way to a smaller mobile browser, you could risk losing visitors to confusing mobile and tablet views.
Not only should your website developer be looking over your mobile design first, but they should be making intuitive suggestions for search options, filtering and other expert tips to make sure your website translates well to browsers on mobile devices.
Related: HubSpot Developer Utopia - 7 Things to Expert When Developing a HubSpot CMS Website
\nPoorly Planned Design
\n
UX, font size, ugly color contrasts, menu navigation that is too clunky or not intuitive - all of these things contribute to a poor user interface, which can annihilate a bounce rate. It seems logical, but users (especially in the ADD on-demand world we live in today) want to find the information they’re looking for easily, without extra work and without hurting their eyes.
As a rule of thumb, if a user can’t locate the information they want within 4 seconds of clicking on a page, they’re probably leaving for the next source of information. This means that you have to have a simple and intuitive design, fast loading pages, colors that are complementary but not too contrasting and navigation that is easy to understand.
A list of common issues with poorly designed websites?
- \n
- Fonts that are too big or too small \n
- Glaringly contrasting colors that are hard to read or look at \n
- Pages that have too many elements loading at the same time and take longer than 4 seconds to load \n
- Large useless animations \n
- Music that doesn’t allow the user to control the volume or plays the moment a page is clicked \n
- Irrelevant, obnoxious images \n
- Too many ads or banners popping up \n
- Chat or opt-in boxes that are relentless \n
- Layouts that shift as you move down the page \n
Some developers created the Big Ugly Website to give you a hint for the types of things that turn off a user. It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often things like font size, color and poor layout are encountered by users.
\n\n
We could go on and on, but those are just a few of the things that can easily frustrate users from a design perspective. You’ll want to minimize or avoid these things entirely to make sure that your users are getting exactly what they are looking for when it comes to your products and services.
Your page loads too slowly
\n
We already discussed the 4 second rule, but there’s a lot more to page load speed than most realize. From your website host and server to excessive plugins, large images, scripts and other elements - every second matters. In fact, according to websitesetup.org: 7 out of 10 people say that the speed of a website page affects their desire to buy from an online retailer. Not only that, but websites that take 5 seconds to load have a 90% bounce rate!
Page load speed matters more than you realize. A few tenths of a second may not seem like much, but if it puts you over that critical threshold, you’re handicapping your ability to convert your visitors and sending your bounce rate up. In the retail industry, decreasing your load time by just one tenth of a second can result in 8.4% increase in conversion rates! That’s HUGE! The same article states that that same .1 second decrease in load speed also yielded 9.2% increase in order size and page view per session by 8.6%
Things like image size and optimization, scripts and old code, fonts and icons, videos and hosting are the biggest culprits for bogging down load speed. We’ve got a write up on page speed optimization that includes 5 factors that could be bogging down your website that you should definitely check out.
Your title tag and meta description may be misleading
\n
In the age of click-bait articles, so many news outlets and blogs are using their title tag and meta description to get people to click through. But when it comes to reducing your bounce rate, relevance matters. You want your user to know in as few words as possible what the information they’re about to click through includes while still ensuring the description is as compelling as possible. A gifted copywriter will be able to assist with this.
For SEO purposes, make sure that your Title Tag is 60 characters or less (or that the most important information is included within those 60 characters) and that your Meta Description is 160 characters or less.
It should be a relevant description of what the user hopes to gain and the keyword that you’re optimizing that particular website page or blog for should be relevant to the topic you’re discussing. Oftentimes a local business makes an effort to optimize their website for a certain product type or service offering and includes that keyword in a blog title that may not be perfectly relevant for that topic.
When it comes to planning your content, it’s most important to offer valuable information without being misleading, spamming keywords or trying to weave in keywords that don’t entirely fit the topic of the blog post or website page.
Remember: Google is trying to deliver the most relevant information to help answer a user's question. The more you focus on the user, the better off you’ll be and the more people will engage with the content that you’re putting out, resulting in lower bounce rates.
Poor quality referrals
\n
Inbound links are a great way to get traffic to your site and increase your credibility with search engines - to a point. You want to make sure that you’re not just listing your business in any irrelevant directory that you can and that every inbound link actually makes sense for the types of people that you’re looking for.
What are good ways to get quality inbound links and referral traffic?
- \n
- Industry specific directories. Are there directories specifically for your industry and offerings? You should be there. As a HubSpot CMS Developer, we’ve become a HubSpot Partner and are now listed in their Partner Marketplace, which has actually been a source of a few great leads for us. Do some research on listings that are relevant to you and see if you can get listed there. It’s a simple and easy way to get qualified referral traffic sent to your site.
- Guest blogging for other websites is a great way to get relevant inbound links to your site. Align yourself with industries that you serve, other authorities in your space and create partnerships with businesses whose products and services cater to a similar audience.
- Keep writing original, quality content. Performing your own research can be a great way to get linked to or even just having original thoughts about problems that your prospects and customers relate to. Don’t underestimate the value of a quality content creator and strategist and NEVER use a bot or AI software to write your blog articles. Your content is the most important way to keep your visitors engaged and you want to make sure it holds plenty of value and thought leadership for web visitors. \n
For most businesses, the goal of your website is to attract visitors and keep them on your website until they make a conversion decision. If a poor design, low quality content, slow loading pages or other elements of your website are pushing them away before they take any desired actions, you need to take action to help keep them on your site and reduce your bounce rate. Installing a heat map software like HotJar is a great start. This will help you to understand what users are doing on your website, optimize the most common actions and eliminate any elements of your site that appear to be confusing to your website visitors.
Using a tool like HotJar in tandem with an experienced web developer will help you understand what actions can be taken to make your website more successful in converting your visitors and keeping them on your page for longer. An experienced website developer will know what features can be added and how to best shift elements around, change typography and best optimize UX to create a positive experience for your users.
What are some thing you've noticed about websites that have made you want to leave? You can even post a link with examples!
When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
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There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
\n\nYour bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that come to your website and take no other action before leaving. This is an indicator to search engines that the content they’ve clicked through isn’t valuable or relevant for what the user searched for, or your website isn’t the best source of information for that topic. This can happen for a number of reasons, but lowering that bounce rate is going to be really critical not only for search engine rankings but also to ensure you’re getting the most out of the traffic that you work so hard to funnel to your website to begin with.
\n\n
Why work on your bounce rate?
\n- \n
- The goal for more people is to have a large percentage of your website visitors taking an action on your website. \n
- One of the considerations for website rank by search engines is bounce rate. The lower your bounce rate, the better your potential to rank is. \n
Even the most savvy marketers can miss something when it comes to decreasing the bounce rate on their website. The intricacies of conversion can be a little daunting to master all at once, but with the right strategy, you can slowly bring down your website’s bounce rate.
Here are a few factors that contribute to an increased bounce rate on your website:
Not mobile-friendly
\nIt is very rare that you’ll encounter a web developer that doesn’t leverage mobile-first design. In the design of your website, you should make sure that your developer either asks for your mobile design or insists that they establish the mobile design prior to beginning the development of the website.
\n
Understanding how elements on the page will shift as the browser size changes is critical to creating a good user experience for your website visitors. If images don’t properly shift above or below the words they support or the navigation doesn’t translate in a logical way to a smaller mobile browser, you could risk losing visitors to confusing mobile and tablet views.
Not only should your website developer be looking over your mobile design first, but they should be making intuitive suggestions for search options, filtering and other expert tips to make sure your website translates well to browsers on mobile devices.
Related: HubSpot Developer Utopia - 7 Things to Expert When Developing a HubSpot CMS Website
\nPoorly Planned Design
\n
UX, font size, ugly color contrasts, menu navigation that is too clunky or not intuitive - all of these things contribute to a poor user interface, which can annihilate a bounce rate. It seems logical, but users (especially in the ADD on-demand world we live in today) want to find the information they’re looking for easily, without extra work and without hurting their eyes.
As a rule of thumb, if a user can’t locate the information they want within 4 seconds of clicking on a page, they’re probably leaving for the next source of information. This means that you have to have a simple and intuitive design, fast loading pages, colors that are complementary but not too contrasting and navigation that is easy to understand.
A list of common issues with poorly designed websites?
- \n
- Fonts that are too big or too small \n
- Glaringly contrasting colors that are hard to read or look at \n
- Pages that have too many elements loading at the same time and take longer than 4 seconds to load \n
- Large useless animations \n
- Music that doesn’t allow the user to control the volume or plays the moment a page is clicked \n
- Irrelevant, obnoxious images \n
- Too many ads or banners popping up \n
- Chat or opt-in boxes that are relentless \n
- Layouts that shift as you move down the page \n
Some developers created the Big Ugly Website to give you a hint for the types of things that turn off a user. It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often things like font size, color and poor layout are encountered by users.
\n\n
We could go on and on, but those are just a few of the things that can easily frustrate users from a design perspective. You’ll want to minimize or avoid these things entirely to make sure that your users are getting exactly what they are looking for when it comes to your products and services.
Your page loads too slowly
\n
We already discussed the 4 second rule, but there’s a lot more to page load speed than most realize. From your website host and server to excessive plugins, large images, scripts and other elements - every second matters. In fact, according to websitesetup.org: 7 out of 10 people say that the speed of a website page affects their desire to buy from an online retailer. Not only that, but websites that take 5 seconds to load have a 90% bounce rate!
Page load speed matters more than you realize. A few tenths of a second may not seem like much, but if it puts you over that critical threshold, you’re handicapping your ability to convert your visitors and sending your bounce rate up. In the retail industry, decreasing your load time by just one tenth of a second can result in 8.4% increase in conversion rates! That’s HUGE! The same article states that that same .1 second decrease in load speed also yielded 9.2% increase in order size and page view per session by 8.6%
Things like image size and optimization, scripts and old code, fonts and icons, videos and hosting are the biggest culprits for bogging down load speed. We’ve got a write up on page speed optimization that includes 5 factors that could be bogging down your website that you should definitely check out.
Your title tag and meta description may be misleading
\n
In the age of click-bait articles, so many news outlets and blogs are using their title tag and meta description to get people to click through. But when it comes to reducing your bounce rate, relevance matters. You want your user to know in as few words as possible what the information they’re about to click through includes while still ensuring the description is as compelling as possible. A gifted copywriter will be able to assist with this.
For SEO purposes, make sure that your Title Tag is 60 characters or less (or that the most important information is included within those 60 characters) and that your Meta Description is 160 characters or less.
It should be a relevant description of what the user hopes to gain and the keyword that you’re optimizing that particular website page or blog for should be relevant to the topic you’re discussing. Oftentimes a local business makes an effort to optimize their website for a certain product type or service offering and includes that keyword in a blog title that may not be perfectly relevant for that topic.
When it comes to planning your content, it’s most important to offer valuable information without being misleading, spamming keywords or trying to weave in keywords that don’t entirely fit the topic of the blog post or website page.
Remember: Google is trying to deliver the most relevant information to help answer a user's question. The more you focus on the user, the better off you’ll be and the more people will engage with the content that you’re putting out, resulting in lower bounce rates.
Poor quality referrals
\n
Inbound links are a great way to get traffic to your site and increase your credibility with search engines - to a point. You want to make sure that you’re not just listing your business in any irrelevant directory that you can and that every inbound link actually makes sense for the types of people that you’re looking for.
What are good ways to get quality inbound links and referral traffic?
- \n
- Industry specific directories. Are there directories specifically for your industry and offerings? You should be there. As a HubSpot CMS Developer, we’ve become a HubSpot Partner and are now listed in their Partner Marketplace, which has actually been a source of a few great leads for us. Do some research on listings that are relevant to you and see if you can get listed there. It’s a simple and easy way to get qualified referral traffic sent to your site.
- Guest blogging for other websites is a great way to get relevant inbound links to your site. Align yourself with industries that you serve, other authorities in your space and create partnerships with businesses whose products and services cater to a similar audience.
- Keep writing original, quality content. Performing your own research can be a great way to get linked to or even just having original thoughts about problems that your prospects and customers relate to. Don’t underestimate the value of a quality content creator and strategist and NEVER use a bot or AI software to write your blog articles. Your content is the most important way to keep your visitors engaged and you want to make sure it holds plenty of value and thought leadership for web visitors. \n
For most businesses, the goal of your website is to attract visitors and keep them on your website until they make a conversion decision. If a poor design, low quality content, slow loading pages or other elements of your website are pushing them away before they take any desired actions, you need to take action to help keep them on your site and reduce your bounce rate. Installing a heat map software like HotJar is a great start. This will help you to understand what users are doing on your website, optimize the most common actions and eliminate any elements of your site that appear to be confusing to your website visitors.
Using a tool like HotJar in tandem with an experienced web developer will help you understand what actions can be taken to make your website more successful in converting your visitors and keeping them on your page for longer. An experienced website developer will know what features can be added and how to best shift elements around, change typography and best optimize UX to create a positive experience for your users.
What are some thing you've noticed about websites that have made you want to leave? You can even post a link with examples!
When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
\n\nYour bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that come to your website and take no other action before leaving. This is an indicator to search engines that the content they’ve clicked through isn’t valuable or relevant for what the user searched for, or your website isn’t the best source of information for that topic. This can happen for a number of reasons, but lowering that bounce rate is going to be really critical not only for search engine rankings but also to ensure you’re getting the most out of the traffic that you work so hard to funnel to your website to begin with.
\n\n
Why work on your bounce rate?
\n- \n
- The goal for more people is to have a large percentage of your website visitors taking an action on your website. \n
- One of the considerations for website rank by search engines is bounce rate. The lower your bounce rate, the better your potential to rank is. \n
Even the most savvy marketers can miss something when it comes to decreasing the bounce rate on their website. The intricacies of conversion can be a little daunting to master all at once, but with the right strategy, you can slowly bring down your website’s bounce rate.
Here are a few factors that contribute to an increased bounce rate on your website:
Not mobile-friendly
\nIt is very rare that you’ll encounter a web developer that doesn’t leverage mobile-first design. In the design of your website, you should make sure that your developer either asks for your mobile design or insists that they establish the mobile design prior to beginning the development of the website.
\n
Understanding how elements on the page will shift as the browser size changes is critical to creating a good user experience for your website visitors. If images don’t properly shift above or below the words they support or the navigation doesn’t translate in a logical way to a smaller mobile browser, you could risk losing visitors to confusing mobile and tablet views.
Not only should your website developer be looking over your mobile design first, but they should be making intuitive suggestions for search options, filtering and other expert tips to make sure your website translates well to browsers on mobile devices.
Related: HubSpot Developer Utopia - 7 Things to Expert When Developing a HubSpot CMS Website
\nPoorly Planned Design
\n
UX, font size, ugly color contrasts, menu navigation that is too clunky or not intuitive - all of these things contribute to a poor user interface, which can annihilate a bounce rate. It seems logical, but users (especially in the ADD on-demand world we live in today) want to find the information they’re looking for easily, without extra work and without hurting their eyes.
As a rule of thumb, if a user can’t locate the information they want within 4 seconds of clicking on a page, they’re probably leaving for the next source of information. This means that you have to have a simple and intuitive design, fast loading pages, colors that are complementary but not too contrasting and navigation that is easy to understand.
A list of common issues with poorly designed websites?
- \n
- Fonts that are too big or too small \n
- Glaringly contrasting colors that are hard to read or look at \n
- Pages that have too many elements loading at the same time and take longer than 4 seconds to load \n
- Large useless animations \n
- Music that doesn’t allow the user to control the volume or plays the moment a page is clicked \n
- Irrelevant, obnoxious images \n
- Too many ads or banners popping up \n
- Chat or opt-in boxes that are relentless \n
- Layouts that shift as you move down the page \n
Some developers created the Big Ugly Website to give you a hint for the types of things that turn off a user. It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often things like font size, color and poor layout are encountered by users.
\n\n
We could go on and on, but those are just a few of the things that can easily frustrate users from a design perspective. You’ll want to minimize or avoid these things entirely to make sure that your users are getting exactly what they are looking for when it comes to your products and services.
Your page loads too slowly
\n
We already discussed the 4 second rule, but there’s a lot more to page load speed than most realize. From your website host and server to excessive plugins, large images, scripts and other elements - every second matters. In fact, according to websitesetup.org: 7 out of 10 people say that the speed of a website page affects their desire to buy from an online retailer. Not only that, but websites that take 5 seconds to load have a 90% bounce rate!
Page load speed matters more than you realize. A few tenths of a second may not seem like much, but if it puts you over that critical threshold, you’re handicapping your ability to convert your visitors and sending your bounce rate up. In the retail industry, decreasing your load time by just one tenth of a second can result in 8.4% increase in conversion rates! That’s HUGE! The same article states that that same .1 second decrease in load speed also yielded 9.2% increase in order size and page view per session by 8.6%
Things like image size and optimization, scripts and old code, fonts and icons, videos and hosting are the biggest culprits for bogging down load speed. We’ve got a write up on page speed optimization that includes 5 factors that could be bogging down your website that you should definitely check out.
Your title tag and meta description may be misleading
\n
In the age of click-bait articles, so many news outlets and blogs are using their title tag and meta description to get people to click through. But when it comes to reducing your bounce rate, relevance matters. You want your user to know in as few words as possible what the information they’re about to click through includes while still ensuring the description is as compelling as possible. A gifted copywriter will be able to assist with this.
For SEO purposes, make sure that your Title Tag is 60 characters or less (or that the most important information is included within those 60 characters) and that your Meta Description is 160 characters or less.
It should be a relevant description of what the user hopes to gain and the keyword that you’re optimizing that particular website page or blog for should be relevant to the topic you’re discussing. Oftentimes a local business makes an effort to optimize their website for a certain product type or service offering and includes that keyword in a blog title that may not be perfectly relevant for that topic.
When it comes to planning your content, it’s most important to offer valuable information without being misleading, spamming keywords or trying to weave in keywords that don’t entirely fit the topic of the blog post or website page.
Remember: Google is trying to deliver the most relevant information to help answer a user's question. The more you focus on the user, the better off you’ll be and the more people will engage with the content that you’re putting out, resulting in lower bounce rates.
Poor quality referrals
\n
Inbound links are a great way to get traffic to your site and increase your credibility with search engines - to a point. You want to make sure that you’re not just listing your business in any irrelevant directory that you can and that every inbound link actually makes sense for the types of people that you’re looking for.
What are good ways to get quality inbound links and referral traffic?
- \n
- Industry specific directories. Are there directories specifically for your industry and offerings? You should be there. As a HubSpot CMS Developer, we’ve become a HubSpot Partner and are now listed in their Partner Marketplace, which has actually been a source of a few great leads for us. Do some research on listings that are relevant to you and see if you can get listed there. It’s a simple and easy way to get qualified referral traffic sent to your site.
- Guest blogging for other websites is a great way to get relevant inbound links to your site. Align yourself with industries that you serve, other authorities in your space and create partnerships with businesses whose products and services cater to a similar audience.
- Keep writing original, quality content. Performing your own research can be a great way to get linked to or even just having original thoughts about problems that your prospects and customers relate to. Don’t underestimate the value of a quality content creator and strategist and NEVER use a bot or AI software to write your blog articles. Your content is the most important way to keep your visitors engaged and you want to make sure it holds plenty of value and thought leadership for web visitors. \n
For most businesses, the goal of your website is to attract visitors and keep them on your website until they make a conversion decision. If a poor design, low quality content, slow loading pages or other elements of your website are pushing them away before they take any desired actions, you need to take action to help keep them on your site and reduce your bounce rate. Installing a heat map software like HotJar is a great start. This will help you to understand what users are doing on your website, optimize the most common actions and eliminate any elements of your site that appear to be confusing to your website visitors.
Using a tool like HotJar in tandem with an experienced web developer will help you understand what actions can be taken to make your website more successful in converting your visitors and keeping them on your page for longer. An experienced website developer will know what features can be added and how to best shift elements around, change typography and best optimize UX to create a positive experience for your users.
What are some thing you've noticed about websites that have made you want to leave? You can even post a link with examples!
When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
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\n\nYour bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that come to your website and take no other action before leaving. This is an indicator to search engines that the content they’ve clicked through isn’t valuable or relevant for what the user searched for, or your website isn’t the best source of information for that topic. This can happen for a number of reasons, but lowering that bounce rate is going to be really critical not only for search engine rankings but also to ensure you’re getting the most out of the traffic that you work so hard to funnel to your website to begin with.
\n\n
Why work on your bounce rate?
\n- \n
- The goal for more people is to have a large percentage of your website visitors taking an action on your website. \n
- One of the considerations for website rank by search engines is bounce rate. The lower your bounce rate, the better your potential to rank is. \n
Even the most savvy marketers can miss something when it comes to decreasing the bounce rate on their website. The intricacies of conversion can be a little daunting to master all at once, but with the right strategy, you can slowly bring down your website’s bounce rate.
Here are a few factors that contribute to an increased bounce rate on your website:
Not mobile-friendly
\nIt is very rare that you’ll encounter a web developer that doesn’t leverage mobile-first design. In the design of your website, you should make sure that your developer either asks for your mobile design or insists that they establish the mobile design prior to beginning the development of the website.
\n
Understanding how elements on the page will shift as the browser size changes is critical to creating a good user experience for your website visitors. If images don’t properly shift above or below the words they support or the navigation doesn’t translate in a logical way to a smaller mobile browser, you could risk losing visitors to confusing mobile and tablet views.
Not only should your website developer be looking over your mobile design first, but they should be making intuitive suggestions for search options, filtering and other expert tips to make sure your website translates well to browsers on mobile devices.
Related: HubSpot Developer Utopia - 7 Things to Expert When Developing a HubSpot CMS Website
\nPoorly Planned Design
\n
UX, font size, ugly color contrasts, menu navigation that is too clunky or not intuitive - all of these things contribute to a poor user interface, which can annihilate a bounce rate. It seems logical, but users (especially in the ADD on-demand world we live in today) want to find the information they’re looking for easily, without extra work and without hurting their eyes.
As a rule of thumb, if a user can’t locate the information they want within 4 seconds of clicking on a page, they’re probably leaving for the next source of information. This means that you have to have a simple and intuitive design, fast loading pages, colors that are complementary but not too contrasting and navigation that is easy to understand.
A list of common issues with poorly designed websites?
- \n
- Fonts that are too big or too small \n
- Glaringly contrasting colors that are hard to read or look at \n
- Pages that have too many elements loading at the same time and take longer than 4 seconds to load \n
- Large useless animations \n
- Music that doesn’t allow the user to control the volume or plays the moment a page is clicked \n
- Irrelevant, obnoxious images \n
- Too many ads or banners popping up \n
- Chat or opt-in boxes that are relentless \n
- Layouts that shift as you move down the page \n
Some developers created the Big Ugly Website to give you a hint for the types of things that turn off a user. It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often things like font size, color and poor layout are encountered by users.
\n\n
We could go on and on, but those are just a few of the things that can easily frustrate users from a design perspective. You’ll want to minimize or avoid these things entirely to make sure that your users are getting exactly what they are looking for when it comes to your products and services.
Your page loads too slowly
\n
We already discussed the 4 second rule, but there’s a lot more to page load speed than most realize. From your website host and server to excessive plugins, large images, scripts and other elements - every second matters. In fact, according to websitesetup.org: 7 out of 10 people say that the speed of a website page affects their desire to buy from an online retailer. Not only that, but websites that take 5 seconds to load have a 90% bounce rate!
Page load speed matters more than you realize. A few tenths of a second may not seem like much, but if it puts you over that critical threshold, you’re handicapping your ability to convert your visitors and sending your bounce rate up. In the retail industry, decreasing your load time by just one tenth of a second can result in 8.4% increase in conversion rates! That’s HUGE! The same article states that that same .1 second decrease in load speed also yielded 9.2% increase in order size and page view per session by 8.6%
Things like image size and optimization, scripts and old code, fonts and icons, videos and hosting are the biggest culprits for bogging down load speed. We’ve got a write up on page speed optimization that includes 5 factors that could be bogging down your website that you should definitely check out.
Your title tag and meta description may be misleading
\n
In the age of click-bait articles, so many news outlets and blogs are using their title tag and meta description to get people to click through. But when it comes to reducing your bounce rate, relevance matters. You want your user to know in as few words as possible what the information they’re about to click through includes while still ensuring the description is as compelling as possible. A gifted copywriter will be able to assist with this.
For SEO purposes, make sure that your Title Tag is 60 characters or less (or that the most important information is included within those 60 characters) and that your Meta Description is 160 characters or less.
It should be a relevant description of what the user hopes to gain and the keyword that you’re optimizing that particular website page or blog for should be relevant to the topic you’re discussing. Oftentimes a local business makes an effort to optimize their website for a certain product type or service offering and includes that keyword in a blog title that may not be perfectly relevant for that topic.
When it comes to planning your content, it’s most important to offer valuable information without being misleading, spamming keywords or trying to weave in keywords that don’t entirely fit the topic of the blog post or website page.
Remember: Google is trying to deliver the most relevant information to help answer a user's question. The more you focus on the user, the better off you’ll be and the more people will engage with the content that you’re putting out, resulting in lower bounce rates.
Poor quality referrals
\n
Inbound links are a great way to get traffic to your site and increase your credibility with search engines - to a point. You want to make sure that you’re not just listing your business in any irrelevant directory that you can and that every inbound link actually makes sense for the types of people that you’re looking for.
What are good ways to get quality inbound links and referral traffic?
- \n
- Industry specific directories. Are there directories specifically for your industry and offerings? You should be there. As a HubSpot CMS Developer, we’ve become a HubSpot Partner and are now listed in their Partner Marketplace, which has actually been a source of a few great leads for us. Do some research on listings that are relevant to you and see if you can get listed there. It’s a simple and easy way to get qualified referral traffic sent to your site.
- Guest blogging for other websites is a great way to get relevant inbound links to your site. Align yourself with industries that you serve, other authorities in your space and create partnerships with businesses whose products and services cater to a similar audience.
- Keep writing original, quality content. Performing your own research can be a great way to get linked to or even just having original thoughts about problems that your prospects and customers relate to. Don’t underestimate the value of a quality content creator and strategist and NEVER use a bot or AI software to write your blog articles. Your content is the most important way to keep your visitors engaged and you want to make sure it holds plenty of value and thought leadership for web visitors. \n
For most businesses, the goal of your website is to attract visitors and keep them on your website until they make a conversion decision. If a poor design, low quality content, slow loading pages or other elements of your website are pushing them away before they take any desired actions, you need to take action to help keep them on your site and reduce your bounce rate. Installing a heat map software like HotJar is a great start. This will help you to understand what users are doing on your website, optimize the most common actions and eliminate any elements of your site that appear to be confusing to your website visitors.
Using a tool like HotJar in tandem with an experienced web developer will help you understand what actions can be taken to make your website more successful in converting your visitors and keeping them on your page for longer. An experienced website developer will know what features can be added and how to best shift elements around, change typography and best optimize UX to create a positive experience for your users.
What are some thing you've noticed about websites that have made you want to leave? You can even post a link with examples!
When it comes to the psychology of buying decisions, so many tiny elements that you may not even realize are contributing to whether or not a user makes a conversion action on your website. There are technical elements, psychological elements, aesthetic elements and other aspects of your website that are all either coming together to help a prospect make the decision you want, or pushing them away. Marketers spend years mastering content marketing, technical SEO, and consulting with web development professionals on UX issues to make sure that the conditions are perfect when a prospect arrives on their website - only to be stumped when their bounce rate goes over 60%.
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Quality Assurance: You Need QA in HubSpot CMS Development","id":81427894392,"includeDefaultCustomCss":null,"isCaptchaRequired":true,"isCrawlableByBots":false,"isDraft":false,"isInstanceLayoutPage":false,"isInstantEmailEnabled":false,"isPublished":true,"isSocialPublishingEnabled":false,"keywords":[],"label":"Website Quality Assurance: You Need QA in HubSpot CMS Development","language":"en","lastEditSessionId":null,"lastEditUpdateId":null,"layoutSections":{},"legacyBlogTabid":null,"legacyId":null,"legacyPostGuid":null,"linkRelCanonicalUrl":"","listTemplate":"","liveDomain":"deckerdevs.com","mab":false,"mabExperimentId":null,"mabMaster":false,"mabVariant":false,"meta":{"html_title":"Website Quality Assurance: You Need QA in HubSpot CMS Development","public_access_rules":[],"public_access_rules_enabled":false,"enable_google_amp_output_override":false,"generate_json_ld_enabled":true,"composition_id":0,"is_crawlable_by_bots":false,"use_featured_image":true,"post_body":"We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
![\"hs](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/hs%20partners.svg\")
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
The client should focus on what’s important
\n
If the client has provided an expected, finalized and approved design, they’ll be looking to test and approve a draft that looks very similar if not identical to that design. They will not want to handle major bugs, formatting issues, questions of inconsistencies in browser compatibility and other aesthetic issues.
If you’re working with a one-man development team, it’s very difficult for them to objectively look at work and see it from any other angle. It’s likely that if this is the case, you’re gonna need external departments or others (hopefully not the client) to look it over objectively. Allowing a single developer to complete a project and turn it directly over to the client is basically asking your client to complete quality assurance for you. A very good developer may be able to catch an issue or two, but you’ll always want to have a separate, skilled person that understands how to properly test a website for bugs, browser compatibility issues and other problems.
Once your development team finishes a round of edits or the initial design template, you’ll want to have your internal team take a close look at what they’ve built. Working within the template build to find usability issues, bugs and any other glitches is important. Your project management staff or quality assurance staff (if you’re lucky enough to have them) can review all of these items before the design is handed off to the client.
You should have a comprehensive list of QA items for them to review and some sort of tool that allows for collaboration and feedback. Our team uses Pastel. Pastel is a great tool because it allows for internal and external collaboration, hidden comments, status updates and more. You can do QA on PDF, JPEG and live website pages. The team at Pastel is very passionate about making improvements and they particularly enjoy working with agencies. (No, we aren’t paid to say that, we just think they’re really awesome.) You can snag a free trial to test it out.
It'll shorten the development process
\n
Who doesn’t love scope creep?
Just kidding. Everyone hates scope creep.
It can be an inevitable and sometimes unavoidable evil in the industry of marketing services delivery and website development, but implementing a really good quality assurance process can go a long way to avoiding scope creep. When you deliver a draft website to a client or when you receive a draft website as a client, you’ll want to make sure it’s as close to the design as possible. We’ve heard the statement before, “The CEO just can’t get past the formatting issue to proof the copy” or “These images aren’t what we want” - it is sometimes difficult when a website is still in draft mode to envision that end product when all that the client wants to see is the perfect iteration of the original design document. ![\"deckerdevs-mobile](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/deckerdevs-mobile%20optimization-1.svg\")
Delivering a draft that is as close to complete as possible will allow the client to to focus on the elements they need to focus on - like core functionality, adding or delivering the correct images and copy and providing the important feedback and envisioning how the design is working well for both internal marketers and the prospects and leads that will find themselves on the website. The more they can focus on these items, the more “wish list” items they may compile, which provides strong support for them leveraging growth driven design (more on that later).
\n
\n
It puts more eyes on the work
\n
Developers have very different brains.
Believe us when we say that it requires a special kind of nerd to have a passion to create something by staring at tiny lines of code all day. We’re very good at what we do, but we don’t necessarily have marketer brains. Placing a project manager, quality assurance specialist or marketer in the middle of a project before it is sent over for review is critical. They’ll ask important questions, play with modules until they can break them, and identify issues that the development team may not see.
By having a centralized spreadsheet or piece of software that manages these edits, you can eliminate a large portion of feedback and make things easier for both the developer and the client. The more people that see the initial draft prior to it being delivered to the client, the more issues can be weeded out in advance.
It keeps edits in a central location and makes teams more productive
\n
Using a software or spreadsheet to manage the quality assurance process keeps everything centralized and helps avoid the issue of project managers or developers wasting time threading through a 75 e-mail string to find the feedback they need. This also allows multiple people to submit feedback without it becoming overwhelming. We do request in most cases that there be a single “final answer, Regis” contact to provide the edits so we can make sure we have the right information to execute edits and complete changes.
It reduces post-launch feedback
\n
Once a website is completed, we’re ready to jump into the next project. We often encounter “wish list” items that pop up during development that we categorize as pre-launch or post-launch. Post-launch work allows us to develop the bells and whistles for a client that they find are “nice to have” items after the initial website build has been completed.
If we’re stuck in an endless round of edits because of lacking quality assurance testing, it can not only take a lot longer to get to those wish list items, but frustration can build if client expectations are not managed properly and a developer might risk losing a relationship with the client.
We’d much rather move our clients into growth-driven design to accommodate all their projects after launch or a short term development retainer to get some of those wish list items completed.
Website projects can be cumbersome for a small business. Often they’re only looking at their website every 3-5 years for a redesign. While we as HubSpot development partners are working slowly to show businesses that a long term relationship with a development partner that makes small changes over time (check out why continuous improvement is the best model for your website) is ideal, it will take time for the world to catch up. In the meantime, a comprehensive quality assurance process will help avoid development headaches for everyone involved.
Work on implementing a comprehensive quality assurance process with your development team to ensure that projects launch on time and everyone is as happy with the process as they are with the final project.
","rss_summary":"
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
The client should focus on what’s important
\n
If the client has provided an expected, finalized and approved design, they’ll be looking to test and approve a draft that looks very similar if not identical to that design. They will not want to handle major bugs, formatting issues, questions of inconsistencies in browser compatibility and other aesthetic issues.
If you’re working with a one-man development team, it’s very difficult for them to objectively look at work and see it from any other angle. It’s likely that if this is the case, you’re gonna need external departments or others (hopefully not the client) to look it over objectively. Allowing a single developer to complete a project and turn it directly over to the client is basically asking your client to complete quality assurance for you. A very good developer may be able to catch an issue or two, but you’ll always want to have a separate, skilled person that understands how to properly test a website for bugs, browser compatibility issues and other problems.
Once your development team finishes a round of edits or the initial design template, you’ll want to have your internal team take a close look at what they’ve built. Working within the template build to find usability issues, bugs and any other glitches is important. Your project management staff or quality assurance staff (if you’re lucky enough to have them) can review all of these items before the design is handed off to the client.
You should have a comprehensive list of QA items for them to review and some sort of tool that allows for collaboration and feedback. Our team uses Pastel. Pastel is a great tool because it allows for internal and external collaboration, hidden comments, status updates and more. You can do QA on PDF, JPEG and live website pages. The team at Pastel is very passionate about making improvements and they particularly enjoy working with agencies. (No, we aren’t paid to say that, we just think they’re really awesome.) You can snag a free trial to test it out.
It'll shorten the development process
\n
Who doesn’t love scope creep?
Just kidding. Everyone hates scope creep.
It can be an inevitable and sometimes unavoidable evil in the industry of marketing services delivery and website development, but implementing a really good quality assurance process can go a long way to avoiding scope creep. When you deliver a draft website to a client or when you receive a draft website as a client, you’ll want to make sure it’s as close to the design as possible. We’ve heard the statement before, “The CEO just can’t get past the formatting issue to proof the copy” or “These images aren’t what we want” - it is sometimes difficult when a website is still in draft mode to envision that end product when all that the client wants to see is the perfect iteration of the original design document. Delivering a draft that is as close to complete as possible will allow the client to to focus on the elements they need to focus on - like core functionality, adding or delivering the correct images and copy and providing the important feedback and envisioning how the design is working well for both internal marketers and the prospects and leads that will find themselves on the website. The more they can focus on these items, the more “wish list” items they may compile, which provides strong support for them leveraging growth driven design (more on that later).
\n
\n
It puts more eyes on the work
\n
Developers have very different brains.
Believe us when we say that it requires a special kind of nerd to have a passion to create something by staring at tiny lines of code all day. We’re very good at what we do, but we don’t necessarily have marketer brains. Placing a project manager, quality assurance specialist or marketer in the middle of a project before it is sent over for review is critical. They’ll ask important questions, play with modules until they can break them, and identify issues that the development team may not see.
By having a centralized spreadsheet or piece of software that manages these edits, you can eliminate a large portion of feedback and make things easier for both the developer and the client. The more people that see the initial draft prior to it being delivered to the client, the more issues can be weeded out in advance.
It keeps edits in a central location and makes teams more productive
\n
Using a software or spreadsheet to manage the quality assurance process keeps everything centralized and helps avoid the issue of project managers or developers wasting time threading through a 75 e-mail string to find the feedback they need. This also allows multiple people to submit feedback without it becoming overwhelming. We do request in most cases that there be a single “final answer, Regis” contact to provide the edits so we can make sure we have the right information to execute edits and complete changes.
It reduces post-launch feedback
\n
Once a website is completed, we’re ready to jump into the next project. We often encounter “wish list” items that pop up during development that we categorize as pre-launch or post-launch. Post-launch work allows us to develop the bells and whistles for a client that they find are “nice to have” items after the initial website build has been completed.
If we’re stuck in an endless round of edits because of lacking quality assurance testing, it can not only take a lot longer to get to those wish list items, but frustration can build if client expectations are not managed properly and a developer might risk losing a relationship with the client.
We’d much rather move our clients into growth-driven design to accommodate all their projects after launch or a short term development retainer to get some of those wish list items completed.
Website projects can be cumbersome for a small business. Often they’re only looking at their website every 3-5 years for a redesign. While we as HubSpot development partners are working slowly to show businesses that a long term relationship with a development partner that makes small changes over time (check out why continuous improvement is the best model for your website) is ideal, it will take time for the world to catch up. In the meantime, a comprehensive quality assurance process will help avoid development headaches for everyone involved.
Work on implementing a comprehensive quality assurance process with your development team to ensure that projects launch on time and everyone is as happy with the process as they are with the final project.
","tag_ids":[62770442823,78562833827,81427988387],"topic_ids":[62770442823,78562833827,81427988387],"post_summary":"
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
The client should focus on what’s important
\n
If the client has provided an expected, finalized and approved design, they’ll be looking to test and approve a draft that looks very similar if not identical to that design. They will not want to handle major bugs, formatting issues, questions of inconsistencies in browser compatibility and other aesthetic issues.
If you’re working with a one-man development team, it’s very difficult for them to objectively look at work and see it from any other angle. It’s likely that if this is the case, you’re gonna need external departments or others (hopefully not the client) to look it over objectively. Allowing a single developer to complete a project and turn it directly over to the client is basically asking your client to complete quality assurance for you. A very good developer may be able to catch an issue or two, but you’ll always want to have a separate, skilled person that understands how to properly test a website for bugs, browser compatibility issues and other problems.
Once your development team finishes a round of edits or the initial design template, you’ll want to have your internal team take a close look at what they’ve built. Working within the template build to find usability issues, bugs and any other glitches is important. Your project management staff or quality assurance staff (if you’re lucky enough to have them) can review all of these items before the design is handed off to the client.
You should have a comprehensive list of QA items for them to review and some sort of tool that allows for collaboration and feedback. Our team uses Pastel. Pastel is a great tool because it allows for internal and external collaboration, hidden comments, status updates and more. You can do QA on PDF, JPEG and live website pages. The team at Pastel is very passionate about making improvements and they particularly enjoy working with agencies. (No, we aren’t paid to say that, we just think they’re really awesome.) You can snag a free trial to test it out.
It'll shorten the development process
\n
Who doesn’t love scope creep?
Just kidding. Everyone hates scope creep.
It can be an inevitable and sometimes unavoidable evil in the industry of marketing services delivery and website development, but implementing a really good quality assurance process can go a long way to avoiding scope creep. When you deliver a draft website to a client or when you receive a draft website as a client, you’ll want to make sure it’s as close to the design as possible. We’ve heard the statement before, “The CEO just can’t get past the formatting issue to proof the copy” or “These images aren’t what we want” - it is sometimes difficult when a website is still in draft mode to envision that end product when all that the client wants to see is the perfect iteration of the original design document. Delivering a draft that is as close to complete as possible will allow the client to to focus on the elements they need to focus on - like core functionality, adding or delivering the correct images and copy and providing the important feedback and envisioning how the design is working well for both internal marketers and the prospects and leads that will find themselves on the website. The more they can focus on these items, the more “wish list” items they may compile, which provides strong support for them leveraging growth driven design (more on that later).
\n
\n
It puts more eyes on the work
\n
Developers have very different brains.
Believe us when we say that it requires a special kind of nerd to have a passion to create something by staring at tiny lines of code all day. We’re very good at what we do, but we don’t necessarily have marketer brains. Placing a project manager, quality assurance specialist or marketer in the middle of a project before it is sent over for review is critical. They’ll ask important questions, play with modules until they can break them, and identify issues that the development team may not see.
By having a centralized spreadsheet or piece of software that manages these edits, you can eliminate a large portion of feedback and make things easier for both the developer and the client. The more people that see the initial draft prior to it being delivered to the client, the more issues can be weeded out in advance.
It keeps edits in a central location and makes teams more productive
\n
Using a software or spreadsheet to manage the quality assurance process keeps everything centralized and helps avoid the issue of project managers or developers wasting time threading through a 75 e-mail string to find the feedback they need. This also allows multiple people to submit feedback without it becoming overwhelming. We do request in most cases that there be a single “final answer, Regis” contact to provide the edits so we can make sure we have the right information to execute edits and complete changes.
It reduces post-launch feedback
\n
Once a website is completed, we’re ready to jump into the next project. We often encounter “wish list” items that pop up during development that we categorize as pre-launch or post-launch. Post-launch work allows us to develop the bells and whistles for a client that they find are “nice to have” items after the initial website build has been completed.
If we’re stuck in an endless round of edits because of lacking quality assurance testing, it can not only take a lot longer to get to those wish list items, but frustration can build if client expectations are not managed properly and a developer might risk losing a relationship with the client.
We’d much rather move our clients into growth-driven design to accommodate all their projects after launch or a short term development retainer to get some of those wish list items completed.
Website projects can be cumbersome for a small business. Often they’re only looking at their website every 3-5 years for a redesign. While we as HubSpot development partners are working slowly to show businesses that a long term relationship with a development partner that makes small changes over time (check out why continuous improvement is the best model for your website) is ideal, it will take time for the world to catch up. In the meantime, a comprehensive quality assurance process will help avoid development headaches for everyone involved.
Work on implementing a comprehensive quality assurance process with your development team to ensure that projects launch on time and everyone is as happy with the process as they are with the final project.
","postBodyRss":"
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
The client should focus on what’s important
\n
If the client has provided an expected, finalized and approved design, they’ll be looking to test and approve a draft that looks very similar if not identical to that design. They will not want to handle major bugs, formatting issues, questions of inconsistencies in browser compatibility and other aesthetic issues.
If you’re working with a one-man development team, it’s very difficult for them to objectively look at work and see it from any other angle. It’s likely that if this is the case, you’re gonna need external departments or others (hopefully not the client) to look it over objectively. Allowing a single developer to complete a project and turn it directly over to the client is basically asking your client to complete quality assurance for you. A very good developer may be able to catch an issue or two, but you’ll always want to have a separate, skilled person that understands how to properly test a website for bugs, browser compatibility issues and other problems.
Once your development team finishes a round of edits or the initial design template, you’ll want to have your internal team take a close look at what they’ve built. Working within the template build to find usability issues, bugs and any other glitches is important. Your project management staff or quality assurance staff (if you’re lucky enough to have them) can review all of these items before the design is handed off to the client.
You should have a comprehensive list of QA items for them to review and some sort of tool that allows for collaboration and feedback. Our team uses Pastel. Pastel is a great tool because it allows for internal and external collaboration, hidden comments, status updates and more. You can do QA on PDF, JPEG and live website pages. The team at Pastel is very passionate about making improvements and they particularly enjoy working with agencies. (No, we aren’t paid to say that, we just think they’re really awesome.) You can snag a free trial to test it out.
It'll shorten the development process
\n
Who doesn’t love scope creep?
Just kidding. Everyone hates scope creep.
It can be an inevitable and sometimes unavoidable evil in the industry of marketing services delivery and website development, but implementing a really good quality assurance process can go a long way to avoiding scope creep. When you deliver a draft website to a client or when you receive a draft website as a client, you’ll want to make sure it’s as close to the design as possible. We’ve heard the statement before, “The CEO just can’t get past the formatting issue to proof the copy” or “These images aren’t what we want” - it is sometimes difficult when a website is still in draft mode to envision that end product when all that the client wants to see is the perfect iteration of the original design document. Delivering a draft that is as close to complete as possible will allow the client to to focus on the elements they need to focus on - like core functionality, adding or delivering the correct images and copy and providing the important feedback and envisioning how the design is working well for both internal marketers and the prospects and leads that will find themselves on the website. The more they can focus on these items, the more “wish list” items they may compile, which provides strong support for them leveraging growth driven design (more on that later).
\n
\n
It puts more eyes on the work
\n
Developers have very different brains.
Believe us when we say that it requires a special kind of nerd to have a passion to create something by staring at tiny lines of code all day. We’re very good at what we do, but we don’t necessarily have marketer brains. Placing a project manager, quality assurance specialist or marketer in the middle of a project before it is sent over for review is critical. They’ll ask important questions, play with modules until they can break them, and identify issues that the development team may not see.
By having a centralized spreadsheet or piece of software that manages these edits, you can eliminate a large portion of feedback and make things easier for both the developer and the client. The more people that see the initial draft prior to it being delivered to the client, the more issues can be weeded out in advance.
It keeps edits in a central location and makes teams more productive
\n
Using a software or spreadsheet to manage the quality assurance process keeps everything centralized and helps avoid the issue of project managers or developers wasting time threading through a 75 e-mail string to find the feedback they need. This also allows multiple people to submit feedback without it becoming overwhelming. We do request in most cases that there be a single “final answer, Regis” contact to provide the edits so we can make sure we have the right information to execute edits and complete changes.
It reduces post-launch feedback
\n
Once a website is completed, we’re ready to jump into the next project. We often encounter “wish list” items that pop up during development that we categorize as pre-launch or post-launch. Post-launch work allows us to develop the bells and whistles for a client that they find are “nice to have” items after the initial website build has been completed.
If we’re stuck in an endless round of edits because of lacking quality assurance testing, it can not only take a lot longer to get to those wish list items, but frustration can build if client expectations are not managed properly and a developer might risk losing a relationship with the client.
We’d much rather move our clients into growth-driven design to accommodate all their projects after launch or a short term development retainer to get some of those wish list items completed.
Website projects can be cumbersome for a small business. Often they’re only looking at their website every 3-5 years for a redesign. While we as HubSpot development partners are working slowly to show businesses that a long term relationship with a development partner that makes small changes over time (check out why continuous improvement is the best model for your website) is ideal, it will take time for the world to catch up. In the meantime, a comprehensive quality assurance process will help avoid development headaches for everyone involved.
Work on implementing a comprehensive quality assurance process with your development team to ensure that projects launch on time and everyone is as happy with the process as they are with the final project.
","postEmailContent":"
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
The client should focus on what’s important
\n
If the client has provided an expected, finalized and approved design, they’ll be looking to test and approve a draft that looks very similar if not identical to that design. They will not want to handle major bugs, formatting issues, questions of inconsistencies in browser compatibility and other aesthetic issues.
If you’re working with a one-man development team, it’s very difficult for them to objectively look at work and see it from any other angle. It’s likely that if this is the case, you’re gonna need external departments or others (hopefully not the client) to look it over objectively. Allowing a single developer to complete a project and turn it directly over to the client is basically asking your client to complete quality assurance for you. A very good developer may be able to catch an issue or two, but you’ll always want to have a separate, skilled person that understands how to properly test a website for bugs, browser compatibility issues and other problems.
Once your development team finishes a round of edits or the initial design template, you’ll want to have your internal team take a close look at what they’ve built. Working within the template build to find usability issues, bugs and any other glitches is important. Your project management staff or quality assurance staff (if you’re lucky enough to have them) can review all of these items before the design is handed off to the client.
You should have a comprehensive list of QA items for them to review and some sort of tool that allows for collaboration and feedback. Our team uses Pastel. Pastel is a great tool because it allows for internal and external collaboration, hidden comments, status updates and more. You can do QA on PDF, JPEG and live website pages. The team at Pastel is very passionate about making improvements and they particularly enjoy working with agencies. (No, we aren’t paid to say that, we just think they’re really awesome.) You can snag a free trial to test it out.
It'll shorten the development process
\n
Who doesn’t love scope creep?
Just kidding. Everyone hates scope creep.
It can be an inevitable and sometimes unavoidable evil in the industry of marketing services delivery and website development, but implementing a really good quality assurance process can go a long way to avoiding scope creep. When you deliver a draft website to a client or when you receive a draft website as a client, you’ll want to make sure it’s as close to the design as possible. We’ve heard the statement before, “The CEO just can’t get past the formatting issue to proof the copy” or “These images aren’t what we want” - it is sometimes difficult when a website is still in draft mode to envision that end product when all that the client wants to see is the perfect iteration of the original design document. Delivering a draft that is as close to complete as possible will allow the client to to focus on the elements they need to focus on - like core functionality, adding or delivering the correct images and copy and providing the important feedback and envisioning how the design is working well for both internal marketers and the prospects and leads that will find themselves on the website. The more they can focus on these items, the more “wish list” items they may compile, which provides strong support for them leveraging growth driven design (more on that later).
\n
\n
It puts more eyes on the work
\n
Developers have very different brains.
Believe us when we say that it requires a special kind of nerd to have a passion to create something by staring at tiny lines of code all day. We’re very good at what we do, but we don’t necessarily have marketer brains. Placing a project manager, quality assurance specialist or marketer in the middle of a project before it is sent over for review is critical. They’ll ask important questions, play with modules until they can break them, and identify issues that the development team may not see.
By having a centralized spreadsheet or piece of software that manages these edits, you can eliminate a large portion of feedback and make things easier for both the developer and the client. The more people that see the initial draft prior to it being delivered to the client, the more issues can be weeded out in advance.
It keeps edits in a central location and makes teams more productive
\n
Using a software or spreadsheet to manage the quality assurance process keeps everything centralized and helps avoid the issue of project managers or developers wasting time threading through a 75 e-mail string to find the feedback they need. This also allows multiple people to submit feedback without it becoming overwhelming. We do request in most cases that there be a single “final answer, Regis” contact to provide the edits so we can make sure we have the right information to execute edits and complete changes.
It reduces post-launch feedback
\n
Once a website is completed, we’re ready to jump into the next project. We often encounter “wish list” items that pop up during development that we categorize as pre-launch or post-launch. Post-launch work allows us to develop the bells and whistles for a client that they find are “nice to have” items after the initial website build has been completed.
If we’re stuck in an endless round of edits because of lacking quality assurance testing, it can not only take a lot longer to get to those wish list items, but frustration can build if client expectations are not managed properly and a developer might risk losing a relationship with the client.
We’d much rather move our clients into growth-driven design to accommodate all their projects after launch or a short term development retainer to get some of those wish list items completed.
Website projects can be cumbersome for a small business. Often they’re only looking at their website every 3-5 years for a redesign. While we as HubSpot development partners are working slowly to show businesses that a long term relationship with a development partner that makes small changes over time (check out why continuous improvement is the best model for your website) is ideal, it will take time for the world to catch up. In the meantime, a comprehensive quality assurance process will help avoid development headaches for everyone involved.
Work on implementing a comprehensive quality assurance process with your development team to ensure that projects launch on time and everyone is as happy with the process as they are with the final project.
","rssSummary":"
We hear it all the time from our agency clients, “We said we weren’t going to do website projects any more, and then we took this one on - and it’s been a nightmare!”
\n\n
Most people don’t realize that we are a specialized HubSpot Partner that focuses almost exclusively on HubSpot CMS Development. The majority of our client list are HubSpot Partners. We are often referred work by some of the top development agencies and have a lot of experience in implementing website designs in HubSpot CMS and taking them live.
We were surprised to find in a recent prospect call that not all specialized HubSpot development agencies have a comprehensive internal quality assurance process. Website quality assurance is an internal review of an unpublished website for bugs, formatting issues, browser compatibility, and more. The internal review allows for a certain amount of quality control prior to reaching the client. Issues that we’ve discovered in quality assurance testing can be minor things like responsiveness bugs, incorrect fonts, forms not redirecting properly, or small design issues that are inconsistent with the provided design. Completing QA prior to client review is really important, as it not only solidifies your credibility, but builds client confidence as you move along in the development process.
Here are just a few reasons that you want to make sure to include comprehensive website quality assurance testing in your next HubSpot CMS development project:
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
You get what you pay for
\n
One of the best things about WordPress is that it’s free. You pay for your themes and plugins and the developers who created them usually provide support, or you can hire a web developer if you need either more support or ongoing development expertise. However, that can come at a cost. Security issues, plugins not functioning as you’d hoped, and your website loading more slowly because of so many plugins are just a few common issues with WordPress.
Keep in mind that if you want a robust solution, you’re going to have to fork out a little cash. Committing an investment to HubSpot CMS might mean paying a monthly or annual fee, but it’ll give you a lot more capabilities out of the box without the additional frustration.
HubSpot support is super helpful and not outsourced, so you’re speaking to humans who really understand the platform. Not to mention, there’s an entire fully vetted and trained developer ecosystem with vendors who are crazy experienced and not even a little bit sketchy.
You’re using a ton of different tools to execute on your digital marketing
\n
Versatility used to be what WordPress was known for, but as the number of plugins and developers creating them increases, growing businesses need a less complicated solution. WordPress, as a free CMS with some paid plugins and themes, is a great foundation for a new small business, but once a business starts to move in the direction of lead generation, its needs become more complex.
Now that HubSpot has launched a free version of their CMS, B2B demand generation for startups has become simpler, which is definitely a consideration for those who might’ve gone straight to WordPress in the past. HubSpot CMS Hub Free is HubSpot’s introductory CMS package. It includes premium hosting on HubSpot, the option to build a from-scratch website (with forms, live chat, landing pages, and a blog), and its free CRM platform. This is a perfect option for small businesses that cannot afford HubSpot quite yet, but want to dig into its tools and build a website that creates awareness and builds their brand. It does have a few limitations, however:
- \n
- Limited to 25 website pages \n
- Limited to one blog with 100 posts \n
- No ability to modify system pages \n
- HubSpot branding on website pages, blog posts and landing pages \n
While it might not be for everyone, it gives startups a powerful, free, and simple way to get their brand off the ground. A perfect example is this super basic website we stood up in only three hours using HubSpot CMS Free.
Many growing businesses operating with a WordPress website end up paying a premium for a form manager, SEO plugin, analytics tool, CRM, email marketing platform, and automation solution. All of these different tools not only don’t speak to one another (unless you pay for another integration tool to centralize them), but your marketing team has to login to every single platform to manage information and execute your marketing. It’s cumbersome and inefficient.
With HubSpot, you’re managing everything in one portal. From CMS tools to social media marketing, ad management, CRM for sales and email marketing, automation, blogging, SEO, and analytics — it doesn’t get more centralized than that. While all the tools in HubSpot can be costly when purchased together, HubSpot allows you to close the loop with your content marketing and sales processes, attributing revenue to your campaigns and gaining a full view on what efforts are working, so you can execute more of them. With WordPress, you have to be incredibly organized to use all the different tools. You’ll also probably need to create your own spreadsheets to allow you to really understand where your revenue is coming from.
Keeping your tech stack small helps fuel your marketing team to make educated decisions and work more efficiently.
You've coded yourself into a corner
\n
Probably the biggest pitfall that comes with working in WordPress is a bloated website. While we’ve outlined a a few different factors that can contribute to website bloat and how you can optimize your page speed, you cannot unwind the drag that comes with adding poorly coded plugins to your website.
The more plugins you add to your site, the more code a browser has to load, which can bog down your load speed. While you can limit your plugins and have a developer recommend the best ones, eventually you may want to add advanced functionality such as calculators or a robust resource center to your content arsenal.
HubSpot allows you to add functionality to your website with modules that can be coded by a HubSpot developer who knows best practices. Using one development partner who is certified keeps your website code clean and can ensure that your website doesn’t just pile on code from multiple different developers with plugins that break or leave security holes.
It's more secure
\n
WordPress sites are notorious for experiencing malware attacks. While keeping your plugins and WordPress up to date helps, malware attacks can still occur. Security is an extremely important aspect of your website, and HubSpot has the edge over WordPress here.
Because WordPress is open source, hackers can find security holes and exploit the platform easily. In addition, many of the available plugins aren’t supported and updated by the developers who created them. This makes WordPress sites easy targets.
WordPress theme and plugin developers typically bundle quite a few different plugins together to bring a full suite for you to take advantage of, but this can also create dependencies that aren’t updated correctly. Even if the theme is up to date, sometimes those smaller packages underneath aren’t updated and can create additional security vulnerabilities on your site.
HubSpot, however, has SSL encryption, which not only boosts your rankings with Google, but assures the users whose information you’re collecting that their information is safe. In HubSPot, you automatically receive a standard SAN SSL certification through DigiCert when you connect a domain to your account. If you purchase the custom SSL add-on, you can upload custom SSL certifications to HubSpot and configure security settings. Learn more about your SSL options in HubSpot here.
If you’re cost conscious and don’t plan to do much with your website, WordPress may have been a no-brainer for you. It’s free and has infinite customization options. Just be sure if you opt in to WordPress, you update plugins and WordPress regularly, manage comments, and have your site checked for security issues regularly.
If you’re cost conscious and looking for a starter platform that will grow with you as your marketing budget grows and lead generation is important to you, look to HubSpot. While we’re not currently offering development help on CMS Hub Free, we can definitely give you what you need once you’re ready to upgrade your HubSpot CMS Hub and build something that will suit you as you grow. HubSpot’s CRM is unmatched when it comes to sales, and we think that from a sustainability standpoint there’s no better platform for a growing business that is investing heavily into its sales and marketing strategies.
For a scaling business that uses its website as a lead generation tool, you’ll eventually need a better way to make website improvements, ensure the security of your site, and prevent website bloat. We’ve been huge supporters of HubSpot since they were just a tiny piece of analytics code. They continue to prove that they’re not only surpassing best practices, but setting new benchmarks for what to expect from a CMS and comprehensive marketing automation software.
If you’re considering a switch to HubSpot CMS Professional, we’d love to give you a rundown of the power of HubSpot.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
You get what you pay for
\n
One of the best things about WordPress is that it’s free. You pay for your themes and plugins and the developers who created them usually provide support, or you can hire a web developer if you need either more support or ongoing development expertise. However, that can come at a cost. Security issues, plugins not functioning as you’d hoped, and your website loading more slowly because of so many plugins are just a few common issues with WordPress.
Keep in mind that if you want a robust solution, you’re going to have to fork out a little cash. Committing an investment to HubSpot CMS might mean paying a monthly or annual fee, but it’ll give you a lot more capabilities out of the box without the additional frustration.
HubSpot support is super helpful and not outsourced, so you’re speaking to humans who really understand the platform. Not to mention, there’s an entire fully vetted and trained developer ecosystem with vendors who are crazy experienced and not even a little bit sketchy.
You’re using a ton of different tools to execute on your digital marketing
\n
Versatility used to be what WordPress was known for, but as the number of plugins and developers creating them increases, growing businesses need a less complicated solution. WordPress, as a free CMS with some paid plugins and themes, is a great foundation for a new small business, but once a business starts to move in the direction of lead generation, its needs become more complex.
Now that HubSpot has launched a free version of their CMS, B2B demand generation for startups has become simpler, which is definitely a consideration for those who might’ve gone straight to WordPress in the past. HubSpot CMS Hub Free is HubSpot’s introductory CMS package. It includes premium hosting on HubSpot, the option to build a from-scratch website (with forms, live chat, landing pages, and a blog), and its free CRM platform. This is a perfect option for small businesses that cannot afford HubSpot quite yet, but want to dig into its tools and build a website that creates awareness and builds their brand. It does have a few limitations, however:
- \n
- Limited to 25 website pages \n
- Limited to one blog with 100 posts \n
- No ability to modify system pages \n
- HubSpot branding on website pages, blog posts and landing pages \n
While it might not be for everyone, it gives startups a powerful, free, and simple way to get their brand off the ground. A perfect example is this super basic website we stood up in only three hours using HubSpot CMS Free.
Many growing businesses operating with a WordPress website end up paying a premium for a form manager, SEO plugin, analytics tool, CRM, email marketing platform, and automation solution. All of these different tools not only don’t speak to one another (unless you pay for another integration tool to centralize them), but your marketing team has to login to every single platform to manage information and execute your marketing. It’s cumbersome and inefficient.
With HubSpot, you’re managing everything in one portal. From CMS tools to social media marketing, ad management, CRM for sales and email marketing, automation, blogging, SEO, and analytics — it doesn’t get more centralized than that. While all the tools in HubSpot can be costly when purchased together, HubSpot allows you to close the loop with your content marketing and sales processes, attributing revenue to your campaigns and gaining a full view on what efforts are working, so you can execute more of them. With WordPress, you have to be incredibly organized to use all the different tools. You’ll also probably need to create your own spreadsheets to allow you to really understand where your revenue is coming from.
Keeping your tech stack small helps fuel your marketing team to make educated decisions and work more efficiently.
You've coded yourself into a corner
\n
Probably the biggest pitfall that comes with working in WordPress is a bloated website. While we’ve outlined a a few different factors that can contribute to website bloat and how you can optimize your page speed, you cannot unwind the drag that comes with adding poorly coded plugins to your website.
The more plugins you add to your site, the more code a browser has to load, which can bog down your load speed. While you can limit your plugins and have a developer recommend the best ones, eventually you may want to add advanced functionality such as calculators or a robust resource center to your content arsenal.
HubSpot allows you to add functionality to your website with modules that can be coded by a HubSpot developer who knows best practices. Using one development partner who is certified keeps your website code clean and can ensure that your website doesn’t just pile on code from multiple different developers with plugins that break or leave security holes.
It's more secure
\n
WordPress sites are notorious for experiencing malware attacks. While keeping your plugins and WordPress up to date helps, malware attacks can still occur. Security is an extremely important aspect of your website, and HubSpot has the edge over WordPress here.
Because WordPress is open source, hackers can find security holes and exploit the platform easily. In addition, many of the available plugins aren’t supported and updated by the developers who created them. This makes WordPress sites easy targets.
WordPress theme and plugin developers typically bundle quite a few different plugins together to bring a full suite for you to take advantage of, but this can also create dependencies that aren’t updated correctly. Even if the theme is up to date, sometimes those smaller packages underneath aren’t updated and can create additional security vulnerabilities on your site.
HubSpot, however, has SSL encryption, which not only boosts your rankings with Google, but assures the users whose information you’re collecting that their information is safe. In HubSPot, you automatically receive a standard SAN SSL certification through DigiCert when you connect a domain to your account. If you purchase the custom SSL add-on, you can upload custom SSL certifications to HubSpot and configure security settings. Learn more about your SSL options in HubSpot here.
If you’re cost conscious and don’t plan to do much with your website, WordPress may have been a no-brainer for you. It’s free and has infinite customization options. Just be sure if you opt in to WordPress, you update plugins and WordPress regularly, manage comments, and have your site checked for security issues regularly.
If you’re cost conscious and looking for a starter platform that will grow with you as your marketing budget grows and lead generation is important to you, look to HubSpot. While we’re not currently offering development help on CMS Hub Free, we can definitely give you what you need once you’re ready to upgrade your HubSpot CMS Hub and build something that will suit you as you grow. HubSpot’s CRM is unmatched when it comes to sales, and we think that from a sustainability standpoint there’s no better platform for a growing business that is investing heavily into its sales and marketing strategies.
For a scaling business that uses its website as a lead generation tool, you’ll eventually need a better way to make website improvements, ensure the security of your site, and prevent website bloat. We’ve been huge supporters of HubSpot since they were just a tiny piece of analytics code. They continue to prove that they’re not only surpassing best practices, but setting new benchmarks for what to expect from a CMS and comprehensive marketing automation software.
If you’re considering a switch to HubSpot CMS Professional, we’d love to give you a rundown of the power of HubSpot.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
You get what you pay for
\n
One of the best things about WordPress is that it’s free. You pay for your themes and plugins and the developers who created them usually provide support, or you can hire a web developer if you need either more support or ongoing development expertise. However, that can come at a cost. Security issues, plugins not functioning as you’d hoped, and your website loading more slowly because of so many plugins are just a few common issues with WordPress.
Keep in mind that if you want a robust solution, you’re going to have to fork out a little cash. Committing an investment to HubSpot CMS might mean paying a monthly or annual fee, but it’ll give you a lot more capabilities out of the box without the additional frustration.
HubSpot support is super helpful and not outsourced, so you’re speaking to humans who really understand the platform. Not to mention, there’s an entire fully vetted and trained developer ecosystem with vendors who are crazy experienced and not even a little bit sketchy.
You’re using a ton of different tools to execute on your digital marketing
\n
Versatility used to be what WordPress was known for, but as the number of plugins and developers creating them increases, growing businesses need a less complicated solution. WordPress, as a free CMS with some paid plugins and themes, is a great foundation for a new small business, but once a business starts to move in the direction of lead generation, its needs become more complex.
Now that HubSpot has launched a free version of their CMS, B2B demand generation for startups has become simpler, which is definitely a consideration for those who might’ve gone straight to WordPress in the past. HubSpot CMS Hub Free is HubSpot’s introductory CMS package. It includes premium hosting on HubSpot, the option to build a from-scratch website (with forms, live chat, landing pages, and a blog), and its free CRM platform. This is a perfect option for small businesses that cannot afford HubSpot quite yet, but want to dig into its tools and build a website that creates awareness and builds their brand. It does have a few limitations, however:
- \n
- Limited to 25 website pages \n
- Limited to one blog with 100 posts \n
- No ability to modify system pages \n
- HubSpot branding on website pages, blog posts and landing pages \n
While it might not be for everyone, it gives startups a powerful, free, and simple way to get their brand off the ground. A perfect example is this super basic website we stood up in only three hours using HubSpot CMS Free.
Many growing businesses operating with a WordPress website end up paying a premium for a form manager, SEO plugin, analytics tool, CRM, email marketing platform, and automation solution. All of these different tools not only don’t speak to one another (unless you pay for another integration tool to centralize them), but your marketing team has to login to every single platform to manage information and execute your marketing. It’s cumbersome and inefficient.
With HubSpot, you’re managing everything in one portal. From CMS tools to social media marketing, ad management, CRM for sales and email marketing, automation, blogging, SEO, and analytics — it doesn’t get more centralized than that. While all the tools in HubSpot can be costly when purchased together, HubSpot allows you to close the loop with your content marketing and sales processes, attributing revenue to your campaigns and gaining a full view on what efforts are working, so you can execute more of them. With WordPress, you have to be incredibly organized to use all the different tools. You’ll also probably need to create your own spreadsheets to allow you to really understand where your revenue is coming from.
Keeping your tech stack small helps fuel your marketing team to make educated decisions and work more efficiently.
You've coded yourself into a corner
\n
Probably the biggest pitfall that comes with working in WordPress is a bloated website. While we’ve outlined a a few different factors that can contribute to website bloat and how you can optimize your page speed, you cannot unwind the drag that comes with adding poorly coded plugins to your website.
The more plugins you add to your site, the more code a browser has to load, which can bog down your load speed. While you can limit your plugins and have a developer recommend the best ones, eventually you may want to add advanced functionality such as calculators or a robust resource center to your content arsenal.
HubSpot allows you to add functionality to your website with modules that can be coded by a HubSpot developer who knows best practices. Using one development partner who is certified keeps your website code clean and can ensure that your website doesn’t just pile on code from multiple different developers with plugins that break or leave security holes.
It's more secure
\n
WordPress sites are notorious for experiencing malware attacks. While keeping your plugins and WordPress up to date helps, malware attacks can still occur. Security is an extremely important aspect of your website, and HubSpot has the edge over WordPress here.
Because WordPress is open source, hackers can find security holes and exploit the platform easily. In addition, many of the available plugins aren’t supported and updated by the developers who created them. This makes WordPress sites easy targets.
WordPress theme and plugin developers typically bundle quite a few different plugins together to bring a full suite for you to take advantage of, but this can also create dependencies that aren’t updated correctly. Even if the theme is up to date, sometimes those smaller packages underneath aren’t updated and can create additional security vulnerabilities on your site.
HubSpot, however, has SSL encryption, which not only boosts your rankings with Google, but assures the users whose information you’re collecting that their information is safe. In HubSPot, you automatically receive a standard SAN SSL certification through DigiCert when you connect a domain to your account. If you purchase the custom SSL add-on, you can upload custom SSL certifications to HubSpot and configure security settings. Learn more about your SSL options in HubSpot here.
If you’re cost conscious and don’t plan to do much with your website, WordPress may have been a no-brainer for you. It’s free and has infinite customization options. Just be sure if you opt in to WordPress, you update plugins and WordPress regularly, manage comments, and have your site checked for security issues regularly.
If you’re cost conscious and looking for a starter platform that will grow with you as your marketing budget grows and lead generation is important to you, look to HubSpot. While we’re not currently offering development help on CMS Hub Free, we can definitely give you what you need once you’re ready to upgrade your HubSpot CMS Hub and build something that will suit you as you grow. HubSpot’s CRM is unmatched when it comes to sales, and we think that from a sustainability standpoint there’s no better platform for a growing business that is investing heavily into its sales and marketing strategies.
For a scaling business that uses its website as a lead generation tool, you’ll eventually need a better way to make website improvements, ensure the security of your site, and prevent website bloat. We’ve been huge supporters of HubSpot since they were just a tiny piece of analytics code. They continue to prove that they’re not only surpassing best practices, but setting new benchmarks for what to expect from a CMS and comprehensive marketing automation software.
If you’re considering a switch to HubSpot CMS Professional, we’d love to give you a rundown of the power of HubSpot.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
You get what you pay for
\n
One of the best things about WordPress is that it’s free. You pay for your themes and plugins and the developers who created them usually provide support, or you can hire a web developer if you need either more support or ongoing development expertise. However, that can come at a cost. Security issues, plugins not functioning as you’d hoped, and your website loading more slowly because of so many plugins are just a few common issues with WordPress.
Keep in mind that if you want a robust solution, you’re going to have to fork out a little cash. Committing an investment to HubSpot CMS might mean paying a monthly or annual fee, but it’ll give you a lot more capabilities out of the box without the additional frustration.
HubSpot support is super helpful and not outsourced, so you’re speaking to humans who really understand the platform. Not to mention, there’s an entire fully vetted and trained developer ecosystem with vendors who are crazy experienced and not even a little bit sketchy.
You’re using a ton of different tools to execute on your digital marketing
\n
Versatility used to be what WordPress was known for, but as the number of plugins and developers creating them increases, growing businesses need a less complicated solution. WordPress, as a free CMS with some paid plugins and themes, is a great foundation for a new small business, but once a business starts to move in the direction of lead generation, its needs become more complex.
Now that HubSpot has launched a free version of their CMS, B2B demand generation for startups has become simpler, which is definitely a consideration for those who might’ve gone straight to WordPress in the past. HubSpot CMS Hub Free is HubSpot’s introductory CMS package. It includes premium hosting on HubSpot, the option to build a from-scratch website (with forms, live chat, landing pages, and a blog), and its free CRM platform. This is a perfect option for small businesses that cannot afford HubSpot quite yet, but want to dig into its tools and build a website that creates awareness and builds their brand. It does have a few limitations, however:
- \n
- Limited to 25 website pages \n
- Limited to one blog with 100 posts \n
- No ability to modify system pages \n
- HubSpot branding on website pages, blog posts and landing pages \n
While it might not be for everyone, it gives startups a powerful, free, and simple way to get their brand off the ground. A perfect example is this super basic website we stood up in only three hours using HubSpot CMS Free.
Many growing businesses operating with a WordPress website end up paying a premium for a form manager, SEO plugin, analytics tool, CRM, email marketing platform, and automation solution. All of these different tools not only don’t speak to one another (unless you pay for another integration tool to centralize them), but your marketing team has to login to every single platform to manage information and execute your marketing. It’s cumbersome and inefficient.
With HubSpot, you’re managing everything in one portal. From CMS tools to social media marketing, ad management, CRM for sales and email marketing, automation, blogging, SEO, and analytics — it doesn’t get more centralized than that. While all the tools in HubSpot can be costly when purchased together, HubSpot allows you to close the loop with your content marketing and sales processes, attributing revenue to your campaigns and gaining a full view on what efforts are working, so you can execute more of them. With WordPress, you have to be incredibly organized to use all the different tools. You’ll also probably need to create your own spreadsheets to allow you to really understand where your revenue is coming from.
Keeping your tech stack small helps fuel your marketing team to make educated decisions and work more efficiently.
You've coded yourself into a corner
\n
Probably the biggest pitfall that comes with working in WordPress is a bloated website. While we’ve outlined a a few different factors that can contribute to website bloat and how you can optimize your page speed, you cannot unwind the drag that comes with adding poorly coded plugins to your website.
The more plugins you add to your site, the more code a browser has to load, which can bog down your load speed. While you can limit your plugins and have a developer recommend the best ones, eventually you may want to add advanced functionality such as calculators or a robust resource center to your content arsenal.
HubSpot allows you to add functionality to your website with modules that can be coded by a HubSpot developer who knows best practices. Using one development partner who is certified keeps your website code clean and can ensure that your website doesn’t just pile on code from multiple different developers with plugins that break or leave security holes.
It's more secure
\n
WordPress sites are notorious for experiencing malware attacks. While keeping your plugins and WordPress up to date helps, malware attacks can still occur. Security is an extremely important aspect of your website, and HubSpot has the edge over WordPress here.
Because WordPress is open source, hackers can find security holes and exploit the platform easily. In addition, many of the available plugins aren’t supported and updated by the developers who created them. This makes WordPress sites easy targets.
WordPress theme and plugin developers typically bundle quite a few different plugins together to bring a full suite for you to take advantage of, but this can also create dependencies that aren’t updated correctly. Even if the theme is up to date, sometimes those smaller packages underneath aren’t updated and can create additional security vulnerabilities on your site.
HubSpot, however, has SSL encryption, which not only boosts your rankings with Google, but assures the users whose information you’re collecting that their information is safe. In HubSPot, you automatically receive a standard SAN SSL certification through DigiCert when you connect a domain to your account. If you purchase the custom SSL add-on, you can upload custom SSL certifications to HubSpot and configure security settings. Learn more about your SSL options in HubSpot here.
If you’re cost conscious and don’t plan to do much with your website, WordPress may have been a no-brainer for you. It’s free and has infinite customization options. Just be sure if you opt in to WordPress, you update plugins and WordPress regularly, manage comments, and have your site checked for security issues regularly.
If you’re cost conscious and looking for a starter platform that will grow with you as your marketing budget grows and lead generation is important to you, look to HubSpot. While we’re not currently offering development help on CMS Hub Free, we can definitely give you what you need once you’re ready to upgrade your HubSpot CMS Hub and build something that will suit you as you grow. HubSpot’s CRM is unmatched when it comes to sales, and we think that from a sustainability standpoint there’s no better platform for a growing business that is investing heavily into its sales and marketing strategies.
For a scaling business that uses its website as a lead generation tool, you’ll eventually need a better way to make website improvements, ensure the security of your site, and prevent website bloat. We’ve been huge supporters of HubSpot since they were just a tiny piece of analytics code. They continue to prove that they’re not only surpassing best practices, but setting new benchmarks for what to expect from a CMS and comprehensive marketing automation software.
If you’re considering a switch to HubSpot CMS Professional, we’d love to give you a rundown of the power of HubSpot.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
You get what you pay for
\n
One of the best things about WordPress is that it’s free. You pay for your themes and plugins and the developers who created them usually provide support, or you can hire a web developer if you need either more support or ongoing development expertise. However, that can come at a cost. Security issues, plugins not functioning as you’d hoped, and your website loading more slowly because of so many plugins are just a few common issues with WordPress.
Keep in mind that if you want a robust solution, you’re going to have to fork out a little cash. Committing an investment to HubSpot CMS might mean paying a monthly or annual fee, but it’ll give you a lot more capabilities out of the box without the additional frustration.
HubSpot support is super helpful and not outsourced, so you’re speaking to humans who really understand the platform. Not to mention, there’s an entire fully vetted and trained developer ecosystem with vendors who are crazy experienced and not even a little bit sketchy.
You’re using a ton of different tools to execute on your digital marketing
\n
Versatility used to be what WordPress was known for, but as the number of plugins and developers creating them increases, growing businesses need a less complicated solution. WordPress, as a free CMS with some paid plugins and themes, is a great foundation for a new small business, but once a business starts to move in the direction of lead generation, its needs become more complex.
Now that HubSpot has launched a free version of their CMS, B2B demand generation for startups has become simpler, which is definitely a consideration for those who might’ve gone straight to WordPress in the past. HubSpot CMS Hub Free is HubSpot’s introductory CMS package. It includes premium hosting on HubSpot, the option to build a from-scratch website (with forms, live chat, landing pages, and a blog), and its free CRM platform. This is a perfect option for small businesses that cannot afford HubSpot quite yet, but want to dig into its tools and build a website that creates awareness and builds their brand. It does have a few limitations, however:
- \n
- Limited to 25 website pages \n
- Limited to one blog with 100 posts \n
- No ability to modify system pages \n
- HubSpot branding on website pages, blog posts and landing pages \n
While it might not be for everyone, it gives startups a powerful, free, and simple way to get their brand off the ground. A perfect example is this super basic website we stood up in only three hours using HubSpot CMS Free.
Many growing businesses operating with a WordPress website end up paying a premium for a form manager, SEO plugin, analytics tool, CRM, email marketing platform, and automation solution. All of these different tools not only don’t speak to one another (unless you pay for another integration tool to centralize them), but your marketing team has to login to every single platform to manage information and execute your marketing. It’s cumbersome and inefficient.
With HubSpot, you’re managing everything in one portal. From CMS tools to social media marketing, ad management, CRM for sales and email marketing, automation, blogging, SEO, and analytics — it doesn’t get more centralized than that. While all the tools in HubSpot can be costly when purchased together, HubSpot allows you to close the loop with your content marketing and sales processes, attributing revenue to your campaigns and gaining a full view on what efforts are working, so you can execute more of them. With WordPress, you have to be incredibly organized to use all the different tools. You’ll also probably need to create your own spreadsheets to allow you to really understand where your revenue is coming from.
Keeping your tech stack small helps fuel your marketing team to make educated decisions and work more efficiently.
You've coded yourself into a corner
\n
Probably the biggest pitfall that comes with working in WordPress is a bloated website. While we’ve outlined a a few different factors that can contribute to website bloat and how you can optimize your page speed, you cannot unwind the drag that comes with adding poorly coded plugins to your website.
The more plugins you add to your site, the more code a browser has to load, which can bog down your load speed. While you can limit your plugins and have a developer recommend the best ones, eventually you may want to add advanced functionality such as calculators or a robust resource center to your content arsenal.
HubSpot allows you to add functionality to your website with modules that can be coded by a HubSpot developer who knows best practices. Using one development partner who is certified keeps your website code clean and can ensure that your website doesn’t just pile on code from multiple different developers with plugins that break or leave security holes.
It's more secure
\n
WordPress sites are notorious for experiencing malware attacks. While keeping your plugins and WordPress up to date helps, malware attacks can still occur. Security is an extremely important aspect of your website, and HubSpot has the edge over WordPress here.
Because WordPress is open source, hackers can find security holes and exploit the platform easily. In addition, many of the available plugins aren’t supported and updated by the developers who created them. This makes WordPress sites easy targets.
WordPress theme and plugin developers typically bundle quite a few different plugins together to bring a full suite for you to take advantage of, but this can also create dependencies that aren’t updated correctly. Even if the theme is up to date, sometimes those smaller packages underneath aren’t updated and can create additional security vulnerabilities on your site.
HubSpot, however, has SSL encryption, which not only boosts your rankings with Google, but assures the users whose information you’re collecting that their information is safe. In HubSPot, you automatically receive a standard SAN SSL certification through DigiCert when you connect a domain to your account. If you purchase the custom SSL add-on, you can upload custom SSL certifications to HubSpot and configure security settings. Learn more about your SSL options in HubSpot here.
If you’re cost conscious and don’t plan to do much with your website, WordPress may have been a no-brainer for you. It’s free and has infinite customization options. Just be sure if you opt in to WordPress, you update plugins and WordPress regularly, manage comments, and have your site checked for security issues regularly.
If you’re cost conscious and looking for a starter platform that will grow with you as your marketing budget grows and lead generation is important to you, look to HubSpot. While we’re not currently offering development help on CMS Hub Free, we can definitely give you what you need once you’re ready to upgrade your HubSpot CMS Hub and build something that will suit you as you grow. HubSpot’s CRM is unmatched when it comes to sales, and we think that from a sustainability standpoint there’s no better platform for a growing business that is investing heavily into its sales and marketing strategies.
For a scaling business that uses its website as a lead generation tool, you’ll eventually need a better way to make website improvements, ensure the security of your site, and prevent website bloat. We’ve been huge supporters of HubSpot since they were just a tiny piece of analytics code. They continue to prove that they’re not only surpassing best practices, but setting new benchmarks for what to expect from a CMS and comprehensive marketing automation software.
If you’re considering a switch to HubSpot CMS Professional, we’d love to give you a rundown of the power of HubSpot.
Is it finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS? For a long time, WordPress was the most flexible game in town when it came to content management systems (CMS). With so much functionality in plugins and a huge number of developers working within it, it has been the industry standard for years for those looking to develop complex websites with flexible functionality. It’s open-source, so anyone can create plugins, fixes, themes, or modules. There are dozens of free themes that can have you up and running in no time..
But for a growing business that will be focusing heavily on marketing and building a website robust in resources that grows with them? We’re no longer selling WordPress as a solution for our clients.
Here’s why we think it’s finally time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Tools that served you before may not serve you as you grow
\n
Sure, Pikachu is cute and all, but Raichu is much more powerful and comes with a bigger set of tools or abilities at his disposal to help you win the battle against your competition for website leads.
Whether it’s developing a cost analysis calculator or price comparison tool, or integrating an important business application, there’s always something you can do to enhance the user experience of clients and prospects seeking information on your website. You may want to add a customer portal or tweak your most commonly used module to create a site that’s easy to navigate for both sales and prospects.
Savvy marketers develop a deep understanding of the complex buying journey surrounding their products and services. As you further break down the buying process and plan content for your website, you may find that the site you designed needs additions in order to facilitate the buying process.
You’re going head to head with your competitors
\n
While the battle may not be quite as intense as a Pokemon training battle, you still want to be prepared to go head to head with your competitors online. You can catch up with them, or even best them, by doing research on the top contenders in your industry and their offerings. Use this research when planning your marketing, including any website additions you may be considering.
If your biggest competition has a large resource section on its site, with multiple blog articles, case studies, white papers, and webinars, consider developing a mega menu that allows you to showcase the information you offer in an easy-to-navigate place.
Understanding what others in your industry are doing will help you stay ahead of the curve and competitively situated when it comes to the evolution of your website.
The team has changing needs and goals
\n
You need to make sure that your marketing team has the tools to do their job properly. Happy employees are 13% more productive, according to a UK study. Many organizations spend too much time planning the design of their website and not enough on how the backend should work for their marketing team. You should make planning your modules and user functions in the backend be part of the design process from the beginning, then continue to address these needs by making regular changes and adding strategic features.
Page templates should be easily accessible and set up properly, and different module iterations should be labeled intuitively. Backend users should be able to easily create pages, add content, and edit and optimize that content. HubSpot CMS makes it particularly easy for marketers. Because it is such a user-friendly platform, tasks like adding opacity or sizing options to a hero module places give marketers even more flexibility and control..The more space a marketer has for freedom, creativity, and flexibility, the more ways they can experiment to deliver remarkable content into the hands of the user — and the more your business benefits.
Related: Happy Employees, Happy Customers: API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nPlanning your resources maximizes your success
\n
While in-game resources might respawn in Pokemon, strategically planning how you use them helps ensure sustainable success. The same is true for the financial resources you allocate toward your website strategy. By having a monthly budget that you allocate toward growth-driven design, you can ensure that your website continues to evolve and your teams have the tools they need. Progress won’t be inhibited by an outdated website that doesn’t suit the growing needs of your marketers and the prospects and customers your website is serving.
Allocating a monthly budget toward the continued optimization and growth of your website lets you keep small changes moving along. This avoids stagnation in your pipeline, reduces frustration from your team, and ultimately makes more money in the long run.
Growth-driven design takes the preconceptions of web development to the next level by assigning them a predictable cost and breaking them down into monthly projects that are much more sustainable. The belief behind growth-driven design is that your website is constantly evolving. It is the ultimate Pokemon, because it never stops improving its features to ensure it remains the most competitive champion of your business’s vision and mission.
A sustainable plan is invaluable. It allows you to dream your biggest dreams, because when you break them into small steps, the entire world is at your disposal. Gloria Steinem said, “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” When you dream big and plan your resources accordingly, nothing is outside your reach.
","rss_summary":"
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Tools that served you before may not serve you as you grow
\n
Sure, Pikachu is cute and all, but Raichu is much more powerful and comes with a bigger set of tools or abilities at his disposal to help you win the battle against your competition for website leads.
Whether it’s developing a cost analysis calculator or price comparison tool, or integrating an important business application, there’s always something you can do to enhance the user experience of clients and prospects seeking information on your website. You may want to add a customer portal or tweak your most commonly used module to create a site that’s easy to navigate for both sales and prospects.
Savvy marketers develop a deep understanding of the complex buying journey surrounding their products and services. As you further break down the buying process and plan content for your website, you may find that the site you designed needs additions in order to facilitate the buying process.
You’re going head to head with your competitors
\n
While the battle may not be quite as intense as a Pokemon training battle, you still want to be prepared to go head to head with your competitors online. You can catch up with them, or even best them, by doing research on the top contenders in your industry and their offerings. Use this research when planning your marketing, including any website additions you may be considering.
If your biggest competition has a large resource section on its site, with multiple blog articles, case studies, white papers, and webinars, consider developing a mega menu that allows you to showcase the information you offer in an easy-to-navigate place.
Understanding what others in your industry are doing will help you stay ahead of the curve and competitively situated when it comes to the evolution of your website.
The team has changing needs and goals
\n
You need to make sure that your marketing team has the tools to do their job properly. Happy employees are 13% more productive, according to a UK study. Many organizations spend too much time planning the design of their website and not enough on how the backend should work for their marketing team. You should make planning your modules and user functions in the backend be part of the design process from the beginning, then continue to address these needs by making regular changes and adding strategic features.
Page templates should be easily accessible and set up properly, and different module iterations should be labeled intuitively. Backend users should be able to easily create pages, add content, and edit and optimize that content. HubSpot CMS makes it particularly easy for marketers. Because it is such a user-friendly platform, tasks like adding opacity or sizing options to a hero module places give marketers even more flexibility and control..The more space a marketer has for freedom, creativity, and flexibility, the more ways they can experiment to deliver remarkable content into the hands of the user — and the more your business benefits.
Related: Happy Employees, Happy Customers: API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nPlanning your resources maximizes your success
\n
While in-game resources might respawn in Pokemon, strategically planning how you use them helps ensure sustainable success. The same is true for the financial resources you allocate toward your website strategy. By having a monthly budget that you allocate toward growth-driven design, you can ensure that your website continues to evolve and your teams have the tools they need. Progress won’t be inhibited by an outdated website that doesn’t suit the growing needs of your marketers and the prospects and customers your website is serving.
Allocating a monthly budget toward the continued optimization and growth of your website lets you keep small changes moving along. This avoids stagnation in your pipeline, reduces frustration from your team, and ultimately makes more money in the long run.
Growth-driven design takes the preconceptions of web development to the next level by assigning them a predictable cost and breaking them down into monthly projects that are much more sustainable. The belief behind growth-driven design is that your website is constantly evolving. It is the ultimate Pokemon, because it never stops improving its features to ensure it remains the most competitive champion of your business’s vision and mission.
A sustainable plan is invaluable. It allows you to dream your biggest dreams, because when you break them into small steps, the entire world is at your disposal. Gloria Steinem said, “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” When you dream big and plan your resources accordingly, nothing is outside your reach.
","tag_ids":[62770428201,81427543405],"topic_ids":[62770428201,81427543405],"post_summary":"
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Tools that served you before may not serve you as you grow
\n
Sure, Pikachu is cute and all, but Raichu is much more powerful and comes with a bigger set of tools or abilities at his disposal to help you win the battle against your competition for website leads.
Whether it’s developing a cost analysis calculator or price comparison tool, or integrating an important business application, there’s always something you can do to enhance the user experience of clients and prospects seeking information on your website. You may want to add a customer portal or tweak your most commonly used module to create a site that’s easy to navigate for both sales and prospects.
Savvy marketers develop a deep understanding of the complex buying journey surrounding their products and services. As you further break down the buying process and plan content for your website, you may find that the site you designed needs additions in order to facilitate the buying process.
You’re going head to head with your competitors
\n
While the battle may not be quite as intense as a Pokemon training battle, you still want to be prepared to go head to head with your competitors online. You can catch up with them, or even best them, by doing research on the top contenders in your industry and their offerings. Use this research when planning your marketing, including any website additions you may be considering.
If your biggest competition has a large resource section on its site, with multiple blog articles, case studies, white papers, and webinars, consider developing a mega menu that allows you to showcase the information you offer in an easy-to-navigate place.
Understanding what others in your industry are doing will help you stay ahead of the curve and competitively situated when it comes to the evolution of your website.
The team has changing needs and goals
\n
You need to make sure that your marketing team has the tools to do their job properly. Happy employees are 13% more productive, according to a UK study. Many organizations spend too much time planning the design of their website and not enough on how the backend should work for their marketing team. You should make planning your modules and user functions in the backend be part of the design process from the beginning, then continue to address these needs by making regular changes and adding strategic features.
Page templates should be easily accessible and set up properly, and different module iterations should be labeled intuitively. Backend users should be able to easily create pages, add content, and edit and optimize that content. HubSpot CMS makes it particularly easy for marketers. Because it is such a user-friendly platform, tasks like adding opacity or sizing options to a hero module places give marketers even more flexibility and control..The more space a marketer has for freedom, creativity, and flexibility, the more ways they can experiment to deliver remarkable content into the hands of the user — and the more your business benefits.
Related: Happy Employees, Happy Customers: API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nPlanning your resources maximizes your success
\n
While in-game resources might respawn in Pokemon, strategically planning how you use them helps ensure sustainable success. The same is true for the financial resources you allocate toward your website strategy. By having a monthly budget that you allocate toward growth-driven design, you can ensure that your website continues to evolve and your teams have the tools they need. Progress won’t be inhibited by an outdated website that doesn’t suit the growing needs of your marketers and the prospects and customers your website is serving.
Allocating a monthly budget toward the continued optimization and growth of your website lets you keep small changes moving along. This avoids stagnation in your pipeline, reduces frustration from your team, and ultimately makes more money in the long run.
Growth-driven design takes the preconceptions of web development to the next level by assigning them a predictable cost and breaking them down into monthly projects that are much more sustainable. The belief behind growth-driven design is that your website is constantly evolving. It is the ultimate Pokemon, because it never stops improving its features to ensure it remains the most competitive champion of your business’s vision and mission.
A sustainable plan is invaluable. It allows you to dream your biggest dreams, because when you break them into small steps, the entire world is at your disposal. Gloria Steinem said, “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” When you dream big and plan your resources accordingly, nothing is outside your reach.
","postBodyRss":"
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Tools that served you before may not serve you as you grow
\n
Sure, Pikachu is cute and all, but Raichu is much more powerful and comes with a bigger set of tools or abilities at his disposal to help you win the battle against your competition for website leads.
Whether it’s developing a cost analysis calculator or price comparison tool, or integrating an important business application, there’s always something you can do to enhance the user experience of clients and prospects seeking information on your website. You may want to add a customer portal or tweak your most commonly used module to create a site that’s easy to navigate for both sales and prospects.
Savvy marketers develop a deep understanding of the complex buying journey surrounding their products and services. As you further break down the buying process and plan content for your website, you may find that the site you designed needs additions in order to facilitate the buying process.
You’re going head to head with your competitors
\n
While the battle may not be quite as intense as a Pokemon training battle, you still want to be prepared to go head to head with your competitors online. You can catch up with them, or even best them, by doing research on the top contenders in your industry and their offerings. Use this research when planning your marketing, including any website additions you may be considering.
If your biggest competition has a large resource section on its site, with multiple blog articles, case studies, white papers, and webinars, consider developing a mega menu that allows you to showcase the information you offer in an easy-to-navigate place.
Understanding what others in your industry are doing will help you stay ahead of the curve and competitively situated when it comes to the evolution of your website.
The team has changing needs and goals
\n
You need to make sure that your marketing team has the tools to do their job properly. Happy employees are 13% more productive, according to a UK study. Many organizations spend too much time planning the design of their website and not enough on how the backend should work for their marketing team. You should make planning your modules and user functions in the backend be part of the design process from the beginning, then continue to address these needs by making regular changes and adding strategic features.
Page templates should be easily accessible and set up properly, and different module iterations should be labeled intuitively. Backend users should be able to easily create pages, add content, and edit and optimize that content. HubSpot CMS makes it particularly easy for marketers. Because it is such a user-friendly platform, tasks like adding opacity or sizing options to a hero module places give marketers even more flexibility and control..The more space a marketer has for freedom, creativity, and flexibility, the more ways they can experiment to deliver remarkable content into the hands of the user — and the more your business benefits.
Related: Happy Employees, Happy Customers: API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nPlanning your resources maximizes your success
\n
While in-game resources might respawn in Pokemon, strategically planning how you use them helps ensure sustainable success. The same is true for the financial resources you allocate toward your website strategy. By having a monthly budget that you allocate toward growth-driven design, you can ensure that your website continues to evolve and your teams have the tools they need. Progress won’t be inhibited by an outdated website that doesn’t suit the growing needs of your marketers and the prospects and customers your website is serving.
Allocating a monthly budget toward the continued optimization and growth of your website lets you keep small changes moving along. This avoids stagnation in your pipeline, reduces frustration from your team, and ultimately makes more money in the long run.
Growth-driven design takes the preconceptions of web development to the next level by assigning them a predictable cost and breaking them down into monthly projects that are much more sustainable. The belief behind growth-driven design is that your website is constantly evolving. It is the ultimate Pokemon, because it never stops improving its features to ensure it remains the most competitive champion of your business’s vision and mission.
A sustainable plan is invaluable. It allows you to dream your biggest dreams, because when you break them into small steps, the entire world is at your disposal. Gloria Steinem said, “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” When you dream big and plan your resources accordingly, nothing is outside your reach.
","postEmailContent":"
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Tools that served you before may not serve you as you grow
\n
Sure, Pikachu is cute and all, but Raichu is much more powerful and comes with a bigger set of tools or abilities at his disposal to help you win the battle against your competition for website leads.
Whether it’s developing a cost analysis calculator or price comparison tool, or integrating an important business application, there’s always something you can do to enhance the user experience of clients and prospects seeking information on your website. You may want to add a customer portal or tweak your most commonly used module to create a site that’s easy to navigate for both sales and prospects.
Savvy marketers develop a deep understanding of the complex buying journey surrounding their products and services. As you further break down the buying process and plan content for your website, you may find that the site you designed needs additions in order to facilitate the buying process.
You’re going head to head with your competitors
\n
While the battle may not be quite as intense as a Pokemon training battle, you still want to be prepared to go head to head with your competitors online. You can catch up with them, or even best them, by doing research on the top contenders in your industry and their offerings. Use this research when planning your marketing, including any website additions you may be considering.
If your biggest competition has a large resource section on its site, with multiple blog articles, case studies, white papers, and webinars, consider developing a mega menu that allows you to showcase the information you offer in an easy-to-navigate place.
Understanding what others in your industry are doing will help you stay ahead of the curve and competitively situated when it comes to the evolution of your website.
The team has changing needs and goals
\n
You need to make sure that your marketing team has the tools to do their job properly. Happy employees are 13% more productive, according to a UK study. Many organizations spend too much time planning the design of their website and not enough on how the backend should work for their marketing team. You should make planning your modules and user functions in the backend be part of the design process from the beginning, then continue to address these needs by making regular changes and adding strategic features.
Page templates should be easily accessible and set up properly, and different module iterations should be labeled intuitively. Backend users should be able to easily create pages, add content, and edit and optimize that content. HubSpot CMS makes it particularly easy for marketers. Because it is such a user-friendly platform, tasks like adding opacity or sizing options to a hero module places give marketers even more flexibility and control..The more space a marketer has for freedom, creativity, and flexibility, the more ways they can experiment to deliver remarkable content into the hands of the user — and the more your business benefits.
Related: Happy Employees, Happy Customers: API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nPlanning your resources maximizes your success
\n
While in-game resources might respawn in Pokemon, strategically planning how you use them helps ensure sustainable success. The same is true for the financial resources you allocate toward your website strategy. By having a monthly budget that you allocate toward growth-driven design, you can ensure that your website continues to evolve and your teams have the tools they need. Progress won’t be inhibited by an outdated website that doesn’t suit the growing needs of your marketers and the prospects and customers your website is serving.
Allocating a monthly budget toward the continued optimization and growth of your website lets you keep small changes moving along. This avoids stagnation in your pipeline, reduces frustration from your team, and ultimately makes more money in the long run.
Growth-driven design takes the preconceptions of web development to the next level by assigning them a predictable cost and breaking them down into monthly projects that are much more sustainable. The belief behind growth-driven design is that your website is constantly evolving. It is the ultimate Pokemon, because it never stops improving its features to ensure it remains the most competitive champion of your business’s vision and mission.
A sustainable plan is invaluable. It allows you to dream your biggest dreams, because when you break them into small steps, the entire world is at your disposal. Gloria Steinem said, “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” When you dream big and plan your resources accordingly, nothing is outside your reach.
","rssSummary":"
Listen. We like analogies around here, and with as much time as our kids spend playing games like Minecraft and Pokemon, it’s bound to happen. Are we comparing your website and the process you approach it with to fantastical creatures that evolve inside little tiny balls and battle one another? Yes... yes we are.
Regardless of when your last website refresh was, there’s always this idea that upon “completion,” you’ve reached the final iteration of the website you wanted... the dopamine fix of “catching that Pokemon” is definitely exciting, but what's next?
After you launch your website, is it really as finished as you believe it is? You can ask every developer on the planet and their answer will be a resounding, “No!” A website is never finished, and once you realize that, you can enter a new world that the industry now calls Growth-Driven Design.
So often post-launch we encounter clients with a wish list: features and other small projects that popped up during design but weren’t within scope. “It would be so nice if ________” or “What if we added __________ to this module to make it easier to update the content?” Clients that spend a lot of time on their marketing soon realize that it makes sense to have an ongoing relationship with their website developer, because they understand that their website is a constantly evolving beast.
Here are a few reasons that we think growth-driven design is right up your alley and why your website isn’t that different from playing Pokemon.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
It avoids the 75-email edit strings
\n
According to a survey by Zippia.com, 80% of employees feel stressed because of ineffective company communication. Clearly no one likes inefficiency when it comes to communication, internally or externally.
One of the most difficult parts of managing communication surrounding website projects can be the multiple rounds of edits. If your developer or agency doesn’t have a simple way to communicate edits with a platform like Pastel, they can get caught in an endless string of back and forth messages.With no centralized feedback option, clients have to compile Google Docs, Powerpoint presentations, or those long strings of emails or Slack messages, which then need to be searched to find every single edit.
Not only does this increase the amount of time that a developer has to spend on updates, edits,and bug fixes, but sometimes a request can be overlooked, prolonging the process and sometimes even delaying the delivery of a completed site for review.
By having feedback centralized in Pastel, we avoid the extra communication, leaving our inboxes and Slack queue cleaner, our brains a little freer, and our development team that much more efficient. Keep in mind that not every client or employee likes to use new tools, so we still allow other feedback options, we just try to default to this to keep things organized.
\n
It allows multiple people to leave feedback in one place.
\n
Of course, it’s easy to assign a single point of contact as a final word on a website, but how often does something get lost in translation? We’ve encountered scenarios when the people at the top are dictating their wants and needs to a marketing director or manager, only for the company’s CEO to step in with their internal team and provide the feedback our teams needed all along. In order to avoid issues with too many cooks in the kitchen while also allowing all eyes in for review, Pastel is a great alternative.
With Pastel, you can hover over sections of the website and pin comments to each section. The comment is sticky and remains in place as you navigate through the rest of the document. This allows you to easily click on comments while reviewing areas of concern to save time in describing issues and identifying the issue in question for the development team receiving the feedback.
You can also @mention any user to quickly ping them with a question, notify them of a new edit, or request an update. You can even hold clients and internal teams accountable by turning off commenting after a “comment deadline.” (This is a favorite feature for us when projects are running on tight timeframes and we need to hold everyone to their deadlines.)
\n
You can stay organized and keep up to date on progress.
\n
Keeping comments organized can sometimes be a hassle, and if your development team has a huge list of edits and bug fixes, they may not know exactly how to prioritize them. You can mark items as high priority or categorize your edits using labels. Once a comment is labeled, the team can review it in real time and address high priority items or certain categories of issues, such as bug fixes, before wishlist items or additional feature functionality are addressed.
Pastel also allows for status updates so you can see how edits are progressing in real time. A status can be updated from Active to In Progress to In Review to Resolved by a team member. This keeps a project management team up to date and allows them to communicate timeframes with the client to manage expectations accordingly.
\n
It offers “live” editing.
\n
Because Pastel pulls from the website URL, it allows you to use the same canvas for multiple rounds of edits if you want. If you use a live website URL for feedback, once the code is changed, the edits will reflect on the same document, allowing the team to verify those changes and make additional suggestions if needed.
It integrates with other common marketing tools for seamless ticket or task creation.
\n
We’ve spoken to the team at Pastel; they have a lot of great ideas about how they’ll continue to evolve the software. They’ve communicated that their intent is to build on the number of integrations they offer to make it easier for development teams to use Pastel. . They’ve also assured us that big things are on the horizon for the platform.
We asked Valentin Stakov, founder at Pastel, what the company’s focus was and what agencies and developers could expect from Pastel in the coming months. He said, \"We're planning on improving our existing integrations to make them more robust, as well as building additional integrations. We're also focused on building out more tools to make it easier to communicate with your clients and to keep them updated on their projects.\"
For now, their website lists the following integrations here:
Asana
Monday
Trello
Adobe XD
Jira
Finding a tool with a forward-thinking team is important; we look forward to seeing what integrations these guys come up with in the future.
It saves you time with additional functionality.
\n
Pastel has a few time-saving features as well.
Its interface allows you to easily add screenshots, upload files, and link URLs in the comments. If you want an image replaced on a web page, company file storage can sometimes take a bit to sort through.
Basic responsiveness tests are also a perk of Pastel. While we use real browsers when available and BrowserStack for full browser compatibility testing, the simple toggle on Pastel gives the client and other reviewers a way t to visualize what the website will look like on both mobile and desktop, allowing for more eyes on the process.
Another common activity during launch preparation is tweaking copy and headlines. While all our clients operating in HubSpot CMS have the flexibility to make updates to all content and headlines themselves, sometimes you need those perfect words to make a website look launch-ready.
\n
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
It avoids the 75-email edit strings
\n
According to a survey by Zippia.com, 80% of employees feel stressed because of ineffective company communication. Clearly no one likes inefficiency when it comes to communication, internally or externally.
One of the most difficult parts of managing communication surrounding website projects can be the multiple rounds of edits. If your developer or agency doesn’t have a simple way to communicate edits with a platform like Pastel, they can get caught in an endless string of back and forth messages.With no centralized feedback option, clients have to compile Google Docs, Powerpoint presentations, or those long strings of emails or Slack messages, which then need to be searched to find every single edit.
Not only does this increase the amount of time that a developer has to spend on updates, edits,and bug fixes, but sometimes a request can be overlooked, prolonging the process and sometimes even delaying the delivery of a completed site for review.
By having feedback centralized in Pastel, we avoid the extra communication, leaving our inboxes and Slack queue cleaner, our brains a little freer, and our development team that much more efficient. Keep in mind that not every client or employee likes to use new tools, so we still allow other feedback options, we just try to default to this to keep things organized.
\n
It allows multiple people to leave feedback in one place.
\n
Of course, it’s easy to assign a single point of contact as a final word on a website, but how often does something get lost in translation? We’ve encountered scenarios when the people at the top are dictating their wants and needs to a marketing director or manager, only for the company’s CEO to step in with their internal team and provide the feedback our teams needed all along. In order to avoid issues with too many cooks in the kitchen while also allowing all eyes in for review, Pastel is a great alternative.
With Pastel, you can hover over sections of the website and pin comments to each section. The comment is sticky and remains in place as you navigate through the rest of the document. This allows you to easily click on comments while reviewing areas of concern to save time in describing issues and identifying the issue in question for the development team receiving the feedback.
You can also @mention any user to quickly ping them with a question, notify them of a new edit, or request an update. You can even hold clients and internal teams accountable by turning off commenting after a “comment deadline.” (This is a favorite feature for us when projects are running on tight timeframes and we need to hold everyone to their deadlines.)
\n
You can stay organized and keep up to date on progress.
\n
Keeping comments organized can sometimes be a hassle, and if your development team has a huge list of edits and bug fixes, they may not know exactly how to prioritize them. You can mark items as high priority or categorize your edits using labels. Once a comment is labeled, the team can review it in real time and address high priority items or certain categories of issues, such as bug fixes, before wishlist items or additional feature functionality are addressed.
Pastel also allows for status updates so you can see how edits are progressing in real time. A status can be updated from Active to In Progress to In Review to Resolved by a team member. This keeps a project management team up to date and allows them to communicate timeframes with the client to manage expectations accordingly.
\n
It offers “live” editing.
\n
Because Pastel pulls from the website URL, it allows you to use the same canvas for multiple rounds of edits if you want. If you use a live website URL for feedback, once the code is changed, the edits will reflect on the same document, allowing the team to verify those changes and make additional suggestions if needed.
It integrates with other common marketing tools for seamless ticket or task creation.
\n
We’ve spoken to the team at Pastel; they have a lot of great ideas about how they’ll continue to evolve the software. They’ve communicated that their intent is to build on the number of integrations they offer to make it easier for development teams to use Pastel. . They’ve also assured us that big things are on the horizon for the platform.
We asked Valentin Stakov, founder at Pastel, what the company’s focus was and what agencies and developers could expect from Pastel in the coming months. He said, \"We're planning on improving our existing integrations to make them more robust, as well as building additional integrations. We're also focused on building out more tools to make it easier to communicate with your clients and to keep them updated on their projects.\"
For now, their website lists the following integrations here:
Asana
Monday
Trello
Adobe XD
Jira
Finding a tool with a forward-thinking team is important; we look forward to seeing what integrations these guys come up with in the future.
It saves you time with additional functionality.
\n
Pastel has a few time-saving features as well.
Its interface allows you to easily add screenshots, upload files, and link URLs in the comments. If you want an image replaced on a web page, company file storage can sometimes take a bit to sort through.
Basic responsiveness tests are also a perk of Pastel. While we use real browsers when available and BrowserStack for full browser compatibility testing, the simple toggle on Pastel gives the client and other reviewers a way t to visualize what the website will look like on both mobile and desktop, allowing for more eyes on the process.
Another common activity during launch preparation is tweaking copy and headlines. While all our clients operating in HubSpot CMS have the flexibility to make updates to all content and headlines themselves, sometimes you need those perfect words to make a website look launch-ready.
\n
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
It avoids the 75-email edit strings
\n
According to a survey by Zippia.com, 80% of employees feel stressed because of ineffective company communication. Clearly no one likes inefficiency when it comes to communication, internally or externally.
One of the most difficult parts of managing communication surrounding website projects can be the multiple rounds of edits. If your developer or agency doesn’t have a simple way to communicate edits with a platform like Pastel, they can get caught in an endless string of back and forth messages.With no centralized feedback option, clients have to compile Google Docs, Powerpoint presentations, or those long strings of emails or Slack messages, which then need to be searched to find every single edit.
Not only does this increase the amount of time that a developer has to spend on updates, edits,and bug fixes, but sometimes a request can be overlooked, prolonging the process and sometimes even delaying the delivery of a completed site for review.
By having feedback centralized in Pastel, we avoid the extra communication, leaving our inboxes and Slack queue cleaner, our brains a little freer, and our development team that much more efficient. Keep in mind that not every client or employee likes to use new tools, so we still allow other feedback options, we just try to default to this to keep things organized.
\n
It allows multiple people to leave feedback in one place.
\n
Of course, it’s easy to assign a single point of contact as a final word on a website, but how often does something get lost in translation? We’ve encountered scenarios when the people at the top are dictating their wants and needs to a marketing director or manager, only for the company’s CEO to step in with their internal team and provide the feedback our teams needed all along. In order to avoid issues with too many cooks in the kitchen while also allowing all eyes in for review, Pastel is a great alternative.
With Pastel, you can hover over sections of the website and pin comments to each section. The comment is sticky and remains in place as you navigate through the rest of the document. This allows you to easily click on comments while reviewing areas of concern to save time in describing issues and identifying the issue in question for the development team receiving the feedback.
You can also @mention any user to quickly ping them with a question, notify them of a new edit, or request an update. You can even hold clients and internal teams accountable by turning off commenting after a “comment deadline.” (This is a favorite feature for us when projects are running on tight timeframes and we need to hold everyone to their deadlines.)
\n
You can stay organized and keep up to date on progress.
\n
Keeping comments organized can sometimes be a hassle, and if your development team has a huge list of edits and bug fixes, they may not know exactly how to prioritize them. You can mark items as high priority or categorize your edits using labels. Once a comment is labeled, the team can review it in real time and address high priority items or certain categories of issues, such as bug fixes, before wishlist items or additional feature functionality are addressed.
Pastel also allows for status updates so you can see how edits are progressing in real time. A status can be updated from Active to In Progress to In Review to Resolved by a team member. This keeps a project management team up to date and allows them to communicate timeframes with the client to manage expectations accordingly.
\n
It offers “live” editing.
\n
Because Pastel pulls from the website URL, it allows you to use the same canvas for multiple rounds of edits if you want. If you use a live website URL for feedback, once the code is changed, the edits will reflect on the same document, allowing the team to verify those changes and make additional suggestions if needed.
It integrates with other common marketing tools for seamless ticket or task creation.
\n
We’ve spoken to the team at Pastel; they have a lot of great ideas about how they’ll continue to evolve the software. They’ve communicated that their intent is to build on the number of integrations they offer to make it easier for development teams to use Pastel. . They’ve also assured us that big things are on the horizon for the platform.
We asked Valentin Stakov, founder at Pastel, what the company’s focus was and what agencies and developers could expect from Pastel in the coming months. He said, \"We're planning on improving our existing integrations to make them more robust, as well as building additional integrations. We're also focused on building out more tools to make it easier to communicate with your clients and to keep them updated on their projects.\"
For now, their website lists the following integrations here:
Asana
Monday
Trello
Adobe XD
Jira
Finding a tool with a forward-thinking team is important; we look forward to seeing what integrations these guys come up with in the future.
It saves you time with additional functionality.
\n
Pastel has a few time-saving features as well.
Its interface allows you to easily add screenshots, upload files, and link URLs in the comments. If you want an image replaced on a web page, company file storage can sometimes take a bit to sort through.
Basic responsiveness tests are also a perk of Pastel. While we use real browsers when available and BrowserStack for full browser compatibility testing, the simple toggle on Pastel gives the client and other reviewers a way t to visualize what the website will look like on both mobile and desktop, allowing for more eyes on the process.
Another common activity during launch preparation is tweaking copy and headlines. While all our clients operating in HubSpot CMS have the flexibility to make updates to all content and headlines themselves, sometimes you need those perfect words to make a website look launch-ready.
\n
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
It avoids the 75-email edit strings
\n
According to a survey by Zippia.com, 80% of employees feel stressed because of ineffective company communication. Clearly no one likes inefficiency when it comes to communication, internally or externally.
One of the most difficult parts of managing communication surrounding website projects can be the multiple rounds of edits. If your developer or agency doesn’t have a simple way to communicate edits with a platform like Pastel, they can get caught in an endless string of back and forth messages.With no centralized feedback option, clients have to compile Google Docs, Powerpoint presentations, or those long strings of emails or Slack messages, which then need to be searched to find every single edit.
Not only does this increase the amount of time that a developer has to spend on updates, edits,and bug fixes, but sometimes a request can be overlooked, prolonging the process and sometimes even delaying the delivery of a completed site for review.
By having feedback centralized in Pastel, we avoid the extra communication, leaving our inboxes and Slack queue cleaner, our brains a little freer, and our development team that much more efficient. Keep in mind that not every client or employee likes to use new tools, so we still allow other feedback options, we just try to default to this to keep things organized.
\n
It allows multiple people to leave feedback in one place.
\n
Of course, it’s easy to assign a single point of contact as a final word on a website, but how often does something get lost in translation? We’ve encountered scenarios when the people at the top are dictating their wants and needs to a marketing director or manager, only for the company’s CEO to step in with their internal team and provide the feedback our teams needed all along. In order to avoid issues with too many cooks in the kitchen while also allowing all eyes in for review, Pastel is a great alternative.
With Pastel, you can hover over sections of the website and pin comments to each section. The comment is sticky and remains in place as you navigate through the rest of the document. This allows you to easily click on comments while reviewing areas of concern to save time in describing issues and identifying the issue in question for the development team receiving the feedback.
You can also @mention any user to quickly ping them with a question, notify them of a new edit, or request an update. You can even hold clients and internal teams accountable by turning off commenting after a “comment deadline.” (This is a favorite feature for us when projects are running on tight timeframes and we need to hold everyone to their deadlines.)
\n
You can stay organized and keep up to date on progress.
\n
Keeping comments organized can sometimes be a hassle, and if your development team has a huge list of edits and bug fixes, they may not know exactly how to prioritize them. You can mark items as high priority or categorize your edits using labels. Once a comment is labeled, the team can review it in real time and address high priority items or certain categories of issues, such as bug fixes, before wishlist items or additional feature functionality are addressed.
Pastel also allows for status updates so you can see how edits are progressing in real time. A status can be updated from Active to In Progress to In Review to Resolved by a team member. This keeps a project management team up to date and allows them to communicate timeframes with the client to manage expectations accordingly.
\n
It offers “live” editing.
\n
Because Pastel pulls from the website URL, it allows you to use the same canvas for multiple rounds of edits if you want. If you use a live website URL for feedback, once the code is changed, the edits will reflect on the same document, allowing the team to verify those changes and make additional suggestions if needed.
It integrates with other common marketing tools for seamless ticket or task creation.
\n
We’ve spoken to the team at Pastel; they have a lot of great ideas about how they’ll continue to evolve the software. They’ve communicated that their intent is to build on the number of integrations they offer to make it easier for development teams to use Pastel. . They’ve also assured us that big things are on the horizon for the platform.
We asked Valentin Stakov, founder at Pastel, what the company’s focus was and what agencies and developers could expect from Pastel in the coming months. He said, \"We're planning on improving our existing integrations to make them more robust, as well as building additional integrations. We're also focused on building out more tools to make it easier to communicate with your clients and to keep them updated on their projects.\"
For now, their website lists the following integrations here:
Asana
Monday
Trello
Adobe XD
Jira
Finding a tool with a forward-thinking team is important; we look forward to seeing what integrations these guys come up with in the future.
It saves you time with additional functionality.
\n
Pastel has a few time-saving features as well.
Its interface allows you to easily add screenshots, upload files, and link URLs in the comments. If you want an image replaced on a web page, company file storage can sometimes take a bit to sort through.
Basic responsiveness tests are also a perk of Pastel. While we use real browsers when available and BrowserStack for full browser compatibility testing, the simple toggle on Pastel gives the client and other reviewers a way t to visualize what the website will look like on both mobile and desktop, allowing for more eyes on the process.
Another common activity during launch preparation is tweaking copy and headlines. While all our clients operating in HubSpot CMS have the flexibility to make updates to all content and headlines themselves, sometimes you need those perfect words to make a website look launch-ready.
\n
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
It avoids the 75-email edit strings
\n
According to a survey by Zippia.com, 80% of employees feel stressed because of ineffective company communication. Clearly no one likes inefficiency when it comes to communication, internally or externally.
One of the most difficult parts of managing communication surrounding website projects can be the multiple rounds of edits. If your developer or agency doesn’t have a simple way to communicate edits with a platform like Pastel, they can get caught in an endless string of back and forth messages.With no centralized feedback option, clients have to compile Google Docs, Powerpoint presentations, or those long strings of emails or Slack messages, which then need to be searched to find every single edit.
Not only does this increase the amount of time that a developer has to spend on updates, edits,and bug fixes, but sometimes a request can be overlooked, prolonging the process and sometimes even delaying the delivery of a completed site for review.
By having feedback centralized in Pastel, we avoid the extra communication, leaving our inboxes and Slack queue cleaner, our brains a little freer, and our development team that much more efficient. Keep in mind that not every client or employee likes to use new tools, so we still allow other feedback options, we just try to default to this to keep things organized.
\n
It allows multiple people to leave feedback in one place.
\n
Of course, it’s easy to assign a single point of contact as a final word on a website, but how often does something get lost in translation? We’ve encountered scenarios when the people at the top are dictating their wants and needs to a marketing director or manager, only for the company’s CEO to step in with their internal team and provide the feedback our teams needed all along. In order to avoid issues with too many cooks in the kitchen while also allowing all eyes in for review, Pastel is a great alternative.
With Pastel, you can hover over sections of the website and pin comments to each section. The comment is sticky and remains in place as you navigate through the rest of the document. This allows you to easily click on comments while reviewing areas of concern to save time in describing issues and identifying the issue in question for the development team receiving the feedback.
You can also @mention any user to quickly ping them with a question, notify them of a new edit, or request an update. You can even hold clients and internal teams accountable by turning off commenting after a “comment deadline.” (This is a favorite feature for us when projects are running on tight timeframes and we need to hold everyone to their deadlines.)
\n
You can stay organized and keep up to date on progress.
\n
Keeping comments organized can sometimes be a hassle, and if your development team has a huge list of edits and bug fixes, they may not know exactly how to prioritize them. You can mark items as high priority or categorize your edits using labels. Once a comment is labeled, the team can review it in real time and address high priority items or certain categories of issues, such as bug fixes, before wishlist items or additional feature functionality are addressed.
Pastel also allows for status updates so you can see how edits are progressing in real time. A status can be updated from Active to In Progress to In Review to Resolved by a team member. This keeps a project management team up to date and allows them to communicate timeframes with the client to manage expectations accordingly.
\n
It offers “live” editing.
\n
Because Pastel pulls from the website URL, it allows you to use the same canvas for multiple rounds of edits if you want. If you use a live website URL for feedback, once the code is changed, the edits will reflect on the same document, allowing the team to verify those changes and make additional suggestions if needed.
It integrates with other common marketing tools for seamless ticket or task creation.
\n
We’ve spoken to the team at Pastel; they have a lot of great ideas about how they’ll continue to evolve the software. They’ve communicated that their intent is to build on the number of integrations they offer to make it easier for development teams to use Pastel. . They’ve also assured us that big things are on the horizon for the platform.
We asked Valentin Stakov, founder at Pastel, what the company’s focus was and what agencies and developers could expect from Pastel in the coming months. He said, \"We're planning on improving our existing integrations to make them more robust, as well as building additional integrations. We're also focused on building out more tools to make it easier to communicate with your clients and to keep them updated on their projects.\"
For now, their website lists the following integrations here:
Asana
Monday
Trello
Adobe XD
Jira
Finding a tool with a forward-thinking team is important; we look forward to seeing what integrations these guys come up with in the future.
It saves you time with additional functionality.
\n
Pastel has a few time-saving features as well.
Its interface allows you to easily add screenshots, upload files, and link URLs in the comments. If you want an image replaced on a web page, company file storage can sometimes take a bit to sort through.
Basic responsiveness tests are also a perk of Pastel. While we use real browsers when available and BrowserStack for full browser compatibility testing, the simple toggle on Pastel gives the client and other reviewers a way t to visualize what the website will look like on both mobile and desktop, allowing for more eyes on the process.
Another common activity during launch preparation is tweaking copy and headlines. While all our clients operating in HubSpot CMS have the flexibility to make updates to all content and headlines themselves, sometimes you need those perfect words to make a website look launch-ready.
\n
Our team has been developing websites for many years and HubSpot CMS development quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of the development process. Our project management team and technical director love diving into newly developed modules and projects in an attempt to find bugs that need fixing or responsiveness and browser compatibility issues.
We use a comprehensive checklist for testing all active browsers on most major devices, manually testing responsiveness, reviewing design files in comparison to the “final” product, and testing module functionality for bugs. Through that process we use a few tools to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. These tools include QA spreadsheets, BrowserStack to test browser compatibility, and perhaps our favorite collaboration and feedback tool, Pastel.
Pastel is a collaboration tool that allows internal teams, contractors, and clients to review marketing projects. We simply plug the project URL into usepastel.com and can quickly begin the review process with live browsing and the ability to easily click to add comments, update text, and collaborate for quick edits and updates. This is critical for us, since most of our team is remote.
For other teams looking for feedback collaboration software, or for agencies and companies that want to understand more about how a website should be reviewed for quality assurance, here’s a feature and benefit rundown of why we love Pastel for HubSpot CMS development feedback and communication for quality assurance testing.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
There's a breakdown between sales and development, and its usually found in over-promising.
\n
We ask all our agency clients to include us in scoping and estimation of all projects and not to throw out a number until we have the opportunity to look closely at a website project, integration, or web app. When an executive or sales professional begins pitching a new website or integration project sale without getting preliminary information or including us on the call, we sometimes run into issues.
An account manager or even the executive team can throw out a ballpark figure based on their experience, only to find there’s a huge customer portal or some other sort of integration required to make it happen.
There is absolutely no question that talented HubSpot CMS developers are difficult to find and retain, but at times there can be issues associated with development that result from a sales or executive team that isn’t technically minded. We leave our booking link open to our clients and often sit in on sales calls with them to help determine the best course of action for a website project, based on budget, desired platform, functionality, required integrations, and goals.
When a sales professional runs a HubSpot CMS development project request meeting, they usually don’t know what information to ask for and miss a lot of important insights. By including your developer in the initial stages of the meeting, you can closely manage expectations and build confidence in your prospect or customer by showing them that you have people on your side that have executed these projects before and know exactly what is needed to complete them.
Sometimes when executive teams lack technical acumen, they are taken advantage of.
\n
We recently encountered a client whose Wordpress developer told them that they could develop a website in HubSpot CMS without any issues. A few weeks and thousands of dollars later, their web developer ghosted them and they went into their portal only to find hard-coded modules implemented that didn’t allow for marketers to complete any edits whatsoever without coding knowledge. It ended up costing them and their client thousands more to have the work entirely redone.
This is the type of issue that can occur if an agency is inexpensively outsourcing and doesn’t have much technical acumen. If you’re outsourcing cheap web development, you should at least consider paying a consultant or HubSpot developer to interview and vet your talent to make sure that you’re getting what you’re paying for.
When it comes to value, when you pay less you’ll compromise on something and pay for that lack of experience down the road. A gifted developer will work more efficiently and be better able to make suggestions during the sales process up front to not only give an accurate estimate, but to really wow the client by not just delivering what they want, but taking those ideas to the next level.
Related: Why an Experienced Web Developer? Your Website Isn't a Sub Sandwich.
\nAn experienced developer can really flex their skills and leverage the capabilities of HubSpot.
\n
Great developers geek out on things like custom objects, line of business application integrations, and other fun projects. If you’re just starting a website development project with an existing client or new prospect, your salesperson or executive team may not know how to take the robust tools available in HubSpot and really integrate the client’s website and business processes into it.
By leveraging an experienced developer as a technical director, you can include them where necessary in your sales meetings and take the time to understand how tools like Operations Hub, Services Hub, and Sales Hub can integrate with your website to create a truly comprehensive experience for the client and customer.
The client expects the expertise that you promised them.
\n
We prefer to work with agencies. They have the understanding and knowledge of the process to create a really amazing website design that functions in a way that serves the customer. They usually have a seamless process for design, they’re willing to interface with the client, and they usually bring us well-qualified clients that “get it.” Our relationships with our agency clients are our favorite and most consistent relationships, hands down.
Every now and then we are referred to an agency that wants to operate on price alone. They don’t understand the value of a gifted developer, they aren’t seeing the red flags that pop up when they find cheap development, and they don’t have a process in place to quality control the work that they do outsource. Most often, those clients don’t have a robust web development side of their business.
We find this interesting, because in the same sales meeting where that agency convinced the client of their value, they’re selling a project short by not honoring their own beliefs when it comes to getting value for what you’re willing to pay for.
We get it. Business is business. But you can’t, in good conscience, pitch a mission to bring incredible marketing into the world and let your development lag short of that, can you?
Related: 6 Signs it's Time to Ditch Your HubSpot Developer
\n
When you spend so much time talking about customer delight, but also spend a lot of time trying to find the cheapest way to source your development talent while still billing the client as much as possible, we’re not sure you’re being true to your mission.
Instead, maybe what you get in value in these projects over time and the increased trust from your clients and customers means that paying a little more up front is worth it.
Maybe spending a little more for experienced developers that you bring into the fold as part of your sales process can be a complete game-changer for the services you offer and the ways you delight your clients and customers.
Maybe you can completely change your agency by hiring top-tier talent.
We like to think so anyway.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
There's a breakdown between sales and development, and its usually found in over-promising.
\n
We ask all our agency clients to include us in scoping and estimation of all projects and not to throw out a number until we have the opportunity to look closely at a website project, integration, or web app. When an executive or sales professional begins pitching a new website or integration project sale without getting preliminary information or including us on the call, we sometimes run into issues.
An account manager or even the executive team can throw out a ballpark figure based on their experience, only to find there’s a huge customer portal or some other sort of integration required to make it happen.
There is absolutely no question that talented HubSpot CMS developers are difficult to find and retain, but at times there can be issues associated with development that result from a sales or executive team that isn’t technically minded. We leave our booking link open to our clients and often sit in on sales calls with them to help determine the best course of action for a website project, based on budget, desired platform, functionality, required integrations, and goals.
When a sales professional runs a HubSpot CMS development project request meeting, they usually don’t know what information to ask for and miss a lot of important insights. By including your developer in the initial stages of the meeting, you can closely manage expectations and build confidence in your prospect or customer by showing them that you have people on your side that have executed these projects before and know exactly what is needed to complete them.
Sometimes when executive teams lack technical acumen, they are taken advantage of.
\n
We recently encountered a client whose Wordpress developer told them that they could develop a website in HubSpot CMS without any issues. A few weeks and thousands of dollars later, their web developer ghosted them and they went into their portal only to find hard-coded modules implemented that didn’t allow for marketers to complete any edits whatsoever without coding knowledge. It ended up costing them and their client thousands more to have the work entirely redone.
This is the type of issue that can occur if an agency is inexpensively outsourcing and doesn’t have much technical acumen. If you’re outsourcing cheap web development, you should at least consider paying a consultant or HubSpot developer to interview and vet your talent to make sure that you’re getting what you’re paying for.
When it comes to value, when you pay less you’ll compromise on something and pay for that lack of experience down the road. A gifted developer will work more efficiently and be better able to make suggestions during the sales process up front to not only give an accurate estimate, but to really wow the client by not just delivering what they want, but taking those ideas to the next level.
Related: Why an Experienced Web Developer? Your Website Isn't a Sub Sandwich.
\nAn experienced developer can really flex their skills and leverage the capabilities of HubSpot.
\n
Great developers geek out on things like custom objects, line of business application integrations, and other fun projects. If you’re just starting a website development project with an existing client or new prospect, your salesperson or executive team may not know how to take the robust tools available in HubSpot and really integrate the client’s website and business processes into it.
By leveraging an experienced developer as a technical director, you can include them where necessary in your sales meetings and take the time to understand how tools like Operations Hub, Services Hub, and Sales Hub can integrate with your website to create a truly comprehensive experience for the client and customer.
The client expects the expertise that you promised them.
\n
We prefer to work with agencies. They have the understanding and knowledge of the process to create a really amazing website design that functions in a way that serves the customer. They usually have a seamless process for design, they’re willing to interface with the client, and they usually bring us well-qualified clients that “get it.” Our relationships with our agency clients are our favorite and most consistent relationships, hands down.
Every now and then we are referred to an agency that wants to operate on price alone. They don’t understand the value of a gifted developer, they aren’t seeing the red flags that pop up when they find cheap development, and they don’t have a process in place to quality control the work that they do outsource. Most often, those clients don’t have a robust web development side of their business.
We find this interesting, because in the same sales meeting where that agency convinced the client of their value, they’re selling a project short by not honoring their own beliefs when it comes to getting value for what you’re willing to pay for.
We get it. Business is business. But you can’t, in good conscience, pitch a mission to bring incredible marketing into the world and let your development lag short of that, can you?
Related: 6 Signs it's Time to Ditch Your HubSpot Developer
\n
When you spend so much time talking about customer delight, but also spend a lot of time trying to find the cheapest way to source your development talent while still billing the client as much as possible, we’re not sure you’re being true to your mission.
Instead, maybe what you get in value in these projects over time and the increased trust from your clients and customers means that paying a little more up front is worth it.
Maybe spending a little more for experienced developers that you bring into the fold as part of your sales process can be a complete game-changer for the services you offer and the ways you delight your clients and customers.
Maybe you can completely change your agency by hiring top-tier talent.
We like to think so anyway.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
There's a breakdown between sales and development, and its usually found in over-promising.
\n
We ask all our agency clients to include us in scoping and estimation of all projects and not to throw out a number until we have the opportunity to look closely at a website project, integration, or web app. When an executive or sales professional begins pitching a new website or integration project sale without getting preliminary information or including us on the call, we sometimes run into issues.
An account manager or even the executive team can throw out a ballpark figure based on their experience, only to find there’s a huge customer portal or some other sort of integration required to make it happen.
There is absolutely no question that talented HubSpot CMS developers are difficult to find and retain, but at times there can be issues associated with development that result from a sales or executive team that isn’t technically minded. We leave our booking link open to our clients and often sit in on sales calls with them to help determine the best course of action for a website project, based on budget, desired platform, functionality, required integrations, and goals.
When a sales professional runs a HubSpot CMS development project request meeting, they usually don’t know what information to ask for and miss a lot of important insights. By including your developer in the initial stages of the meeting, you can closely manage expectations and build confidence in your prospect or customer by showing them that you have people on your side that have executed these projects before and know exactly what is needed to complete them.
Sometimes when executive teams lack technical acumen, they are taken advantage of.
\n
We recently encountered a client whose Wordpress developer told them that they could develop a website in HubSpot CMS without any issues. A few weeks and thousands of dollars later, their web developer ghosted them and they went into their portal only to find hard-coded modules implemented that didn’t allow for marketers to complete any edits whatsoever without coding knowledge. It ended up costing them and their client thousands more to have the work entirely redone.
This is the type of issue that can occur if an agency is inexpensively outsourcing and doesn’t have much technical acumen. If you’re outsourcing cheap web development, you should at least consider paying a consultant or HubSpot developer to interview and vet your talent to make sure that you’re getting what you’re paying for.
When it comes to value, when you pay less you’ll compromise on something and pay for that lack of experience down the road. A gifted developer will work more efficiently and be better able to make suggestions during the sales process up front to not only give an accurate estimate, but to really wow the client by not just delivering what they want, but taking those ideas to the next level.
Related: Why an Experienced Web Developer? Your Website Isn't a Sub Sandwich.
\nAn experienced developer can really flex their skills and leverage the capabilities of HubSpot.
\n
Great developers geek out on things like custom objects, line of business application integrations, and other fun projects. If you’re just starting a website development project with an existing client or new prospect, your salesperson or executive team may not know how to take the robust tools available in HubSpot and really integrate the client’s website and business processes into it.
By leveraging an experienced developer as a technical director, you can include them where necessary in your sales meetings and take the time to understand how tools like Operations Hub, Services Hub, and Sales Hub can integrate with your website to create a truly comprehensive experience for the client and customer.
The client expects the expertise that you promised them.
\n
We prefer to work with agencies. They have the understanding and knowledge of the process to create a really amazing website design that functions in a way that serves the customer. They usually have a seamless process for design, they’re willing to interface with the client, and they usually bring us well-qualified clients that “get it.” Our relationships with our agency clients are our favorite and most consistent relationships, hands down.
Every now and then we are referred to an agency that wants to operate on price alone. They don’t understand the value of a gifted developer, they aren’t seeing the red flags that pop up when they find cheap development, and they don’t have a process in place to quality control the work that they do outsource. Most often, those clients don’t have a robust web development side of their business.
We find this interesting, because in the same sales meeting where that agency convinced the client of their value, they’re selling a project short by not honoring their own beliefs when it comes to getting value for what you’re willing to pay for.
We get it. Business is business. But you can’t, in good conscience, pitch a mission to bring incredible marketing into the world and let your development lag short of that, can you?
Related: 6 Signs it's Time to Ditch Your HubSpot Developer
\n
When you spend so much time talking about customer delight, but also spend a lot of time trying to find the cheapest way to source your development talent while still billing the client as much as possible, we’re not sure you’re being true to your mission.
Instead, maybe what you get in value in these projects over time and the increased trust from your clients and customers means that paying a little more up front is worth it.
Maybe spending a little more for experienced developers that you bring into the fold as part of your sales process can be a complete game-changer for the services you offer and the ways you delight your clients and customers.
Maybe you can completely change your agency by hiring top-tier talent.
We like to think so anyway.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
There's a breakdown between sales and development, and its usually found in over-promising.
\n
We ask all our agency clients to include us in scoping and estimation of all projects and not to throw out a number until we have the opportunity to look closely at a website project, integration, or web app. When an executive or sales professional begins pitching a new website or integration project sale without getting preliminary information or including us on the call, we sometimes run into issues.
An account manager or even the executive team can throw out a ballpark figure based on their experience, only to find there’s a huge customer portal or some other sort of integration required to make it happen.
There is absolutely no question that talented HubSpot CMS developers are difficult to find and retain, but at times there can be issues associated with development that result from a sales or executive team that isn’t technically minded. We leave our booking link open to our clients and often sit in on sales calls with them to help determine the best course of action for a website project, based on budget, desired platform, functionality, required integrations, and goals.
When a sales professional runs a HubSpot CMS development project request meeting, they usually don’t know what information to ask for and miss a lot of important insights. By including your developer in the initial stages of the meeting, you can closely manage expectations and build confidence in your prospect or customer by showing them that you have people on your side that have executed these projects before and know exactly what is needed to complete them.
Sometimes when executive teams lack technical acumen, they are taken advantage of.
\n
We recently encountered a client whose Wordpress developer told them that they could develop a website in HubSpot CMS without any issues. A few weeks and thousands of dollars later, their web developer ghosted them and they went into their portal only to find hard-coded modules implemented that didn’t allow for marketers to complete any edits whatsoever without coding knowledge. It ended up costing them and their client thousands more to have the work entirely redone.
This is the type of issue that can occur if an agency is inexpensively outsourcing and doesn’t have much technical acumen. If you’re outsourcing cheap web development, you should at least consider paying a consultant or HubSpot developer to interview and vet your talent to make sure that you’re getting what you’re paying for.
When it comes to value, when you pay less you’ll compromise on something and pay for that lack of experience down the road. A gifted developer will work more efficiently and be better able to make suggestions during the sales process up front to not only give an accurate estimate, but to really wow the client by not just delivering what they want, but taking those ideas to the next level.
Related: Why an Experienced Web Developer? Your Website Isn't a Sub Sandwich.
\nAn experienced developer can really flex their skills and leverage the capabilities of HubSpot.
\n
Great developers geek out on things like custom objects, line of business application integrations, and other fun projects. If you’re just starting a website development project with an existing client or new prospect, your salesperson or executive team may not know how to take the robust tools available in HubSpot and really integrate the client’s website and business processes into it.
By leveraging an experienced developer as a technical director, you can include them where necessary in your sales meetings and take the time to understand how tools like Operations Hub, Services Hub, and Sales Hub can integrate with your website to create a truly comprehensive experience for the client and customer.
The client expects the expertise that you promised them.
\n
We prefer to work with agencies. They have the understanding and knowledge of the process to create a really amazing website design that functions in a way that serves the customer. They usually have a seamless process for design, they’re willing to interface with the client, and they usually bring us well-qualified clients that “get it.” Our relationships with our agency clients are our favorite and most consistent relationships, hands down.
Every now and then we are referred to an agency that wants to operate on price alone. They don’t understand the value of a gifted developer, they aren’t seeing the red flags that pop up when they find cheap development, and they don’t have a process in place to quality control the work that they do outsource. Most often, those clients don’t have a robust web development side of their business.
We find this interesting, because in the same sales meeting where that agency convinced the client of their value, they’re selling a project short by not honoring their own beliefs when it comes to getting value for what you’re willing to pay for.
We get it. Business is business. But you can’t, in good conscience, pitch a mission to bring incredible marketing into the world and let your development lag short of that, can you?
Related: 6 Signs it's Time to Ditch Your HubSpot Developer
\n
When you spend so much time talking about customer delight, but also spend a lot of time trying to find the cheapest way to source your development talent while still billing the client as much as possible, we’re not sure you’re being true to your mission.
Instead, maybe what you get in value in these projects over time and the increased trust from your clients and customers means that paying a little more up front is worth it.
Maybe spending a little more for experienced developers that you bring into the fold as part of your sales process can be a complete game-changer for the services you offer and the ways you delight your clients and customers.
Maybe you can completely change your agency by hiring top-tier talent.
We like to think so anyway.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
There's a breakdown between sales and development, and its usually found in over-promising.
\n
We ask all our agency clients to include us in scoping and estimation of all projects and not to throw out a number until we have the opportunity to look closely at a website project, integration, or web app. When an executive or sales professional begins pitching a new website or integration project sale without getting preliminary information or including us on the call, we sometimes run into issues.
An account manager or even the executive team can throw out a ballpark figure based on their experience, only to find there’s a huge customer portal or some other sort of integration required to make it happen.
There is absolutely no question that talented HubSpot CMS developers are difficult to find and retain, but at times there can be issues associated with development that result from a sales or executive team that isn’t technically minded. We leave our booking link open to our clients and often sit in on sales calls with them to help determine the best course of action for a website project, based on budget, desired platform, functionality, required integrations, and goals.
When a sales professional runs a HubSpot CMS development project request meeting, they usually don’t know what information to ask for and miss a lot of important insights. By including your developer in the initial stages of the meeting, you can closely manage expectations and build confidence in your prospect or customer by showing them that you have people on your side that have executed these projects before and know exactly what is needed to complete them.
Sometimes when executive teams lack technical acumen, they are taken advantage of.
\n
We recently encountered a client whose Wordpress developer told them that they could develop a website in HubSpot CMS without any issues. A few weeks and thousands of dollars later, their web developer ghosted them and they went into their portal only to find hard-coded modules implemented that didn’t allow for marketers to complete any edits whatsoever without coding knowledge. It ended up costing them and their client thousands more to have the work entirely redone.
This is the type of issue that can occur if an agency is inexpensively outsourcing and doesn’t have much technical acumen. If you’re outsourcing cheap web development, you should at least consider paying a consultant or HubSpot developer to interview and vet your talent to make sure that you’re getting what you’re paying for.
When it comes to value, when you pay less you’ll compromise on something and pay for that lack of experience down the road. A gifted developer will work more efficiently and be better able to make suggestions during the sales process up front to not only give an accurate estimate, but to really wow the client by not just delivering what they want, but taking those ideas to the next level.
Related: Why an Experienced Web Developer? Your Website Isn't a Sub Sandwich.
\nAn experienced developer can really flex their skills and leverage the capabilities of HubSpot.
\n
Great developers geek out on things like custom objects, line of business application integrations, and other fun projects. If you’re just starting a website development project with an existing client or new prospect, your salesperson or executive team may not know how to take the robust tools available in HubSpot and really integrate the client’s website and business processes into it.
By leveraging an experienced developer as a technical director, you can include them where necessary in your sales meetings and take the time to understand how tools like Operations Hub, Services Hub, and Sales Hub can integrate with your website to create a truly comprehensive experience for the client and customer.
The client expects the expertise that you promised them.
\n
We prefer to work with agencies. They have the understanding and knowledge of the process to create a really amazing website design that functions in a way that serves the customer. They usually have a seamless process for design, they’re willing to interface with the client, and they usually bring us well-qualified clients that “get it.” Our relationships with our agency clients are our favorite and most consistent relationships, hands down.
Every now and then we are referred to an agency that wants to operate on price alone. They don’t understand the value of a gifted developer, they aren’t seeing the red flags that pop up when they find cheap development, and they don’t have a process in place to quality control the work that they do outsource. Most often, those clients don’t have a robust web development side of their business.
We find this interesting, because in the same sales meeting where that agency convinced the client of their value, they’re selling a project short by not honoring their own beliefs when it comes to getting value for what you’re willing to pay for.
We get it. Business is business. But you can’t, in good conscience, pitch a mission to bring incredible marketing into the world and let your development lag short of that, can you?
Related: 6 Signs it's Time to Ditch Your HubSpot Developer
\n
When you spend so much time talking about customer delight, but also spend a lot of time trying to find the cheapest way to source your development talent while still billing the client as much as possible, we’re not sure you’re being true to your mission.
Instead, maybe what you get in value in these projects over time and the increased trust from your clients and customers means that paying a little more up front is worth it.
Maybe spending a little more for experienced developers that you bring into the fold as part of your sales process can be a complete game-changer for the services you offer and the ways you delight your clients and customers.
Maybe you can completely change your agency by hiring top-tier talent.
We like to think so anyway.
We have taken an honest look at the issues that we’ve come across in our short tenure as a HubSpot Partner. While we have only formally been a HubSpot agency for a short while, we have been working with HubSpot CMS, all related hubs, and HubSpot agencies for much, much longer. Through that time we’ve seen some recurring problems within HubSpot agencies and HubSpot CMS developers in general.
We hear over and over from new agency clients or small businesses that they didn’t get what they needed from their development partner, that the developer over-promised their skills or that the project went wildly over scope. These types of issues are symptoms of a bigger problem: lacking technical expertise at the sales and executive levels. Even HubSpot Partner agencies that are owned by web developers can run into these problems when their staff is overworked or underpaid. Our solution? Fractional technical directors or outsourcing to a skilled HubSpot development agency for more money.
We know. You don’t want to pay more for a service that you’re marking up and risk losing margin, but some of us need to take a serious look at our development partner and ask ourselves, is this a good fit? Where you’re paying less, you’re almost always sacrificing more somewhere else — it’s just a matter of where.
So, hear us out. Here’s why we believe you should pay more for HubSpot CMS development outsourcing for agencies or a fractional technical director as a HubSpot agency.
When it comes to finding a trustworthy, talented HubSpot CMS developer, there is a large pool of HubSpot agencies and a few freelance developers that can get the job done. Not every business has the budget to afford the best in HubSpot CMS development agencies, though. These businesses sometimes opt for HubSpot marketplace templates that can be customized by a developer to make things a little easier. When you do this, you know that the theme has been verified and reviewed by HubSpot and you’ll have a little more peace of mind. But sometimes if you’ve taken the risk to inexpensively outsource a HubSpot developer, it can come with some serious consequences —the worst of which is being ghosted by your developer. ![\"NOT](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/NOT%20SURE%20IF%20THE%20CONVERSATION.webp\")
We’ve seen it a few times, unfortunately. Businesses or agencies are referred to us that outsourced development to an individual that oversold their expertise in HubSpot CMS. The client struggles through part of the process, only to find that the interface isn’t at all what they expected, or the site is slow and buggy, or they get partially through and their developer jumps ship with the deposit when they realize they’re in too far over their head.
What’s an agency or business to do when they find their HubSpot CMS developer has ghosted them?
Take heart, we’ve laid out what needs to happen next.
Take a breath and realize everything is going to be okay.
\n
It’s a hard pill to swallow when your developer abandons the project. Try not to waste too much time pursuing them. While you should definitely perform due diligence to ensure it isn’t just a misunderstanding or illness, once you identify that developer isn’t coming back, you need to accept it so that you can begin to move things forward.
Fight the desire to tell them off. Instead, send them one last email calmly delineating the situation, the payments they’ve received, and their obligation to you or your client. It should include the contract that you’ve established with them (please always get contracts signed by your agency or developer), a timeframe for acceptable response, and an outline of previous communications. If there are any clauses in the contract that cover this situation, you’ll want to refer to them and let them know to expect you to make good on any consequences promised by the contract breach. Keep all correspondence for later, in the event that you make the decision to pursue any other actions.
Don’t internalize things too much or waste time wondering what you should have done differently in vetting this developer. Just know what you should expect when working with an experienced HubSpot CMS developer and begin your search for someone that you can trust to complete the project.
Eliminate access immediately.
\n
If your developer’s moral compass and ethical standards include leaving you high and dry mid-project, you want to protect your assets and property and avoid any further issues. You’ll want to pull that developer’s access to your HubSpot portal, any cloud storage folders that you’ve shared, website content files, image files, design files, and anything else you’ve shared.
The sooner you do this, the more peace of mind you’ll have. You can always come back and add them if it was a misunderstanding, but you cannot get data back if that developer decides to take it from you.
Be transparent and honest about the situation.
\n
This part can be difficult. If you’re inside an organization and managing the project, it will be hard to tell your executive team what has happened. You may worry that they will blame you and you’ll have to face the consequences. If you’re an agency, you may be tempted to not tell the client the entire story. From experience and in the interest of saving the long-term relationship (or your job), you’ll want to rip the Band-Aid off and be as forthcoming as possible. Let them know that you did your best to select a developer within their budget, but unfortunately that developer oversold their skills.
Let them know you’ll need a few weeks to find and vet new talent and what your plans are for recouping their deposit, if possible. If not, you may want to see how you can make it up on the new project by not marking up labor or offering some discounted or free services to make up for your oversight.
Consider an insurance claim or lawsuit.
\n
When it’s not possible to recoup the initial investment, you should consider suing your developer. With any luck, you’ve done due diligence in vetting them and ensured that they have insurance. While we don’t personally have experience in web development insurance lawsuits, we do carry liability insurance ourselves and understand the basic liabilities of being a web developer.
Be sure to consult an attorney and gather any correspondence, your contract or agreement, and anything else you have for them to review. They’ll be able to give you the best insight on what your options are for recouping your investment.
Get recommendations for a reliable HubSpot CMS developer.
\n
You may have to begin again, but this time you’re starting from experience. You already have a good understanding of the red flags and know all the signs it’s time to ditch your HubSpot CMS developer, so this time you’re starting from experience. If you’re a HubSpot Partner, you can start with your Channel Account Manager for the best recommendations. If you’re a HubSpot user that isn’t an agency, you can start with the HubSpot Ecosystem Solutions Directory (please note that you must have a HubSpot portal login to access this directory).
You’ll want to make sure you ask for references and make sure that the developer is a good fit. Just because a HubSpot developer agency is reputable and does good work, doesn’t mean they don’t suffer from agency growing pains that can impact you as a client. Take the time to carefully explain your situation. It’s very likely based on the work that the developer has completed already, the new developer or agency may have to start from scratch. You should be prepared to pay for an entirely new website. We know. It’s a lot, but when it is finished you’ll have a much better foundation that won’t cost you in page load speed or website bloat later on.
Related: Signs it's time to ditch your HubSpot CMS developer
\nIdentify where you are, what you have and keep going.
\n
You’ll want to forward all documents, design files, correspondence, and credentials to your new agency or developer as soon as possible once you’ve executed an agreement with them. The more information they have, the more they’ll be able to do and the faster they can get started. While you don’t want to rush into anything with a developer prior to vetting them properly, you do want to act quickly once you choose your developer.
Be sure not to rush your timelines. You’ll likely have to re-establish a deadline and work at the pace of your new developer to get things done properly. This is actually a great opportunity to take a look at design elements or anything else that you’ve been considering adding to the site. Really take this time to get the feedback from your developer and understand what they think could be changed or tweaked in order to maximize the user experience. An experienced developer will be able to make sound recommendations to optimize user experience.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot developer? Your website isn't a sub sandwich.
\n
It can be hard when your HubSpot developer ghosts you, but the reality is that the type of person or business that would leave you hanging in the middle of a huge project isn’t someone you should be working with anyway. Rather than looking at the negative side of the situation, take a look at the opportunities in front of you. Now you know. Now you’ll never make the mistake of not properly qualifying a developer again.
We are referred many projects that other developers couldn’t bring to the finish line. We’re happy to give yours a second look and see if we can recommend (or be) a HubSpot CMS developer that can help.
When it comes to finding a trustworthy, talented HubSpot CMS developer, there is a large pool of HubSpot agencies and a few freelance developers that can get the job done. Not every business has the budget to afford the best in HubSpot CMS development agencies, though. These businesses sometimes opt for HubSpot marketplace templates that can be customized by a developer to make things a little easier. When you do this, you know that the theme has been verified and reviewed by HubSpot and you’ll have a little more peace of mind. But sometimes if you’ve taken the risk to inexpensively outsource a HubSpot developer, it can come with some serious consequences —the worst of which is being ghosted by your developer. We’ve seen it a few times, unfortunately. Businesses or agencies are referred to us that outsourced development to an individual that oversold their expertise in HubSpot CMS. The client struggles through part of the process, only to find that the interface isn’t at all what they expected, or the site is slow and buggy, or they get partially through and their developer jumps ship with the deposit when they realize they’re in too far over their head.
What’s an agency or business to do when they find their HubSpot CMS developer has ghosted them?
Take heart, we’ve laid out what needs to happen next.
When it comes to finding a trustworthy, talented HubSpot CMS developer, there is a large pool of HubSpot agencies and a few freelance developers that can get the job done. Not every business has the budget to afford the best in HubSpot CMS development agencies, though. These businesses sometimes opt for HubSpot marketplace templates that can be customized by a developer to make things a little easier. When you do this, you know that the theme has been verified and reviewed by HubSpot and you’ll have a little more peace of mind. But sometimes if you’ve taken the risk to inexpensively outsource a HubSpot developer, it can come with some serious consequences —the worst of which is being ghosted by your developer. We’ve seen it a few times, unfortunately. Businesses or agencies are referred to us that outsourced development to an individual that oversold their expertise in HubSpot CMS. The client struggles through part of the process, only to find that the interface isn’t at all what they expected, or the site is slow and buggy, or they get partially through and their developer jumps ship with the deposit when they realize they’re in too far over their head.
What’s an agency or business to do when they find their HubSpot CMS developer has ghosted them?
Take heart, we’ve laid out what needs to happen next.
Take a breath and realize everything is going to be okay.
\n
It’s a hard pill to swallow when your developer abandons the project. Try not to waste too much time pursuing them. While you should definitely perform due diligence to ensure it isn’t just a misunderstanding or illness, once you identify that developer isn’t coming back, you need to accept it so that you can begin to move things forward.
Fight the desire to tell them off. Instead, send them one last email calmly delineating the situation, the payments they’ve received, and their obligation to you or your client. It should include the contract that you’ve established with them (please always get contracts signed by your agency or developer), a timeframe for acceptable response, and an outline of previous communications. If there are any clauses in the contract that cover this situation, you’ll want to refer to them and let them know to expect you to make good on any consequences promised by the contract breach. Keep all correspondence for later, in the event that you make the decision to pursue any other actions.
Don’t internalize things too much or waste time wondering what you should have done differently in vetting this developer. Just know what you should expect when working with an experienced HubSpot CMS developer and begin your search for someone that you can trust to complete the project.
Eliminate access immediately.
\n
If your developer’s moral compass and ethical standards include leaving you high and dry mid-project, you want to protect your assets and property and avoid any further issues. You’ll want to pull that developer’s access to your HubSpot portal, any cloud storage folders that you’ve shared, website content files, image files, design files, and anything else you’ve shared.
The sooner you do this, the more peace of mind you’ll have. You can always come back and add them if it was a misunderstanding, but you cannot get data back if that developer decides to take it from you.
Be transparent and honest about the situation.
\n
This part can be difficult. If you’re inside an organization and managing the project, it will be hard to tell your executive team what has happened. You may worry that they will blame you and you’ll have to face the consequences. If you’re an agency, you may be tempted to not tell the client the entire story. From experience and in the interest of saving the long-term relationship (or your job), you’ll want to rip the Band-Aid off and be as forthcoming as possible. Let them know that you did your best to select a developer within their budget, but unfortunately that developer oversold their skills.
Let them know you’ll need a few weeks to find and vet new talent and what your plans are for recouping their deposit, if possible. If not, you may want to see how you can make it up on the new project by not marking up labor or offering some discounted or free services to make up for your oversight.
Consider an insurance claim or lawsuit.
\n
When it’s not possible to recoup the initial investment, you should consider suing your developer. With any luck, you’ve done due diligence in vetting them and ensured that they have insurance. While we don’t personally have experience in web development insurance lawsuits, we do carry liability insurance ourselves and understand the basic liabilities of being a web developer.
Be sure to consult an attorney and gather any correspondence, your contract or agreement, and anything else you have for them to review. They’ll be able to give you the best insight on what your options are for recouping your investment.
Get recommendations for a reliable HubSpot CMS developer.
\n
You may have to begin again, but this time you’re starting from experience. You already have a good understanding of the red flags and know all the signs it’s time to ditch your HubSpot CMS developer, so this time you’re starting from experience. If you’re a HubSpot Partner, you can start with your Channel Account Manager for the best recommendations. If you’re a HubSpot user that isn’t an agency, you can start with the HubSpot Ecosystem Solutions Directory (please note that you must have a HubSpot portal login to access this directory).
You’ll want to make sure you ask for references and make sure that the developer is a good fit. Just because a HubSpot developer agency is reputable and does good work, doesn’t mean they don’t suffer from agency growing pains that can impact you as a client. Take the time to carefully explain your situation. It’s very likely based on the work that the developer has completed already, the new developer or agency may have to start from scratch. You should be prepared to pay for an entirely new website. We know. It’s a lot, but when it is finished you’ll have a much better foundation that won’t cost you in page load speed or website bloat later on.
Related: Signs it's time to ditch your HubSpot CMS developer
\nIdentify where you are, what you have and keep going.
\n
You’ll want to forward all documents, design files, correspondence, and credentials to your new agency or developer as soon as possible once you’ve executed an agreement with them. The more information they have, the more they’ll be able to do and the faster they can get started. While you don’t want to rush into anything with a developer prior to vetting them properly, you do want to act quickly once you choose your developer.
Be sure not to rush your timelines. You’ll likely have to re-establish a deadline and work at the pace of your new developer to get things done properly. This is actually a great opportunity to take a look at design elements or anything else that you’ve been considering adding to the site. Really take this time to get the feedback from your developer and understand what they think could be changed or tweaked in order to maximize the user experience. An experienced developer will be able to make sound recommendations to optimize user experience.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot developer? Your website isn't a sub sandwich.
\n
It can be hard when your HubSpot developer ghosts you, but the reality is that the type of person or business that would leave you hanging in the middle of a huge project isn’t someone you should be working with anyway. Rather than looking at the negative side of the situation, take a look at the opportunities in front of you. Now you know. Now you’ll never make the mistake of not properly qualifying a developer again.
We are referred many projects that other developers couldn’t bring to the finish line. We’re happy to give yours a second look and see if we can recommend (or be) a HubSpot CMS developer that can help.
When it comes to finding a trustworthy, talented HubSpot CMS developer, there is a large pool of HubSpot agencies and a few freelance developers that can get the job done. Not every business has the budget to afford the best in HubSpot CMS development agencies, though. These businesses sometimes opt for HubSpot marketplace templates that can be customized by a developer to make things a little easier. When you do this, you know that the theme has been verified and reviewed by HubSpot and you’ll have a little more peace of mind. But sometimes if you’ve taken the risk to inexpensively outsource a HubSpot developer, it can come with some serious consequences —the worst of which is being ghosted by your developer. We’ve seen it a few times, unfortunately. Businesses or agencies are referred to us that outsourced development to an individual that oversold their expertise in HubSpot CMS. The client struggles through part of the process, only to find that the interface isn’t at all what they expected, or the site is slow and buggy, or they get partially through and their developer jumps ship with the deposit when they realize they’re in too far over their head.
What’s an agency or business to do when they find their HubSpot CMS developer has ghosted them?
Take heart, we’ve laid out what needs to happen next.
When it comes to finding a trustworthy, talented HubSpot CMS developer, there is a large pool of HubSpot agencies and a few freelance developers that can get the job done. Not every business has the budget to afford the best in HubSpot CMS development agencies, though. These businesses sometimes opt for HubSpot marketplace templates that can be customized by a developer to make things a little easier. When you do this, you know that the theme has been verified and reviewed by HubSpot and you’ll have a little more peace of mind. But sometimes if you’ve taken the risk to inexpensively outsource a HubSpot developer, it can come with some serious consequences —the worst of which is being ghosted by your developer. We’ve seen it a few times, unfortunately. Businesses or agencies are referred to us that outsourced development to an individual that oversold their expertise in HubSpot CMS. The client struggles through part of the process, only to find that the interface isn’t at all what they expected, or the site is slow and buggy, or they get partially through and their developer jumps ship with the deposit when they realize they’re in too far over their head.
What’s an agency or business to do when they find their HubSpot CMS developer has ghosted them?
Take heart, we’ve laid out what needs to happen next.
Take a breath and realize everything is going to be okay.
\n
It’s a hard pill to swallow when your developer abandons the project. Try not to waste too much time pursuing them. While you should definitely perform due diligence to ensure it isn’t just a misunderstanding or illness, once you identify that developer isn’t coming back, you need to accept it so that you can begin to move things forward.
Fight the desire to tell them off. Instead, send them one last email calmly delineating the situation, the payments they’ve received, and their obligation to you or your client. It should include the contract that you’ve established with them (please always get contracts signed by your agency or developer), a timeframe for acceptable response, and an outline of previous communications. If there are any clauses in the contract that cover this situation, you’ll want to refer to them and let them know to expect you to make good on any consequences promised by the contract breach. Keep all correspondence for later, in the event that you make the decision to pursue any other actions.
Don’t internalize things too much or waste time wondering what you should have done differently in vetting this developer. Just know what you should expect when working with an experienced HubSpot CMS developer and begin your search for someone that you can trust to complete the project.
Eliminate access immediately.
\n
If your developer’s moral compass and ethical standards include leaving you high and dry mid-project, you want to protect your assets and property and avoid any further issues. You’ll want to pull that developer’s access to your HubSpot portal, any cloud storage folders that you’ve shared, website content files, image files, design files, and anything else you’ve shared.
The sooner you do this, the more peace of mind you’ll have. You can always come back and add them if it was a misunderstanding, but you cannot get data back if that developer decides to take it from you.
Be transparent and honest about the situation.
\n
This part can be difficult. If you’re inside an organization and managing the project, it will be hard to tell your executive team what has happened. You may worry that they will blame you and you’ll have to face the consequences. If you’re an agency, you may be tempted to not tell the client the entire story. From experience and in the interest of saving the long-term relationship (or your job), you’ll want to rip the Band-Aid off and be as forthcoming as possible. Let them know that you did your best to select a developer within their budget, but unfortunately that developer oversold their skills.
Let them know you’ll need a few weeks to find and vet new talent and what your plans are for recouping their deposit, if possible. If not, you may want to see how you can make it up on the new project by not marking up labor or offering some discounted or free services to make up for your oversight.
Consider an insurance claim or lawsuit.
\n
When it’s not possible to recoup the initial investment, you should consider suing your developer. With any luck, you’ve done due diligence in vetting them and ensured that they have insurance. While we don’t personally have experience in web development insurance lawsuits, we do carry liability insurance ourselves and understand the basic liabilities of being a web developer.
Be sure to consult an attorney and gather any correspondence, your contract or agreement, and anything else you have for them to review. They’ll be able to give you the best insight on what your options are for recouping your investment.
Get recommendations for a reliable HubSpot CMS developer.
\n
You may have to begin again, but this time you’re starting from experience. You already have a good understanding of the red flags and know all the signs it’s time to ditch your HubSpot CMS developer, so this time you’re starting from experience. If you’re a HubSpot Partner, you can start with your Channel Account Manager for the best recommendations. If you’re a HubSpot user that isn’t an agency, you can start with the HubSpot Ecosystem Solutions Directory (please note that you must have a HubSpot portal login to access this directory).
You’ll want to make sure you ask for references and make sure that the developer is a good fit. Just because a HubSpot developer agency is reputable and does good work, doesn’t mean they don’t suffer from agency growing pains that can impact you as a client. Take the time to carefully explain your situation. It’s very likely based on the work that the developer has completed already, the new developer or agency may have to start from scratch. You should be prepared to pay for an entirely new website. We know. It’s a lot, but when it is finished you’ll have a much better foundation that won’t cost you in page load speed or website bloat later on.
Related: Signs it's time to ditch your HubSpot CMS developer
\nIdentify where you are, what you have and keep going.
\n
You’ll want to forward all documents, design files, correspondence, and credentials to your new agency or developer as soon as possible once you’ve executed an agreement with them. The more information they have, the more they’ll be able to do and the faster they can get started. While you don’t want to rush into anything with a developer prior to vetting them properly, you do want to act quickly once you choose your developer.
Be sure not to rush your timelines. You’ll likely have to re-establish a deadline and work at the pace of your new developer to get things done properly. This is actually a great opportunity to take a look at design elements or anything else that you’ve been considering adding to the site. Really take this time to get the feedback from your developer and understand what they think could be changed or tweaked in order to maximize the user experience. An experienced developer will be able to make sound recommendations to optimize user experience.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot developer? Your website isn't a sub sandwich.
\n
It can be hard when your HubSpot developer ghosts you, but the reality is that the type of person or business that would leave you hanging in the middle of a huge project isn’t someone you should be working with anyway. Rather than looking at the negative side of the situation, take a look at the opportunities in front of you. Now you know. Now you’ll never make the mistake of not properly qualifying a developer again.
We are referred many projects that other developers couldn’t bring to the finish line. We’re happy to give yours a second look and see if we can recommend (or be) a HubSpot CMS developer that can help.
When it comes to finding a trustworthy, talented HubSpot CMS developer, there is a large pool of HubSpot agencies and a few freelance developers that can get the job done. Not every business has the budget to afford the best in HubSpot CMS development agencies, though. These businesses sometimes opt for HubSpot marketplace templates that can be customized by a developer to make things a little easier. When you do this, you know that the theme has been verified and reviewed by HubSpot and you’ll have a little more peace of mind. But sometimes if you’ve taken the risk to inexpensively outsource a HubSpot developer, it can come with some serious consequences —the worst of which is being ghosted by your developer. We’ve seen it a few times, unfortunately. Businesses or agencies are referred to us that outsourced development to an individual that oversold their expertise in HubSpot CMS. The client struggles through part of the process, only to find that the interface isn’t at all what they expected, or the site is slow and buggy, or they get partially through and their developer jumps ship with the deposit when they realize they’re in too far over their head.
What’s an agency or business to do when they find their HubSpot CMS developer has ghosted them?
Take heart, we’ve laid out what needs to happen next.
Take a breath and realize everything is going to be okay.
\n
It’s a hard pill to swallow when your developer abandons the project. Try not to waste too much time pursuing them. While you should definitely perform due diligence to ensure it isn’t just a misunderstanding or illness, once you identify that developer isn’t coming back, you need to accept it so that you can begin to move things forward.
Fight the desire to tell them off. Instead, send them one last email calmly delineating the situation, the payments they’ve received, and their obligation to you or your client. It should include the contract that you’ve established with them (please always get contracts signed by your agency or developer), a timeframe for acceptable response, and an outline of previous communications. If there are any clauses in the contract that cover this situation, you’ll want to refer to them and let them know to expect you to make good on any consequences promised by the contract breach. Keep all correspondence for later, in the event that you make the decision to pursue any other actions.
Don’t internalize things too much or waste time wondering what you should have done differently in vetting this developer. Just know what you should expect when working with an experienced HubSpot CMS developer and begin your search for someone that you can trust to complete the project.
Eliminate access immediately.
\n
If your developer’s moral compass and ethical standards include leaving you high and dry mid-project, you want to protect your assets and property and avoid any further issues. You’ll want to pull that developer’s access to your HubSpot portal, any cloud storage folders that you’ve shared, website content files, image files, design files, and anything else you’ve shared.
The sooner you do this, the more peace of mind you’ll have. You can always come back and add them if it was a misunderstanding, but you cannot get data back if that developer decides to take it from you.
Be transparent and honest about the situation.
\n
This part can be difficult. If you’re inside an organization and managing the project, it will be hard to tell your executive team what has happened. You may worry that they will blame you and you’ll have to face the consequences. If you’re an agency, you may be tempted to not tell the client the entire story. From experience and in the interest of saving the long-term relationship (or your job), you’ll want to rip the Band-Aid off and be as forthcoming as possible. Let them know that you did your best to select a developer within their budget, but unfortunately that developer oversold their skills.
Let them know you’ll need a few weeks to find and vet new talent and what your plans are for recouping their deposit, if possible. If not, you may want to see how you can make it up on the new project by not marking up labor or offering some discounted or free services to make up for your oversight.
Consider an insurance claim or lawsuit.
\n
When it’s not possible to recoup the initial investment, you should consider suing your developer. With any luck, you’ve done due diligence in vetting them and ensured that they have insurance. While we don’t personally have experience in web development insurance lawsuits, we do carry liability insurance ourselves and understand the basic liabilities of being a web developer.
Be sure to consult an attorney and gather any correspondence, your contract or agreement, and anything else you have for them to review. They’ll be able to give you the best insight on what your options are for recouping your investment.
Get recommendations for a reliable HubSpot CMS developer.
\n
You may have to begin again, but this time you’re starting from experience. You already have a good understanding of the red flags and know all the signs it’s time to ditch your HubSpot CMS developer, so this time you’re starting from experience. If you’re a HubSpot Partner, you can start with your Channel Account Manager for the best recommendations. If you’re a HubSpot user that isn’t an agency, you can start with the HubSpot Ecosystem Solutions Directory (please note that you must have a HubSpot portal login to access this directory).
You’ll want to make sure you ask for references and make sure that the developer is a good fit. Just because a HubSpot developer agency is reputable and does good work, doesn’t mean they don’t suffer from agency growing pains that can impact you as a client. Take the time to carefully explain your situation. It’s very likely based on the work that the developer has completed already, the new developer or agency may have to start from scratch. You should be prepared to pay for an entirely new website. We know. It’s a lot, but when it is finished you’ll have a much better foundation that won’t cost you in page load speed or website bloat later on.
Related: Signs it's time to ditch your HubSpot CMS developer
\nIdentify where you are, what you have and keep going.
\n
You’ll want to forward all documents, design files, correspondence, and credentials to your new agency or developer as soon as possible once you’ve executed an agreement with them. The more information they have, the more they’ll be able to do and the faster they can get started. While you don’t want to rush into anything with a developer prior to vetting them properly, you do want to act quickly once you choose your developer.
Be sure not to rush your timelines. You’ll likely have to re-establish a deadline and work at the pace of your new developer to get things done properly. This is actually a great opportunity to take a look at design elements or anything else that you’ve been considering adding to the site. Really take this time to get the feedback from your developer and understand what they think could be changed or tweaked in order to maximize the user experience. An experienced developer will be able to make sound recommendations to optimize user experience.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot developer? Your website isn't a sub sandwich.
\n
It can be hard when your HubSpot developer ghosts you, but the reality is that the type of person or business that would leave you hanging in the middle of a huge project isn’t someone you should be working with anyway. Rather than looking at the negative side of the situation, take a look at the opportunities in front of you. Now you know. Now you’ll never make the mistake of not properly qualifying a developer again.
We are referred many projects that other developers couldn’t bring to the finish line. We’re happy to give yours a second look and see if we can recommend (or be) a HubSpot CMS developer that can help.
When it comes to finding a trustworthy, talented HubSpot CMS developer, there is a large pool of HubSpot agencies and a few freelance developers that can get the job done. Not every business has the budget to afford the best in HubSpot CMS development agencies, though. These businesses sometimes opt for HubSpot marketplace templates that can be customized by a developer to make things a little easier. When you do this, you know that the theme has been verified and reviewed by HubSpot and you’ll have a little more peace of mind. But sometimes if you’ve taken the risk to inexpensively outsource a HubSpot developer, it can come with some serious consequences —the worst of which is being ghosted by your developer.
We’ve seen it a few times, unfortunately. Businesses or agencies are referred to us that outsourced development to an individual that oversold their expertise in HubSpot CMS. The client struggles through part of the process, only to find that the interface isn’t at all what they expected, or the site is slow and buggy, or they get partially through and their developer jumps ship with the deposit when they realize they’re in too far over their head.
What’s an agency or business to do when they find their HubSpot CMS developer has ghosted them?
Take heart, we’ve laid out what needs to happen next.
When it comes to finding a trustworthy, talented HubSpot CMS developer, there is a large pool of HubSpot agencies and a few freelance developers that can get the job done. Not every business has the budget to afford the best in HubSpot CMS development agencies, though. These businesses sometimes opt for HubSpot marketplace templates that can be customized by a developer to make things a little easier. When you do this, you know that the theme has been verified and reviewed by HubSpot and you’ll have a little more peace of mind. But sometimes if you’ve taken the risk to inexpensively outsource a HubSpot developer, it can come with some serious consequences —the worst of which is being ghosted by your developer.
We’ve seen it a few times, unfortunately. Businesses or agencies are referred to us that outsourced development to an individual that oversold their expertise in HubSpot CMS. The client struggles through part of the process, only to find that the interface isn’t at all what they expected, or the site is slow and buggy, or they get partially through and their developer jumps ship with the deposit when they realize they’re in too far over their head.
What’s an agency or business to do when they find their HubSpot CMS developer has ghosted them?
Take heart, we’ve laid out what needs to happen next.
When it comes to finding a trustworthy, talented HubSpot CMS developer, there is a large pool of HubSpot agencies and a few freelance developers that can get the job done. Not every business has the budget to afford the best in HubSpot CMS development agencies, though. These businesses sometimes opt for HubSpot marketplace templates that can be customized by a developer to make things a little easier. When you do this, you know that the theme has been verified and reviewed by HubSpot and you’ll have a little more peace of mind. But sometimes if you’ve taken the risk to inexpensively outsource a HubSpot developer, it can come with some serious consequences —the worst of which is being ghosted by your developer.
We’ve seen it a few times, unfortunately. Businesses or agencies are referred to us that outsourced development to an individual that oversold their expertise in HubSpot CMS. The client struggles through part of the process, only to find that the interface isn’t at all what they expected, or the site is slow and buggy, or they get partially through and their developer jumps ship with the deposit when they realize they’re in too far over their head.
What’s an agency or business to do when they find their HubSpot CMS developer has ghosted them?
Take heart, we’ve laid out what needs to happen next.
When it comes to finding a trustworthy, talented HubSpot CMS developer, there is a large pool of HubSpot agencies and a few freelance developers that can get the job done. Not every business has the budget to afford the best in HubSpot CMS development agencies, though. These businesses sometimes opt for HubSpot marketplace templates that can be customized by a developer to make things a little easier. When you do this, you know that the theme has been verified and reviewed by HubSpot and you’ll have a little more peace of mind. But sometimes if you’ve taken the risk to inexpensively outsource a HubSpot developer, it can come with some serious consequences —the worst of which is being ghosted by your developer. We’ve seen it a few times, unfortunately. Businesses or agencies are referred to us that outsourced development to an individual that oversold their expertise in HubSpot CMS. The client struggles through part of the process, only to find that the interface isn’t at all what they expected, or the site is slow and buggy, or they get partially through and their developer jumps ship with the deposit when they realize they’re in too far over their head.
What’s an agency or business to do when they find their HubSpot CMS developer has ghosted them?
Take heart, we’ve laid out what needs to happen next.
When it comes to finding a trustworthy, talented HubSpot CMS developer, there is a large pool of HubSpot agencies and a few freelance developers that can get the job done. Not every business has the budget to afford the best in HubSpot CMS development agencies, though. These businesses sometimes opt for HubSpot marketplace templates that can be customized by a developer to make things a little easier. When you do this, you know that the theme has been verified and reviewed by HubSpot and you’ll have a little more peace of mind. But sometimes if you’ve taken the risk to inexpensively outsource a HubSpot developer, it can come with some serious consequences —the worst of which is being ghosted by your developer.
We’ve seen it a few times, unfortunately. Businesses or agencies are referred to us that outsourced development to an individual that oversold their expertise in HubSpot CMS. The client struggles through part of the process, only to find that the interface isn’t at all what they expected, or the site is slow and buggy, or they get partially through and their developer jumps ship with the deposit when they realize they’re in too far over their head.
What’s an agency or business to do when they find their HubSpot CMS developer has ghosted them?
Take heart, we’ve laid out what needs to happen next.
When it comes to finding a trustworthy, talented HubSpot CMS developer, there is a large pool of HubSpot agencies and a few freelance developers that can get the job done. Not every business has the budget to afford the best in HubSpot CMS development agencies, though. These businesses sometimes opt for HubSpot marketplace templates that can be customized by a developer to make things a little easier. When you do this, you know that the theme has been verified and reviewed by HubSpot and you’ll have a little more peace of mind. But sometimes if you’ve taken the risk to inexpensively outsource a HubSpot developer, it can come with some serious consequences —the worst of which is being ghosted by your developer. We’ve seen it a few times, unfortunately. Businesses or agencies are referred to us that outsourced development to an individual that oversold their expertise in HubSpot CMS. The client struggles through part of the process, only to find that the interface isn’t at all what they expected, or the site is slow and buggy, or they get partially through and their developer jumps ship with the deposit when they realize they’re in too far over their head.
What’s an agency or business to do when they find their HubSpot CMS developer has ghosted them?
Take heart, we’ve laid out what needs to happen next.
Take a breath and realize everything is going to be okay.
\n
It’s a hard pill to swallow when your developer abandons the project. Try not to waste too much time pursuing them. While you should definitely perform due diligence to ensure it isn’t just a misunderstanding or illness, once you identify that developer isn’t coming back, you need to accept it so that you can begin to move things forward.
Fight the desire to tell them off. Instead, send them one last email calmly delineating the situation, the payments they’ve received, and their obligation to you or your client. It should include the contract that you’ve established with them (please always get contracts signed by your agency or developer), a timeframe for acceptable response, and an outline of previous communications. If there are any clauses in the contract that cover this situation, you’ll want to refer to them and let them know to expect you to make good on any consequences promised by the contract breach. Keep all correspondence for later, in the event that you make the decision to pursue any other actions.
Don’t internalize things too much or waste time wondering what you should have done differently in vetting this developer. Just know what you should expect when working with an experienced HubSpot CMS developer and begin your search for someone that you can trust to complete the project.
Eliminate access immediately.
\n
If your developer’s moral compass and ethical standards include leaving you high and dry mid-project, you want to protect your assets and property and avoid any further issues. You’ll want to pull that developer’s access to your HubSpot portal, any cloud storage folders that you’ve shared, website content files, image files, design files, and anything else you’ve shared.
The sooner you do this, the more peace of mind you’ll have. You can always come back and add them if it was a misunderstanding, but you cannot get data back if that developer decides to take it from you.
Be transparent and honest about the situation.
\n
This part can be difficult. If you’re inside an organization and managing the project, it will be hard to tell your executive team what has happened. You may worry that they will blame you and you’ll have to face the consequences. If you’re an agency, you may be tempted to not tell the client the entire story. From experience and in the interest of saving the long-term relationship (or your job), you’ll want to rip the Band-Aid off and be as forthcoming as possible. Let them know that you did your best to select a developer within their budget, but unfortunately that developer oversold their skills.
Let them know you’ll need a few weeks to find and vet new talent and what your plans are for recouping their deposit, if possible. If not, you may want to see how you can make it up on the new project by not marking up labor or offering some discounted or free services to make up for your oversight.
Consider an insurance claim or lawsuit.
\n
When it’s not possible to recoup the initial investment, you should consider suing your developer. With any luck, you’ve done due diligence in vetting them and ensured that they have insurance. While we don’t personally have experience in web development insurance lawsuits, we do carry liability insurance ourselves and understand the basic liabilities of being a web developer.
Be sure to consult an attorney and gather any correspondence, your contract or agreement, and anything else you have for them to review. They’ll be able to give you the best insight on what your options are for recouping your investment.
Get recommendations for a reliable HubSpot CMS developer.
\n
You may have to begin again, but this time you’re starting from experience. You already have a good understanding of the red flags and know all the signs it’s time to ditch your HubSpot CMS developer, so this time you’re starting from experience. If you’re a HubSpot Partner, you can start with your Channel Account Manager for the best recommendations. If you’re a HubSpot user that isn’t an agency, you can start with the HubSpot Ecosystem Solutions Directory (please note that you must have a HubSpot portal login to access this directory).
You’ll want to make sure you ask for references and make sure that the developer is a good fit. Just because a HubSpot developer agency is reputable and does good work, doesn’t mean they don’t suffer from agency growing pains that can impact you as a client. Take the time to carefully explain your situation. It’s very likely based on the work that the developer has completed already, the new developer or agency may have to start from scratch. You should be prepared to pay for an entirely new website. We know. It’s a lot, but when it is finished you’ll have a much better foundation that won’t cost you in page load speed or website bloat later on.
Related: Signs it's time to ditch your HubSpot CMS developer
\nIdentify where you are, what you have and keep going.
\n
You’ll want to forward all documents, design files, correspondence, and credentials to your new agency or developer as soon as possible once you’ve executed an agreement with them. The more information they have, the more they’ll be able to do and the faster they can get started. While you don’t want to rush into anything with a developer prior to vetting them properly, you do want to act quickly once you choose your developer.
Be sure not to rush your timelines. You’ll likely have to re-establish a deadline and work at the pace of your new developer to get things done properly. This is actually a great opportunity to take a look at design elements or anything else that you’ve been considering adding to the site. Really take this time to get the feedback from your developer and understand what they think could be changed or tweaked in order to maximize the user experience. An experienced developer will be able to make sound recommendations to optimize user experience.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot developer? Your website isn't a sub sandwich.
\n
It can be hard when your HubSpot developer ghosts you, but the reality is that the type of person or business that would leave you hanging in the middle of a huge project isn’t someone you should be working with anyway. Rather than looking at the negative side of the situation, take a look at the opportunities in front of you. Now you know. Now you’ll never make the mistake of not properly qualifying a developer again.
We are referred many projects that other developers couldn’t bring to the finish line. We’re happy to give yours a second look and see if we can recommend (or be) a HubSpot CMS developer that can help.
When it comes to finding a trustworthy, talented HubSpot CMS developer, there is a large pool of HubSpot agencies and a few freelance developers that can get the job done. Not every business has the budget to afford the best in HubSpot CMS development agencies, though. These businesses sometimes opt for HubSpot marketplace templates that can be customized by a developer to make things a little easier. When you do this, you know that the theme has been verified and reviewed by HubSpot and you’ll have a little more peace of mind. But sometimes if you’ve taken the risk to inexpensively outsource a HubSpot developer, it can come with some serious consequences —the worst of which is being ghosted by your developer. We’ve seen it a few times, unfortunately. Businesses or agencies are referred to us that outsourced development to an individual that oversold their expertise in HubSpot CMS. The client struggles through part of the process, only to find that the interface isn’t at all what they expected, or the site is slow and buggy, or they get partially through and their developer jumps ship with the deposit when they realize they’re in too far over their head.
What’s an agency or business to do when they find their HubSpot CMS developer has ghosted them?
Take heart, we’ve laid out what needs to happen next.
Business owners, marketers, and executive teams groan when it comes time for a new website project, and for good reason. It’s rare that a website project (particularly a redesign) stays within a reasonable budget or timeline. As quality HubSpot CMS developers become harder to find, and the biggest agencies continue to run into issues with scaling, a new website project proposal process can seem daunting. If you have only had bad experiences with website builds, what do you need to know to ensure things go more smoothly next time?
We’ve shared the warning signs that it’s time to ditch your current HubSpot developer, but you should also know what to expect when you choose a HubSpot developer. Here are seven things you can expect from a qualified, experienced HubSpot CMS developer when you’re developing a new website project.
1. A projected timeline.
\n
It’s hard to predict exactly when a website will launch, and while the go-live day can change based on any number of factors, setting an approximate timeline or specifying a certain week of the month you expect to finalize the project is more than reasonable. If you have a target date, you can build a for deliverables, including the delivery of the design, sign-off and approval of that design, development of modules, and delivery of a quality-assured and -tested first draft.
Your development partner should break down the timeline and hold you accountable as well, by specifying the date when final first draft edits are needed, as well as having you name a single point of contact to manage all edits on your side. This minimizes the back and forth for last-minute changes to design or afterthought additions to the website. While there are always a few edits and bugs to work out, for the most part once your design is approved and finalized, development should be fairly straightforward.
Be wary of developers promising a very specific launch date or refusing to adjust a launch date based on how the project unfolds. Setting realistic expectations is important, and unless you’ve worked with your developer in the past, it’s unlikely that you’ll meet a set-in-stone launch date. There are a number of variables outside a developer’s control that can affect the ability to launch at an exact date, such as delayed delivery of edits, additional design changes, or out of scope work. While a single-day delay may not impact a launch date, prolonged delays or the accumulation of minor delays can start to put pressure on the developer.
Busy dev agencies typically have their development staff estimated out. If your approvals and content aren’t delivered on time, this could come back to bite you later. Be sure to do your own due diligence and understand that it’s possible you might have played a role in your delayed launch. The ideal developer will work with you and explain that timelines are a guideline or estimate, and the more closely you both do your parts, the closer to that estimate the actual launch will be.
2. A finalized proof.
\n
We recently had a prospect come in whose HubSpot agency was bogged down (link when available). Whether that agency was chronically short staffed or just growing at a super fast pace, the Marketing Manager that we met with was pretty upset about the final draft that was delivered to them. “It’s almost as though they want us to handle the quality control, there were so many bugs and formatting issues. The proof didn’t even look like the agreed-upon design.”
It’s the worst to get clients that are unhappy with the delivery of a project that has such a significant upfront investment —so unhappy that they had to move development agencies to get quality delivered. By delineating the deliverables and responsibilities of each party, a client can easily hold their developer accountable by pointing back to the project timeline and responsibilities outline in order to receive exactly what they expect when it’s time for the final draft to be reviewed.
3. Feedback on your design requests.
\n
We say it a lot, but your developer should be more than an order taker. If you approach your agency with a preconceived design concept and haven’t had a UX/UI expert review it, your web developer should have usability and design feature feedback and suggestions based on your goals. They should be experienced enough in the front and back end of HubSpot CMS to point out potential issues with design and ask detailed questions on your expectations for both the end-user and the marketing team that will be updating content.
A user-friendly interface will allow employees to operate more efficiently and users to find the information they need with ease, increasing conversion rates and selling more products and services. It’s possible you’ve got a great design, but you should very specifically ask your developer for their feedback and suggestions. Their answer will tell a lot about the depth of their expertise and understanding of the relations among marketing, conversion optimization, and development.
Related reading: Your Website Isn’t a Submarine Sandwich
\n4. Accountability and updates.
\n![\"HubSpot](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/HubSpot%20CMS%20developer%20Utopia%207%20things%20to%20expect%20when%20developing%20a%20Hubspot%20website%20(1).webp\")
Sometimes projects run into delays. Whether we’re waiting on access to a third-party application that we’re integrating with the website, your edits are taking longer than expected, or we’ve just run into challenges implementing the design, sometimes projects don’t run on time. Communication is the difference between an experienced, accountable developer and an inexperienced developer who’s bogged down or doesn’t have your best interests in mind.
Your HubSpot developer should have your project mapped out from the start. Any missed milestone has the potential to delay the delivery timeline. An experienced developer will know this and reach out quickly to communicate rather than making excuses when the project is running behind schedule. They’ll quickly inform you of the timeline for out of scope work and how you can expect those design changes or edits to impact the timeline initially discussed.
\n5. Push for needed items.
\n
Every web developer knows how busy small- to medium-sized businesses can be. With employees taking on multiple job functions and a huge focus on performance, delays in needed items can sometimes occur. Rather than sitting around and waiting (unless they’ve been specifically instructed to do so due to project delays), a qualified and experienced developer will follow up on deadlines for content, images, style elements, and feedback to keep a project running on time. They understand that your goals are important and that sometimes the day to day can get in the way of timely delivery. They’ll push for what they need and try to help you organize it as simply as possible for efficient handoff.
6. Training and support.
\n
Often a website project will launch and additional work will be needed. An employee might find inaccurate data in the website, an important design change may be needed, or marketing and IT staff may need training on how to change and edit the website. An experienced developer will accommodate this by providing a certain number of hours for training, support, and bug fixes for up to a week or two after project launch. They’ll hand-hold the transition and make sure they’re readily available should anything happen or should quick edits need to be made. Your developer shouldn’t ghost you or fail to support their work after the fact.
7. Post-launch feedback timeline.
\n
While a skilled, experienced, reputable HubSpot developer will stand behind their work and assist in the transition and delivery of your website after launch, they’ll also be sure to hold your organization accountable when it comes to edits and bug fixes. They’ll often provide one or two weeks for your point of contact to reach out with any issues that need to be completed or fixed. Once this timeline has expired, there may be a small amount of wiggle room, but generally you should expect to pay for any edits or changes after the agreed-upon delivery deadline. More proactive developers will have already negotiated a growth-driven design retainer of some sort to help ensure that you can continuously improve your website as your marketing evolves.
It is worthwhile to talk about the difference between defects or bug fixes and revisions. This is something that your developer will help you define beforehand and help categorize as they come up. Bug fixes or defects are items that aren’t working properly or weren’t executed correctly by the developer. Revisions are small tweaks that a client may find after the fact for elements that don’t work as well as they expected. For instance, the structure or length of copy or placeholder photos versus actual photos may make the delivered site different from the original design. Revisions will usually cost extra, but this can vary depending on the developer and whether the project came in within scope.
Related reading: the continuous improvement model
\n
Strategy for what’s to come.
\n
Continuous improvement is the next step for any company with a focus on inbound marketing. You’ll probably need to add more landing page templates, additional modules, or new calculators or other widgets as you understand more about the buyer’s journey. The complexity of the information you present will change and you’ll want to be sure that your website is keeping up with the ever-changing needs of your marketing staff. Having a growth-driven design retainer for continual improvement and evolution of your website is important, and your development team should discuss this both before and after launch to help you prepare a budget. This will ensure that your marketing staff continues to be happy with your website on an ongoing basis and avoid those expensive overhauls every three to five years.
Not every company owner, marketing manager, or agency that is outsourcing HubSpot development work knows what to expect or what needs to be done when it comes to a new HubSpot CMS development project. A skilled, experienced developer will have structures in place and communicate the needs and expectations for both their agency and your organization when it comes to delivering the project according to your expectations.
It might take time and it might not always look perfect, but fostering a close relationship with your HubSpot development professional is extremely important to the success of your marketing, the happiness of your employees, and the evolution of your online presence. Do your diligence to qualify any developer you’re vetting. If you need help, we’re always willing to provide a second opinion.
\n\n
Business owners, marketers, and executive teams groan when it comes time for a new website project, and for good reason. It’s rare that a website project (particularly a redesign) stays within a reasonable budget or timeline. As quality HubSpot CMS developers become harder to find, and the biggest agencies continue to run into issues with scaling, a new website project proposal process can seem daunting. If you have only had bad experiences with website builds, what do you need to know to ensure things go more smoothly next time?
Business owners, marketers, and executive teams groan when it comes time for a new website project, and for good reason. It’s rare that a website project (particularly a redesign) stays within a reasonable budget or timeline. As quality HubSpot CMS developers become harder to find, and the biggest agencies continue to run into issues with scaling, a new website project proposal process can seem daunting. If you have only had bad experiences with website builds, what do you need to know to ensure things go more smoothly next time?
We’ve shared the warning signs that it’s time to ditch your current HubSpot developer, but you should also know what to expect when you choose a HubSpot developer. Here are seven things you can expect from a qualified, experienced HubSpot CMS developer when you’re developing a new website project.
1. A projected timeline.
\n
It’s hard to predict exactly when a website will launch, and while the go-live day can change based on any number of factors, setting an approximate timeline or specifying a certain week of the month you expect to finalize the project is more than reasonable. If you have a target date, you can build a for deliverables, including the delivery of the design, sign-off and approval of that design, development of modules, and delivery of a quality-assured and -tested first draft.
Your development partner should break down the timeline and hold you accountable as well, by specifying the date when final first draft edits are needed, as well as having you name a single point of contact to manage all edits on your side. This minimizes the back and forth for last-minute changes to design or afterthought additions to the website. While there are always a few edits and bugs to work out, for the most part once your design is approved and finalized, development should be fairly straightforward.
Be wary of developers promising a very specific launch date or refusing to adjust a launch date based on how the project unfolds. Setting realistic expectations is important, and unless you’ve worked with your developer in the past, it’s unlikely that you’ll meet a set-in-stone launch date. There are a number of variables outside a developer’s control that can affect the ability to launch at an exact date, such as delayed delivery of edits, additional design changes, or out of scope work. While a single-day delay may not impact a launch date, prolonged delays or the accumulation of minor delays can start to put pressure on the developer.
Busy dev agencies typically have their development staff estimated out. If your approvals and content aren’t delivered on time, this could come back to bite you later. Be sure to do your own due diligence and understand that it’s possible you might have played a role in your delayed launch. The ideal developer will work with you and explain that timelines are a guideline or estimate, and the more closely you both do your parts, the closer to that estimate the actual launch will be.
2. A finalized proof.
\n
We recently had a prospect come in whose HubSpot agency was bogged down (link when available). Whether that agency was chronically short staffed or just growing at a super fast pace, the Marketing Manager that we met with was pretty upset about the final draft that was delivered to them. “It’s almost as though they want us to handle the quality control, there were so many bugs and formatting issues. The proof didn’t even look like the agreed-upon design.”
It’s the worst to get clients that are unhappy with the delivery of a project that has such a significant upfront investment —so unhappy that they had to move development agencies to get quality delivered. By delineating the deliverables and responsibilities of each party, a client can easily hold their developer accountable by pointing back to the project timeline and responsibilities outline in order to receive exactly what they expect when it’s time for the final draft to be reviewed.
3. Feedback on your design requests.
\n
We say it a lot, but your developer should be more than an order taker. If you approach your agency with a preconceived design concept and haven’t had a UX/UI expert review it, your web developer should have usability and design feature feedback and suggestions based on your goals. They should be experienced enough in the front and back end of HubSpot CMS to point out potential issues with design and ask detailed questions on your expectations for both the end-user and the marketing team that will be updating content.
A user-friendly interface will allow employees to operate more efficiently and users to find the information they need with ease, increasing conversion rates and selling more products and services. It’s possible you’ve got a great design, but you should very specifically ask your developer for their feedback and suggestions. Their answer will tell a lot about the depth of their expertise and understanding of the relations among marketing, conversion optimization, and development.
Related reading: Your Website Isn’t a Submarine Sandwich
\n4. Accountability and updates.
\n
Sometimes projects run into delays. Whether we’re waiting on access to a third-party application that we’re integrating with the website, your edits are taking longer than expected, or we’ve just run into challenges implementing the design, sometimes projects don’t run on time. Communication is the difference between an experienced, accountable developer and an inexperienced developer who’s bogged down or doesn’t have your best interests in mind.
Your HubSpot developer should have your project mapped out from the start. Any missed milestone has the potential to delay the delivery timeline. An experienced developer will know this and reach out quickly to communicate rather than making excuses when the project is running behind schedule. They’ll quickly inform you of the timeline for out of scope work and how you can expect those design changes or edits to impact the timeline initially discussed.
\n5. Push for needed items.
\n
Every web developer knows how busy small- to medium-sized businesses can be. With employees taking on multiple job functions and a huge focus on performance, delays in needed items can sometimes occur. Rather than sitting around and waiting (unless they’ve been specifically instructed to do so due to project delays), a qualified and experienced developer will follow up on deadlines for content, images, style elements, and feedback to keep a project running on time. They understand that your goals are important and that sometimes the day to day can get in the way of timely delivery. They’ll push for what they need and try to help you organize it as simply as possible for efficient handoff.
6. Training and support.
\n
Often a website project will launch and additional work will be needed. An employee might find inaccurate data in the website, an important design change may be needed, or marketing and IT staff may need training on how to change and edit the website. An experienced developer will accommodate this by providing a certain number of hours for training, support, and bug fixes for up to a week or two after project launch. They’ll hand-hold the transition and make sure they’re readily available should anything happen or should quick edits need to be made. Your developer shouldn’t ghost you or fail to support their work after the fact.
7. Post-launch feedback timeline.
\n
While a skilled, experienced, reputable HubSpot developer will stand behind their work and assist in the transition and delivery of your website after launch, they’ll also be sure to hold your organization accountable when it comes to edits and bug fixes. They’ll often provide one or two weeks for your point of contact to reach out with any issues that need to be completed or fixed. Once this timeline has expired, there may be a small amount of wiggle room, but generally you should expect to pay for any edits or changes after the agreed-upon delivery deadline. More proactive developers will have already negotiated a growth-driven design retainer of some sort to help ensure that you can continuously improve your website as your marketing evolves.
It is worthwhile to talk about the difference between defects or bug fixes and revisions. This is something that your developer will help you define beforehand and help categorize as they come up. Bug fixes or defects are items that aren’t working properly or weren’t executed correctly by the developer. Revisions are small tweaks that a client may find after the fact for elements that don’t work as well as they expected. For instance, the structure or length of copy or placeholder photos versus actual photos may make the delivered site different from the original design. Revisions will usually cost extra, but this can vary depending on the developer and whether the project came in within scope.
Related reading: the continuous improvement model
\n
Strategy for what’s to come.
\n
Continuous improvement is the next step for any company with a focus on inbound marketing. You’ll probably need to add more landing page templates, additional modules, or new calculators or other widgets as you understand more about the buyer’s journey. The complexity of the information you present will change and you’ll want to be sure that your website is keeping up with the ever-changing needs of your marketing staff. Having a growth-driven design retainer for continual improvement and evolution of your website is important, and your development team should discuss this both before and after launch to help you prepare a budget. This will ensure that your marketing staff continues to be happy with your website on an ongoing basis and avoid those expensive overhauls every three to five years.
Not every company owner, marketing manager, or agency that is outsourcing HubSpot development work knows what to expect or what needs to be done when it comes to a new HubSpot CMS development project. A skilled, experienced developer will have structures in place and communicate the needs and expectations for both their agency and your organization when it comes to delivering the project according to your expectations.
It might take time and it might not always look perfect, but fostering a close relationship with your HubSpot development professional is extremely important to the success of your marketing, the happiness of your employees, and the evolution of your online presence. Do your diligence to qualify any developer you’re vetting. If you need help, we’re always willing to provide a second opinion.
\n\n
Business owners, marketers, and executive teams groan when it comes time for a new website project, and for good reason. It’s rare that a website project (particularly a redesign) stays within a reasonable budget or timeline. As quality HubSpot CMS developers become harder to find, and the biggest agencies continue to run into issues with scaling, a new website project proposal process can seem daunting. If you have only had bad experiences with website builds, what do you need to know to ensure things go more smoothly next time?
Business owners, marketers, and executive teams groan when it comes time for a new website project, and for good reason. It’s rare that a website project (particularly a redesign) stays within a reasonable budget or timeline. As quality HubSpot CMS developers become harder to find, and the biggest agencies continue to run into issues with scaling, a new website project proposal process can seem daunting. If you have only had bad experiences with website builds, what do you need to know to ensure things go more smoothly next time?
We’ve shared the warning signs that it’s time to ditch your current HubSpot developer, but you should also know what to expect when you choose a HubSpot developer. Here are seven things you can expect from a qualified, experienced HubSpot CMS developer when you’re developing a new website project.
1. A projected timeline.
\n
It’s hard to predict exactly when a website will launch, and while the go-live day can change based on any number of factors, setting an approximate timeline or specifying a certain week of the month you expect to finalize the project is more than reasonable. If you have a target date, you can build a for deliverables, including the delivery of the design, sign-off and approval of that design, development of modules, and delivery of a quality-assured and -tested first draft.
Your development partner should break down the timeline and hold you accountable as well, by specifying the date when final first draft edits are needed, as well as having you name a single point of contact to manage all edits on your side. This minimizes the back and forth for last-minute changes to design or afterthought additions to the website. While there are always a few edits and bugs to work out, for the most part once your design is approved and finalized, development should be fairly straightforward.
Be wary of developers promising a very specific launch date or refusing to adjust a launch date based on how the project unfolds. Setting realistic expectations is important, and unless you’ve worked with your developer in the past, it’s unlikely that you’ll meet a set-in-stone launch date. There are a number of variables outside a developer’s control that can affect the ability to launch at an exact date, such as delayed delivery of edits, additional design changes, or out of scope work. While a single-day delay may not impact a launch date, prolonged delays or the accumulation of minor delays can start to put pressure on the developer.
Busy dev agencies typically have their development staff estimated out. If your approvals and content aren’t delivered on time, this could come back to bite you later. Be sure to do your own due diligence and understand that it’s possible you might have played a role in your delayed launch. The ideal developer will work with you and explain that timelines are a guideline or estimate, and the more closely you both do your parts, the closer to that estimate the actual launch will be.
2. A finalized proof.
\n
We recently had a prospect come in whose HubSpot agency was bogged down (link when available). Whether that agency was chronically short staffed or just growing at a super fast pace, the Marketing Manager that we met with was pretty upset about the final draft that was delivered to them. “It’s almost as though they want us to handle the quality control, there were so many bugs and formatting issues. The proof didn’t even look like the agreed-upon design.”
It’s the worst to get clients that are unhappy with the delivery of a project that has such a significant upfront investment —so unhappy that they had to move development agencies to get quality delivered. By delineating the deliverables and responsibilities of each party, a client can easily hold their developer accountable by pointing back to the project timeline and responsibilities outline in order to receive exactly what they expect when it’s time for the final draft to be reviewed.
3. Feedback on your design requests.
\n
We say it a lot, but your developer should be more than an order taker. If you approach your agency with a preconceived design concept and haven’t had a UX/UI expert review it, your web developer should have usability and design feature feedback and suggestions based on your goals. They should be experienced enough in the front and back end of HubSpot CMS to point out potential issues with design and ask detailed questions on your expectations for both the end-user and the marketing team that will be updating content.
A user-friendly interface will allow employees to operate more efficiently and users to find the information they need with ease, increasing conversion rates and selling more products and services. It’s possible you’ve got a great design, but you should very specifically ask your developer for their feedback and suggestions. Their answer will tell a lot about the depth of their expertise and understanding of the relations among marketing, conversion optimization, and development.
Related reading: Your Website Isn’t a Submarine Sandwich
\n4. Accountability and updates.
\n
Sometimes projects run into delays. Whether we’re waiting on access to a third-party application that we’re integrating with the website, your edits are taking longer than expected, or we’ve just run into challenges implementing the design, sometimes projects don’t run on time. Communication is the difference between an experienced, accountable developer and an inexperienced developer who’s bogged down or doesn’t have your best interests in mind.
Your HubSpot developer should have your project mapped out from the start. Any missed milestone has the potential to delay the delivery timeline. An experienced developer will know this and reach out quickly to communicate rather than making excuses when the project is running behind schedule. They’ll quickly inform you of the timeline for out of scope work and how you can expect those design changes or edits to impact the timeline initially discussed.
\n5. Push for needed items.
\n
Every web developer knows how busy small- to medium-sized businesses can be. With employees taking on multiple job functions and a huge focus on performance, delays in needed items can sometimes occur. Rather than sitting around and waiting (unless they’ve been specifically instructed to do so due to project delays), a qualified and experienced developer will follow up on deadlines for content, images, style elements, and feedback to keep a project running on time. They understand that your goals are important and that sometimes the day to day can get in the way of timely delivery. They’ll push for what they need and try to help you organize it as simply as possible for efficient handoff.
6. Training and support.
\n
Often a website project will launch and additional work will be needed. An employee might find inaccurate data in the website, an important design change may be needed, or marketing and IT staff may need training on how to change and edit the website. An experienced developer will accommodate this by providing a certain number of hours for training, support, and bug fixes for up to a week or two after project launch. They’ll hand-hold the transition and make sure they’re readily available should anything happen or should quick edits need to be made. Your developer shouldn’t ghost you or fail to support their work after the fact.
7. Post-launch feedback timeline.
\n
While a skilled, experienced, reputable HubSpot developer will stand behind their work and assist in the transition and delivery of your website after launch, they’ll also be sure to hold your organization accountable when it comes to edits and bug fixes. They’ll often provide one or two weeks for your point of contact to reach out with any issues that need to be completed or fixed. Once this timeline has expired, there may be a small amount of wiggle room, but generally you should expect to pay for any edits or changes after the agreed-upon delivery deadline. More proactive developers will have already negotiated a growth-driven design retainer of some sort to help ensure that you can continuously improve your website as your marketing evolves.
It is worthwhile to talk about the difference between defects or bug fixes and revisions. This is something that your developer will help you define beforehand and help categorize as they come up. Bug fixes or defects are items that aren’t working properly or weren’t executed correctly by the developer. Revisions are small tweaks that a client may find after the fact for elements that don’t work as well as they expected. For instance, the structure or length of copy or placeholder photos versus actual photos may make the delivered site different from the original design. Revisions will usually cost extra, but this can vary depending on the developer and whether the project came in within scope.
Related reading: the continuous improvement model
\n
Strategy for what’s to come.
\n
Continuous improvement is the next step for any company with a focus on inbound marketing. You’ll probably need to add more landing page templates, additional modules, or new calculators or other widgets as you understand more about the buyer’s journey. The complexity of the information you present will change and you’ll want to be sure that your website is keeping up with the ever-changing needs of your marketing staff. Having a growth-driven design retainer for continual improvement and evolution of your website is important, and your development team should discuss this both before and after launch to help you prepare a budget. This will ensure that your marketing staff continues to be happy with your website on an ongoing basis and avoid those expensive overhauls every three to five years.
Not every company owner, marketing manager, or agency that is outsourcing HubSpot development work knows what to expect or what needs to be done when it comes to a new HubSpot CMS development project. A skilled, experienced developer will have structures in place and communicate the needs and expectations for both their agency and your organization when it comes to delivering the project according to your expectations.
It might take time and it might not always look perfect, but fostering a close relationship with your HubSpot development professional is extremely important to the success of your marketing, the happiness of your employees, and the evolution of your online presence. Do your diligence to qualify any developer you’re vetting. If you need help, we’re always willing to provide a second opinion.
\n\n
Business owners, marketers, and executive teams groan when it comes time for a new website project, and for good reason. It’s rare that a website project (particularly a redesign) stays within a reasonable budget or timeline. As quality HubSpot CMS developers become harder to find, and the biggest agencies continue to run into issues with scaling, a new website project proposal process can seem daunting. If you have only had bad experiences with website builds, what do you need to know to ensure things go more smoothly next time?
We’ve shared the warning signs that it’s time to ditch your current HubSpot developer, but you should also know what to expect when you choose a HubSpot developer. Here are seven things you can expect from a qualified, experienced HubSpot CMS developer when you’re developing a new website project.
1. A projected timeline.
\n
It’s hard to predict exactly when a website will launch, and while the go-live day can change based on any number of factors, setting an approximate timeline or specifying a certain week of the month you expect to finalize the project is more than reasonable. If you have a target date, you can build a for deliverables, including the delivery of the design, sign-off and approval of that design, development of modules, and delivery of a quality-assured and -tested first draft.
Your development partner should break down the timeline and hold you accountable as well, by specifying the date when final first draft edits are needed, as well as having you name a single point of contact to manage all edits on your side. This minimizes the back and forth for last-minute changes to design or afterthought additions to the website. While there are always a few edits and bugs to work out, for the most part once your design is approved and finalized, development should be fairly straightforward.
Be wary of developers promising a very specific launch date or refusing to adjust a launch date based on how the project unfolds. Setting realistic expectations is important, and unless you’ve worked with your developer in the past, it’s unlikely that you’ll meet a set-in-stone launch date. There are a number of variables outside a developer’s control that can affect the ability to launch at an exact date, such as delayed delivery of edits, additional design changes, or out of scope work. While a single-day delay may not impact a launch date, prolonged delays or the accumulation of minor delays can start to put pressure on the developer.
Busy dev agencies typically have their development staff estimated out. If your approvals and content aren’t delivered on time, this could come back to bite you later. Be sure to do your own due diligence and understand that it’s possible you might have played a role in your delayed launch. The ideal developer will work with you and explain that timelines are a guideline or estimate, and the more closely you both do your parts, the closer to that estimate the actual launch will be.
2. A finalized proof.
\n
We recently had a prospect come in whose HubSpot agency was bogged down (link when available). Whether that agency was chronically short staffed or just growing at a super fast pace, the Marketing Manager that we met with was pretty upset about the final draft that was delivered to them. “It’s almost as though they want us to handle the quality control, there were so many bugs and formatting issues. The proof didn’t even look like the agreed-upon design.”
It’s the worst to get clients that are unhappy with the delivery of a project that has such a significant upfront investment —so unhappy that they had to move development agencies to get quality delivered. By delineating the deliverables and responsibilities of each party, a client can easily hold their developer accountable by pointing back to the project timeline and responsibilities outline in order to receive exactly what they expect when it’s time for the final draft to be reviewed.
3. Feedback on your design requests.
\n
We say it a lot, but your developer should be more than an order taker. If you approach your agency with a preconceived design concept and haven’t had a UX/UI expert review it, your web developer should have usability and design feature feedback and suggestions based on your goals. They should be experienced enough in the front and back end of HubSpot CMS to point out potential issues with design and ask detailed questions on your expectations for both the end-user and the marketing team that will be updating content.
A user-friendly interface will allow employees to operate more efficiently and users to find the information they need with ease, increasing conversion rates and selling more products and services. It’s possible you’ve got a great design, but you should very specifically ask your developer for their feedback and suggestions. Their answer will tell a lot about the depth of their expertise and understanding of the relations among marketing, conversion optimization, and development.
Related reading: Your Website Isn’t a Submarine Sandwich
\n4. Accountability and updates.
\n
Sometimes projects run into delays. Whether we’re waiting on access to a third-party application that we’re integrating with the website, your edits are taking longer than expected, or we’ve just run into challenges implementing the design, sometimes projects don’t run on time. Communication is the difference between an experienced, accountable developer and an inexperienced developer who’s bogged down or doesn’t have your best interests in mind.
Your HubSpot developer should have your project mapped out from the start. Any missed milestone has the potential to delay the delivery timeline. An experienced developer will know this and reach out quickly to communicate rather than making excuses when the project is running behind schedule. They’ll quickly inform you of the timeline for out of scope work and how you can expect those design changes or edits to impact the timeline initially discussed.
\n5. Push for needed items.
\n
Every web developer knows how busy small- to medium-sized businesses can be. With employees taking on multiple job functions and a huge focus on performance, delays in needed items can sometimes occur. Rather than sitting around and waiting (unless they’ve been specifically instructed to do so due to project delays), a qualified and experienced developer will follow up on deadlines for content, images, style elements, and feedback to keep a project running on time. They understand that your goals are important and that sometimes the day to day can get in the way of timely delivery. They’ll push for what they need and try to help you organize it as simply as possible for efficient handoff.
6. Training and support.
\n
Often a website project will launch and additional work will be needed. An employee might find inaccurate data in the website, an important design change may be needed, or marketing and IT staff may need training on how to change and edit the website. An experienced developer will accommodate this by providing a certain number of hours for training, support, and bug fixes for up to a week or two after project launch. They’ll hand-hold the transition and make sure they’re readily available should anything happen or should quick edits need to be made. Your developer shouldn’t ghost you or fail to support their work after the fact.
7. Post-launch feedback timeline.
\n
While a skilled, experienced, reputable HubSpot developer will stand behind their work and assist in the transition and delivery of your website after launch, they’ll also be sure to hold your organization accountable when it comes to edits and bug fixes. They’ll often provide one or two weeks for your point of contact to reach out with any issues that need to be completed or fixed. Once this timeline has expired, there may be a small amount of wiggle room, but generally you should expect to pay for any edits or changes after the agreed-upon delivery deadline. More proactive developers will have already negotiated a growth-driven design retainer of some sort to help ensure that you can continuously improve your website as your marketing evolves.
It is worthwhile to talk about the difference between defects or bug fixes and revisions. This is something that your developer will help you define beforehand and help categorize as they come up. Bug fixes or defects are items that aren’t working properly or weren’t executed correctly by the developer. Revisions are small tweaks that a client may find after the fact for elements that don’t work as well as they expected. For instance, the structure or length of copy or placeholder photos versus actual photos may make the delivered site different from the original design. Revisions will usually cost extra, but this can vary depending on the developer and whether the project came in within scope.
Related reading: the continuous improvement model
\n
Strategy for what’s to come.
\n
Continuous improvement is the next step for any company with a focus on inbound marketing. You’ll probably need to add more landing page templates, additional modules, or new calculators or other widgets as you understand more about the buyer’s journey. The complexity of the information you present will change and you’ll want to be sure that your website is keeping up with the ever-changing needs of your marketing staff. Having a growth-driven design retainer for continual improvement and evolution of your website is important, and your development team should discuss this both before and after launch to help you prepare a budget. This will ensure that your marketing staff continues to be happy with your website on an ongoing basis and avoid those expensive overhauls every three to five years.
Not every company owner, marketing manager, or agency that is outsourcing HubSpot development work knows what to expect or what needs to be done when it comes to a new HubSpot CMS development project. A skilled, experienced developer will have structures in place and communicate the needs and expectations for both their agency and your organization when it comes to delivering the project according to your expectations.
It might take time and it might not always look perfect, but fostering a close relationship with your HubSpot development professional is extremely important to the success of your marketing, the happiness of your employees, and the evolution of your online presence. Do your diligence to qualify any developer you’re vetting. If you need help, we’re always willing to provide a second opinion.
\n\n
Business owners, marketers, and executive teams groan when it comes time for a new website project, and for good reason. It’s rare that a website project (particularly a redesign) stays within a reasonable budget or timeline. As quality HubSpot CMS developers become harder to find, and the biggest agencies continue to run into issues with scaling, a new website project proposal process can seem daunting. If you have only had bad experiences with website builds, what do you need to know to ensure things go more smoothly next time?
Business owners, marketers, and executive teams groan when it comes time for a new website project, and for good reason. It’s rare that a website project (particularly a redesign) stays within a reasonable budget or timeline. As quality HubSpot CMS developers become harder to find, and the biggest agencies continue to run into issues with scaling, a new website project proposal process can seem daunting. If you have only had bad experiences with website builds, what do you need to know to ensure things go more smoothly next time?
Business owners, marketers, and executive teams groan when it comes time for a new website project, and for good reason. It’s rare that a website project (particularly a redesign) stays within a reasonable budget or timeline. As quality HubSpot CMS developers become harder to find, and the biggest agencies continue to run into issues with scaling, a new website project proposal process can seem daunting. If you have only had bad experiences with website builds, what do you need to know to ensure things go more smoothly next time?
Business owners, marketers, and executive teams groan when it comes time for a new website project, and for good reason. It’s rare that a website project (particularly a redesign) stays within a reasonable budget or timeline. As quality HubSpot CMS developers become harder to find, and the biggest agencies continue to run into issues with scaling, a new website project proposal process can seem daunting. If you have only had bad experiences with website builds, what do you need to know to ensure things go more smoothly next time?
Business owners, marketers, and executive teams groan when it comes time for a new website project, and for good reason. It’s rare that a website project (particularly a redesign) stays within a reasonable budget or timeline. As quality HubSpot CMS developers become harder to find, and the biggest agencies continue to run into issues with scaling, a new website project proposal process can seem daunting. If you have only had bad experiences with website builds, what do you need to know to ensure things go more smoothly next time?
Business owners, marketers, and executive teams groan when it comes time for a new website project, and for good reason. It’s rare that a website project (particularly a redesign) stays within a reasonable budget or timeline. As quality HubSpot CMS developers become harder to find, and the biggest agencies continue to run into issues with scaling, a new website project proposal process can seem daunting. If you have only had bad experiences with website builds, what do you need to know to ensure things go more smoothly next time?
We’ve shared the warning signs that it’s time to ditch your current HubSpot developer, but you should also know what to expect when you choose a HubSpot developer. Here are seven things you can expect from a qualified, experienced HubSpot CMS developer when you’re developing a new website project.
1. A projected timeline.
\n
It’s hard to predict exactly when a website will launch, and while the go-live day can change based on any number of factors, setting an approximate timeline or specifying a certain week of the month you expect to finalize the project is more than reasonable. If you have a target date, you can build a for deliverables, including the delivery of the design, sign-off and approval of that design, development of modules, and delivery of a quality-assured and -tested first draft.
Your development partner should break down the timeline and hold you accountable as well, by specifying the date when final first draft edits are needed, as well as having you name a single point of contact to manage all edits on your side. This minimizes the back and forth for last-minute changes to design or afterthought additions to the website. While there are always a few edits and bugs to work out, for the most part once your design is approved and finalized, development should be fairly straightforward.
Be wary of developers promising a very specific launch date or refusing to adjust a launch date based on how the project unfolds. Setting realistic expectations is important, and unless you’ve worked with your developer in the past, it’s unlikely that you’ll meet a set-in-stone launch date. There are a number of variables outside a developer’s control that can affect the ability to launch at an exact date, such as delayed delivery of edits, additional design changes, or out of scope work. While a single-day delay may not impact a launch date, prolonged delays or the accumulation of minor delays can start to put pressure on the developer.
Busy dev agencies typically have their development staff estimated out. If your approvals and content aren’t delivered on time, this could come back to bite you later. Be sure to do your own due diligence and understand that it’s possible you might have played a role in your delayed launch. The ideal developer will work with you and explain that timelines are a guideline or estimate, and the more closely you both do your parts, the closer to that estimate the actual launch will be.
2. A finalized proof.
\n
We recently had a prospect come in whose HubSpot agency was bogged down (link when available). Whether that agency was chronically short staffed or just growing at a super fast pace, the Marketing Manager that we met with was pretty upset about the final draft that was delivered to them. “It’s almost as though they want us to handle the quality control, there were so many bugs and formatting issues. The proof didn’t even look like the agreed-upon design.”
It’s the worst to get clients that are unhappy with the delivery of a project that has such a significant upfront investment —so unhappy that they had to move development agencies to get quality delivered. By delineating the deliverables and responsibilities of each party, a client can easily hold their developer accountable by pointing back to the project timeline and responsibilities outline in order to receive exactly what they expect when it’s time for the final draft to be reviewed.
3. Feedback on your design requests.
\n
We say it a lot, but your developer should be more than an order taker. If you approach your agency with a preconceived design concept and haven’t had a UX/UI expert review it, your web developer should have usability and design feature feedback and suggestions based on your goals. They should be experienced enough in the front and back end of HubSpot CMS to point out potential issues with design and ask detailed questions on your expectations for both the end-user and the marketing team that will be updating content.
A user-friendly interface will allow employees to operate more efficiently and users to find the information they need with ease, increasing conversion rates and selling more products and services. It’s possible you’ve got a great design, but you should very specifically ask your developer for their feedback and suggestions. Their answer will tell a lot about the depth of their expertise and understanding of the relations among marketing, conversion optimization, and development.
Related reading: Your Website Isn’t a Submarine Sandwich
\n4. Accountability and updates.
\n
Sometimes projects run into delays. Whether we’re waiting on access to a third-party application that we’re integrating with the website, your edits are taking longer than expected, or we’ve just run into challenges implementing the design, sometimes projects don’t run on time. Communication is the difference between an experienced, accountable developer and an inexperienced developer who’s bogged down or doesn’t have your best interests in mind.
Your HubSpot developer should have your project mapped out from the start. Any missed milestone has the potential to delay the delivery timeline. An experienced developer will know this and reach out quickly to communicate rather than making excuses when the project is running behind schedule. They’ll quickly inform you of the timeline for out of scope work and how you can expect those design changes or edits to impact the timeline initially discussed.
\n5. Push for needed items.
\n
Every web developer knows how busy small- to medium-sized businesses can be. With employees taking on multiple job functions and a huge focus on performance, delays in needed items can sometimes occur. Rather than sitting around and waiting (unless they’ve been specifically instructed to do so due to project delays), a qualified and experienced developer will follow up on deadlines for content, images, style elements, and feedback to keep a project running on time. They understand that your goals are important and that sometimes the day to day can get in the way of timely delivery. They’ll push for what they need and try to help you organize it as simply as possible for efficient handoff.
6. Training and support.
\n
Often a website project will launch and additional work will be needed. An employee might find inaccurate data in the website, an important design change may be needed, or marketing and IT staff may need training on how to change and edit the website. An experienced developer will accommodate this by providing a certain number of hours for training, support, and bug fixes for up to a week or two after project launch. They’ll hand-hold the transition and make sure they’re readily available should anything happen or should quick edits need to be made. Your developer shouldn’t ghost you or fail to support their work after the fact.
7. Post-launch feedback timeline.
\n
While a skilled, experienced, reputable HubSpot developer will stand behind their work and assist in the transition and delivery of your website after launch, they’ll also be sure to hold your organization accountable when it comes to edits and bug fixes. They’ll often provide one or two weeks for your point of contact to reach out with any issues that need to be completed or fixed. Once this timeline has expired, there may be a small amount of wiggle room, but generally you should expect to pay for any edits or changes after the agreed-upon delivery deadline. More proactive developers will have already negotiated a growth-driven design retainer of some sort to help ensure that you can continuously improve your website as your marketing evolves.
It is worthwhile to talk about the difference between defects or bug fixes and revisions. This is something that your developer will help you define beforehand and help categorize as they come up. Bug fixes or defects are items that aren’t working properly or weren’t executed correctly by the developer. Revisions are small tweaks that a client may find after the fact for elements that don’t work as well as they expected. For instance, the structure or length of copy or placeholder photos versus actual photos may make the delivered site different from the original design. Revisions will usually cost extra, but this can vary depending on the developer and whether the project came in within scope.
Related reading: the continuous improvement model
\n
Strategy for what’s to come.
\n
Continuous improvement is the next step for any company with a focus on inbound marketing. You’ll probably need to add more landing page templates, additional modules, or new calculators or other widgets as you understand more about the buyer’s journey. The complexity of the information you present will change and you’ll want to be sure that your website is keeping up with the ever-changing needs of your marketing staff. Having a growth-driven design retainer for continual improvement and evolution of your website is important, and your development team should discuss this both before and after launch to help you prepare a budget. This will ensure that your marketing staff continues to be happy with your website on an ongoing basis and avoid those expensive overhauls every three to five years.
Not every company owner, marketing manager, or agency that is outsourcing HubSpot development work knows what to expect or what needs to be done when it comes to a new HubSpot CMS development project. A skilled, experienced developer will have structures in place and communicate the needs and expectations for both their agency and your organization when it comes to delivering the project according to your expectations.
It might take time and it might not always look perfect, but fostering a close relationship with your HubSpot development professional is extremely important to the success of your marketing, the happiness of your employees, and the evolution of your online presence. Do your diligence to qualify any developer you’re vetting. If you need help, we’re always willing to provide a second opinion.
\n\n
Business owners, marketers, and executive teams groan when it comes time for a new website project, and for good reason. It’s rare that a website project (particularly a redesign) stays within a reasonable budget or timeline. As quality HubSpot CMS developers become harder to find, and the biggest agencies continue to run into issues with scaling, a new website project proposal process can seem daunting. If you have only had bad experiences with website builds, what do you need to know to ensure things go more smoothly next time?
![\"THAT](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/THAT%20ESCALATED%20QUICKLY-1.jpg\")
We love big HubSpot Partner agencies (and we cannot lie). They inspire us to grow and scale and become the best in our industry. We’ve worked inside their offices and built our expertise through delivering incredible HubSpot projects and making connections that we still value today. We learned how their processes work and how they didn’t work. We have taken that experience and applied it to much of how we run our own HubSpot development agency now.
We see HubSpot case studies from partner agencies and posts on how they’ve grown their revenue by a factor of ten and doubled their staff, and we think, Wow! That’s inspiring, but it sounds like it could be pretty painful! While HubSpot has growth resources for their agency partners, we can’t help but think of the literal growing pains when we were kids; we sometimes couldn’t sleep when our bones grew. There was discomfort, and sometimes a little pain, associated with that growth.
While we love watching the growth of other HubSpot agencies, we’ve also seen the other side of that growth. Several recent prospects have approached us after they’ve found other agencies have let their projects fall through the cracks. Those agencies are encountering problems associated with quick growth, such as overwhelmed staff and quality control issues, which are causing their clients (our new prospects) to suffer.
Here are just a few of the problems fast-growing large HubSpot development agencies encounter. Use them as signs that you, as a small business selecting a HubSpot development agency, can watch out for.
Their talent is sometimes oversold
\n
Top agencies typically garner the top talent — until they don’t. A specialized HubSpot partner soon discovers that not many employees have extensive experience in HubSpot development. While the pool of seasoned HubSpot developers is growing daily, the demand is growing at a far greater pace. An agency might have a few talented, seasoned developers working for it, but the developers cannot keep up with the workload the agency is bringing on, especially if they’re a Diamond or Elite HubSpot Partner that is constantly funneled leads from HubSpot onboarding reps. In addition, those top agencies lose talent as developers go out on their own to become freelancers or open their own HubSpot development agencies. The combination of the deficit in talent and the slowdowns from overworked talent can be felt across the organization.
What to watch for:
\n
A development agency is only as good as its development team, so if they struggle with high turnover or you’re being shifted around to new account reps on the regular, you may want to explore what changes are going on inside the agency. Of course, many agencies run deep in expertise on HubSpot development, typically those whose CEOs and owners are developers themselves: A developer-run agency is often better situated from a depth-of-talent perspective than other agencies.
Check in with the agency and find out where their talent comes from and how they vet their developers, how those developers hone their skills, and what recent projects they’ve completed. Sift through those projects and check load times, bugs, and usability issues to determine how their work is holding up.
Their team is underpaid
\n
Here’s the real truth when it comes to agency life: Developers are not always compensated properly. I said what I said. One of the reasons our owner left the majority of the agencies that he worked within was a heavy workload and compensation that wasn’t commensurate with expertise. It’s a difficult position to be in, as an agency, since clients can be sensitive when it comes to billable time and per-hour billable rates. But as in almost every aspect of life, you get what you pay for. If a client isn’t paying a significant monthly fee, you can almost guarantee that their talent is subpar or very underpaid (and likely to leave).
What to watch for:
\n
Agencies that are willing to discount their hourly rates significantly can only afford to do so because they either have lower overhead or they’re paying their teams much less than they’re charging for margins. If they also charge a low hourly rate to begin with, they’re probably outsourcing work to inexperienced developers who may not be qualified to cleanly code and develop with a lot of intention inside the HubSpot CMS.
Related: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\n\n
Their team is overwhelmed
\n
When becoming a HubSpot partner and the associated boost in lead generation result in a tenfold revenue growth or the doubling of staff, you can almost guarantee that teams are overwhelmed. When a lot of new employees are introduced, new team structures are established, or new clients are assigned to existing teams (which, let’s face it, is a major issue during this widespread period of \"employee shortages\"), developers will be overwhelmed with a massive amount of work. Overwhelmed and unhappy employees are 10% less productive. We probably don’t need to go over how unproductive employees affect the client experience, but there’s a lot of research out there: Dissatisfied employees are two and a half times more likely to say they do not provide excellent customer service and twice as likely to say they do not deliver quality outcomes.
What to watch for:
\n
Many prospects approach us with partially developed websites. Quality assurance is among the most important aspects of our delivery and launch process at deckerdevs. If you notice that you’re approaching the finish line with your project and running into an alarming number of unresolved issues that your development team didn’t seem to catch, this may be a red flag. If you’re not hearing back from your account executive or developer, or it's taking days or weeks to get changes completed, these are also signs that their teams are overwhelmed.
Their team has underwhelming skills
\n
From slowly loading pages to poorly coded sites to ill-conceived resource centers to hard-coded modules and lots of bugs and script errors: We’ve seen a lot of things that you should never see coming from big agencies. People paying the premiums that the biggest HubSpot agencies get deserve better. The executive teams at those agencies probably agree.
What to watch for:
\n
Red flags include buggy websites, rationalizing why a new feature can’t be added, slow-loading pages, minimal feedback from a usability perspective, and stopping work once the project is done. We have long-standing relationships with all our clients to execute projects on their behalf long after a project is completed, whether it’s a single module edit or a full website overhaul. We work closely with clients to determine the best balance between their budget and wishlist, then execute properly with infrastructure that is proven to make things easy for the client.
With such a huge talent gap when it comes to HubSpot CMS developers, it’s important that you do your homework when you’re interviewing development agencies.
\n\n
To avoid these issues, during the sales process, ask who is developing your project; you can even request that you have some face time with the developer. While not all developers are able to meet with clients, depending on the agency, you can at least gain some knowledge and ask the agency for developer references, past projects, and the amount of time they’ve been working in the HubSpot CMS.
\n\n
Hiring an agency with a CEO or owner who has a lot of experience in HubSpot development is critical as well. Ask them about their process, what you should expect, the anticipated timeline, what their expectations are from you, how they’ll be handling bugs, what the QA process is, and how long they’ll support their project post-launch. You’ll also want to understand what happens if you decide the relationship isn’t working out: A lot of bigger agencies have iron-clad agreements that can be difficult to exit.
\n\n
While the majority of the experiences from the biggest HubSpot development agencies are positive, we want you to be as prepared as you can be when you’re interviewing prospective agencies. The more you know and the more questions you ask, the easier it might be to avoid potential issues down the line. While we always love to be the ones to fix any problem we’re approached with, we’d much rather you have the right experience the first time around.
\n\n
\n
","rss_summary":"
We love big HubSpot Partner agencies (and we cannot lie). They inspire us to grow and scale and become the best in our industry. We’ve worked inside their offices and built our expertise through delivering incredible HubSpot projects and making connections that we still value today. We learned how their processes work and how they didn’t work. We have taken that experience and applied it to much of how we run our own HubSpot development agency now.
We see HubSpot case studies from partner agencies and posts on how they’ve grown their revenue by a factor of ten and doubled their staff, and we think, Wow! That’s inspiring, but it sounds like it could be pretty painful! While HubSpot has growth resources for their agency partners, we can’t help but think of the literal growing pains when we were kids; we sometimes couldn’t sleep when our bones grew. There was discomfort, and sometimes a little pain, associated with that growth.
While we love watching the growth of other HubSpot agencies, we’ve also seen the other side of that growth. Several recent prospects have approached us after they’ve found other agencies have let their projects fall through the cracks. Those agencies are encountering problems associated with quick growth, such as overwhelmed staff and quality control issues, which are causing their clients (our new prospects) to suffer.
Here are just a few of the problems fast-growing large HubSpot development agencies encounter. Use them as signs that you, as a small business selecting a HubSpot development agency, can watch out for.
We love big HubSpot Partner agencies (and we cannot lie). They inspire us to grow and scale and become the best in our industry. We’ve worked inside their offices and built our expertise through delivering incredible HubSpot projects and making connections that we still value today. We learned how their processes work and how they didn’t work. We have taken that experience and applied it to much of how we run our own HubSpot development agency now.
We see HubSpot case studies from partner agencies and posts on how they’ve grown their revenue by a factor of ten and doubled their staff, and we think, Wow! That’s inspiring, but it sounds like it could be pretty painful! While HubSpot has growth resources for their agency partners, we can’t help but think of the literal growing pains when we were kids; we sometimes couldn’t sleep when our bones grew. There was discomfort, and sometimes a little pain, associated with that growth.
While we love watching the growth of other HubSpot agencies, we’ve also seen the other side of that growth. Several recent prospects have approached us after they’ve found other agencies have let their projects fall through the cracks. Those agencies are encountering problems associated with quick growth, such as overwhelmed staff and quality control issues, which are causing their clients (our new prospects) to suffer.
Here are just a few of the problems fast-growing large HubSpot development agencies encounter. Use them as signs that you, as a small business selecting a HubSpot development agency, can watch out for.
Their talent is sometimes oversold
\n
Top agencies typically garner the top talent — until they don’t. A specialized HubSpot partner soon discovers that not many employees have extensive experience in HubSpot development. While the pool of seasoned HubSpot developers is growing daily, the demand is growing at a far greater pace. An agency might have a few talented, seasoned developers working for it, but the developers cannot keep up with the workload the agency is bringing on, especially if they’re a Diamond or Elite HubSpot Partner that is constantly funneled leads from HubSpot onboarding reps. In addition, those top agencies lose talent as developers go out on their own to become freelancers or open their own HubSpot development agencies. The combination of the deficit in talent and the slowdowns from overworked talent can be felt across the organization.
What to watch for:
\n
A development agency is only as good as its development team, so if they struggle with high turnover or you’re being shifted around to new account reps on the regular, you may want to explore what changes are going on inside the agency. Of course, many agencies run deep in expertise on HubSpot development, typically those whose CEOs and owners are developers themselves: A developer-run agency is often better situated from a depth-of-talent perspective than other agencies.
Check in with the agency and find out where their talent comes from and how they vet their developers, how those developers hone their skills, and what recent projects they’ve completed. Sift through those projects and check load times, bugs, and usability issues to determine how their work is holding up.
Their team is underpaid
\n
Here’s the real truth when it comes to agency life: Developers are not always compensated properly. I said what I said. One of the reasons our owner left the majority of the agencies that he worked within was a heavy workload and compensation that wasn’t commensurate with expertise. It’s a difficult position to be in, as an agency, since clients can be sensitive when it comes to billable time and per-hour billable rates. But as in almost every aspect of life, you get what you pay for. If a client isn’t paying a significant monthly fee, you can almost guarantee that their talent is subpar or very underpaid (and likely to leave).
What to watch for:
\n
Agencies that are willing to discount their hourly rates significantly can only afford to do so because they either have lower overhead or they’re paying their teams much less than they’re charging for margins. If they also charge a low hourly rate to begin with, they’re probably outsourcing work to inexperienced developers who may not be qualified to cleanly code and develop with a lot of intention inside the HubSpot CMS.
Related: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\n\n
Their team is overwhelmed
\n
When becoming a HubSpot partner and the associated boost in lead generation result in a tenfold revenue growth or the doubling of staff, you can almost guarantee that teams are overwhelmed. When a lot of new employees are introduced, new team structures are established, or new clients are assigned to existing teams (which, let’s face it, is a major issue during this widespread period of \"employee shortages\"), developers will be overwhelmed with a massive amount of work. Overwhelmed and unhappy employees are 10% less productive. We probably don’t need to go over how unproductive employees affect the client experience, but there’s a lot of research out there: Dissatisfied employees are two and a half times more likely to say they do not provide excellent customer service and twice as likely to say they do not deliver quality outcomes.
What to watch for:
\n
Many prospects approach us with partially developed websites. Quality assurance is among the most important aspects of our delivery and launch process at deckerdevs. If you notice that you’re approaching the finish line with your project and running into an alarming number of unresolved issues that your development team didn’t seem to catch, this may be a red flag. If you’re not hearing back from your account executive or developer, or it's taking days or weeks to get changes completed, these are also signs that their teams are overwhelmed.
Their team has underwhelming skills
\n
From slowly loading pages to poorly coded sites to ill-conceived resource centers to hard-coded modules and lots of bugs and script errors: We’ve seen a lot of things that you should never see coming from big agencies. People paying the premiums that the biggest HubSpot agencies get deserve better. The executive teams at those agencies probably agree.
What to watch for:
\n
Red flags include buggy websites, rationalizing why a new feature can’t be added, slow-loading pages, minimal feedback from a usability perspective, and stopping work once the project is done. We have long-standing relationships with all our clients to execute projects on their behalf long after a project is completed, whether it’s a single module edit or a full website overhaul. We work closely with clients to determine the best balance between their budget and wishlist, then execute properly with infrastructure that is proven to make things easy for the client.
With such a huge talent gap when it comes to HubSpot CMS developers, it’s important that you do your homework when you’re interviewing development agencies.
\n\n
To avoid these issues, during the sales process, ask who is developing your project; you can even request that you have some face time with the developer. While not all developers are able to meet with clients, depending on the agency, you can at least gain some knowledge and ask the agency for developer references, past projects, and the amount of time they’ve been working in the HubSpot CMS.
\n\n
Hiring an agency with a CEO or owner who has a lot of experience in HubSpot development is critical as well. Ask them about their process, what you should expect, the anticipated timeline, what their expectations are from you, how they’ll be handling bugs, what the QA process is, and how long they’ll support their project post-launch. You’ll also want to understand what happens if you decide the relationship isn’t working out: A lot of bigger agencies have iron-clad agreements that can be difficult to exit.
\n\n
While the majority of the experiences from the biggest HubSpot development agencies are positive, we want you to be as prepared as you can be when you’re interviewing prospective agencies. The more you know and the more questions you ask, the easier it might be to avoid potential issues down the line. While we always love to be the ones to fix any problem we’re approached with, we’d much rather you have the right experience the first time around.
\n\n
\n
","tag_ids":[62770442823,78562833827],"topic_ids":[62770442823,78562833827],"post_summary":"
We love big HubSpot Partner agencies (and we cannot lie). They inspire us to grow and scale and become the best in our industry. We’ve worked inside their offices and built our expertise through delivering incredible HubSpot projects and making connections that we still value today. We learned how their processes work and how they didn’t work. We have taken that experience and applied it to much of how we run our own HubSpot development agency now.
We see HubSpot case studies from partner agencies and posts on how they’ve grown their revenue by a factor of ten and doubled their staff, and we think, Wow! That’s inspiring, but it sounds like it could be pretty painful! While HubSpot has growth resources for their agency partners, we can’t help but think of the literal growing pains when we were kids; we sometimes couldn’t sleep when our bones grew. There was discomfort, and sometimes a little pain, associated with that growth.
While we love watching the growth of other HubSpot agencies, we’ve also seen the other side of that growth. Several recent prospects have approached us after they’ve found other agencies have let their projects fall through the cracks. Those agencies are encountering problems associated with quick growth, such as overwhelmed staff and quality control issues, which are causing their clients (our new prospects) to suffer.
Here are just a few of the problems fast-growing large HubSpot development agencies encounter. Use them as signs that you, as a small business selecting a HubSpot development agency, can watch out for.
We love big HubSpot Partner agencies (and we cannot lie). They inspire us to grow and scale and become the best in our industry. We’ve worked inside their offices and built our expertise through delivering incredible HubSpot projects and making connections that we still value today. We learned how their processes work and how they didn’t work. We have taken that experience and applied it to much of how we run our own HubSpot development agency now.
We see HubSpot case studies from partner agencies and posts on how they’ve grown their revenue by a factor of ten and doubled their staff, and we think, Wow! That’s inspiring, but it sounds like it could be pretty painful! While HubSpot has growth resources for their agency partners, we can’t help but think of the literal growing pains when we were kids; we sometimes couldn’t sleep when our bones grew. There was discomfort, and sometimes a little pain, associated with that growth.
While we love watching the growth of other HubSpot agencies, we’ve also seen the other side of that growth. Several recent prospects have approached us after they’ve found other agencies have let their projects fall through the cracks. Those agencies are encountering problems associated with quick growth, such as overwhelmed staff and quality control issues, which are causing their clients (our new prospects) to suffer.
Here are just a few of the problems fast-growing large HubSpot development agencies encounter. Use them as signs that you, as a small business selecting a HubSpot development agency, can watch out for.
Their talent is sometimes oversold
\n
Top agencies typically garner the top talent — until they don’t. A specialized HubSpot partner soon discovers that not many employees have extensive experience in HubSpot development. While the pool of seasoned HubSpot developers is growing daily, the demand is growing at a far greater pace. An agency might have a few talented, seasoned developers working for it, but the developers cannot keep up with the workload the agency is bringing on, especially if they’re a Diamond or Elite HubSpot Partner that is constantly funneled leads from HubSpot onboarding reps. In addition, those top agencies lose talent as developers go out on their own to become freelancers or open their own HubSpot development agencies. The combination of the deficit in talent and the slowdowns from overworked talent can be felt across the organization.
What to watch for:
\n
A development agency is only as good as its development team, so if they struggle with high turnover or you’re being shifted around to new account reps on the regular, you may want to explore what changes are going on inside the agency. Of course, many agencies run deep in expertise on HubSpot development, typically those whose CEOs and owners are developers themselves: A developer-run agency is often better situated from a depth-of-talent perspective than other agencies.
Check in with the agency and find out where their talent comes from and how they vet their developers, how those developers hone their skills, and what recent projects they’ve completed. Sift through those projects and check load times, bugs, and usability issues to determine how their work is holding up.
Their team is underpaid
\n
Here’s the real truth when it comes to agency life: Developers are not always compensated properly. I said what I said. One of the reasons our owner left the majority of the agencies that he worked within was a heavy workload and compensation that wasn’t commensurate with expertise. It’s a difficult position to be in, as an agency, since clients can be sensitive when it comes to billable time and per-hour billable rates. But as in almost every aspect of life, you get what you pay for. If a client isn’t paying a significant monthly fee, you can almost guarantee that their talent is subpar or very underpaid (and likely to leave).
What to watch for:
\n
Agencies that are willing to discount their hourly rates significantly can only afford to do so because they either have lower overhead or they’re paying their teams much less than they’re charging for margins. If they also charge a low hourly rate to begin with, they’re probably outsourcing work to inexperienced developers who may not be qualified to cleanly code and develop with a lot of intention inside the HubSpot CMS.
Related: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\n\n
Their team is overwhelmed
\n
When becoming a HubSpot partner and the associated boost in lead generation result in a tenfold revenue growth or the doubling of staff, you can almost guarantee that teams are overwhelmed. When a lot of new employees are introduced, new team structures are established, or new clients are assigned to existing teams (which, let’s face it, is a major issue during this widespread period of \"employee shortages\"), developers will be overwhelmed with a massive amount of work. Overwhelmed and unhappy employees are 10% less productive. We probably don’t need to go over how unproductive employees affect the client experience, but there’s a lot of research out there: Dissatisfied employees are two and a half times more likely to say they do not provide excellent customer service and twice as likely to say they do not deliver quality outcomes.
What to watch for:
\n
Many prospects approach us with partially developed websites. Quality assurance is among the most important aspects of our delivery and launch process at deckerdevs. If you notice that you’re approaching the finish line with your project and running into an alarming number of unresolved issues that your development team didn’t seem to catch, this may be a red flag. If you’re not hearing back from your account executive or developer, or it's taking days or weeks to get changes completed, these are also signs that their teams are overwhelmed.
Their team has underwhelming skills
\n
From slowly loading pages to poorly coded sites to ill-conceived resource centers to hard-coded modules and lots of bugs and script errors: We’ve seen a lot of things that you should never see coming from big agencies. People paying the premiums that the biggest HubSpot agencies get deserve better. The executive teams at those agencies probably agree.
What to watch for:
\n
Red flags include buggy websites, rationalizing why a new feature can’t be added, slow-loading pages, minimal feedback from a usability perspective, and stopping work once the project is done. We have long-standing relationships with all our clients to execute projects on their behalf long after a project is completed, whether it’s a single module edit or a full website overhaul. We work closely with clients to determine the best balance between their budget and wishlist, then execute properly with infrastructure that is proven to make things easy for the client.
With such a huge talent gap when it comes to HubSpot CMS developers, it’s important that you do your homework when you’re interviewing development agencies.
\n\n
To avoid these issues, during the sales process, ask who is developing your project; you can even request that you have some face time with the developer. While not all developers are able to meet with clients, depending on the agency, you can at least gain some knowledge and ask the agency for developer references, past projects, and the amount of time they’ve been working in the HubSpot CMS.
\n\n
Hiring an agency with a CEO or owner who has a lot of experience in HubSpot development is critical as well. Ask them about their process, what you should expect, the anticipated timeline, what their expectations are from you, how they’ll be handling bugs, what the QA process is, and how long they’ll support their project post-launch. You’ll also want to understand what happens if you decide the relationship isn’t working out: A lot of bigger agencies have iron-clad agreements that can be difficult to exit.
\n\n
While the majority of the experiences from the biggest HubSpot development agencies are positive, we want you to be as prepared as you can be when you’re interviewing prospective agencies. The more you know and the more questions you ask, the easier it might be to avoid potential issues down the line. While we always love to be the ones to fix any problem we’re approached with, we’d much rather you have the right experience the first time around.
\n\n
\n
","postBodyRss":"
We love big HubSpot Partner agencies (and we cannot lie). They inspire us to grow and scale and become the best in our industry. We’ve worked inside their offices and built our expertise through delivering incredible HubSpot projects and making connections that we still value today. We learned how their processes work and how they didn’t work. We have taken that experience and applied it to much of how we run our own HubSpot development agency now.
We see HubSpot case studies from partner agencies and posts on how they’ve grown their revenue by a factor of ten and doubled their staff, and we think, Wow! That’s inspiring, but it sounds like it could be pretty painful! While HubSpot has growth resources for their agency partners, we can’t help but think of the literal growing pains when we were kids; we sometimes couldn’t sleep when our bones grew. There was discomfort, and sometimes a little pain, associated with that growth.
While we love watching the growth of other HubSpot agencies, we’ve also seen the other side of that growth. Several recent prospects have approached us after they’ve found other agencies have let their projects fall through the cracks. Those agencies are encountering problems associated with quick growth, such as overwhelmed staff and quality control issues, which are causing their clients (our new prospects) to suffer.
Here are just a few of the problems fast-growing large HubSpot development agencies encounter. Use them as signs that you, as a small business selecting a HubSpot development agency, can watch out for.
Their talent is sometimes oversold
\n
Top agencies typically garner the top talent — until they don’t. A specialized HubSpot partner soon discovers that not many employees have extensive experience in HubSpot development. While the pool of seasoned HubSpot developers is growing daily, the demand is growing at a far greater pace. An agency might have a few talented, seasoned developers working for it, but the developers cannot keep up with the workload the agency is bringing on, especially if they’re a Diamond or Elite HubSpot Partner that is constantly funneled leads from HubSpot onboarding reps. In addition, those top agencies lose talent as developers go out on their own to become freelancers or open their own HubSpot development agencies. The combination of the deficit in talent and the slowdowns from overworked talent can be felt across the organization.
What to watch for:
\n
A development agency is only as good as its development team, so if they struggle with high turnover or you’re being shifted around to new account reps on the regular, you may want to explore what changes are going on inside the agency. Of course, many agencies run deep in expertise on HubSpot development, typically those whose CEOs and owners are developers themselves: A developer-run agency is often better situated from a depth-of-talent perspective than other agencies.
Check in with the agency and find out where their talent comes from and how they vet their developers, how those developers hone their skills, and what recent projects they’ve completed. Sift through those projects and check load times, bugs, and usability issues to determine how their work is holding up.
Their team is underpaid
\n
Here’s the real truth when it comes to agency life: Developers are not always compensated properly. I said what I said. One of the reasons our owner left the majority of the agencies that he worked within was a heavy workload and compensation that wasn’t commensurate with expertise. It’s a difficult position to be in, as an agency, since clients can be sensitive when it comes to billable time and per-hour billable rates. But as in almost every aspect of life, you get what you pay for. If a client isn’t paying a significant monthly fee, you can almost guarantee that their talent is subpar or very underpaid (and likely to leave).
What to watch for:
\n
Agencies that are willing to discount their hourly rates significantly can only afford to do so because they either have lower overhead or they’re paying their teams much less than they’re charging for margins. If they also charge a low hourly rate to begin with, they’re probably outsourcing work to inexperienced developers who may not be qualified to cleanly code and develop with a lot of intention inside the HubSpot CMS.
Related: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\n\n
Their team is overwhelmed
\n
When becoming a HubSpot partner and the associated boost in lead generation result in a tenfold revenue growth or the doubling of staff, you can almost guarantee that teams are overwhelmed. When a lot of new employees are introduced, new team structures are established, or new clients are assigned to existing teams (which, let’s face it, is a major issue during this widespread period of \"employee shortages\"), developers will be overwhelmed with a massive amount of work. Overwhelmed and unhappy employees are 10% less productive. We probably don’t need to go over how unproductive employees affect the client experience, but there’s a lot of research out there: Dissatisfied employees are two and a half times more likely to say they do not provide excellent customer service and twice as likely to say they do not deliver quality outcomes.
What to watch for:
\n
Many prospects approach us with partially developed websites. Quality assurance is among the most important aspects of our delivery and launch process at deckerdevs. If you notice that you’re approaching the finish line with your project and running into an alarming number of unresolved issues that your development team didn’t seem to catch, this may be a red flag. If you’re not hearing back from your account executive or developer, or it's taking days or weeks to get changes completed, these are also signs that their teams are overwhelmed.
Their team has underwhelming skills
\n
From slowly loading pages to poorly coded sites to ill-conceived resource centers to hard-coded modules and lots of bugs and script errors: We’ve seen a lot of things that you should never see coming from big agencies. People paying the premiums that the biggest HubSpot agencies get deserve better. The executive teams at those agencies probably agree.
What to watch for:
\n
Red flags include buggy websites, rationalizing why a new feature can’t be added, slow-loading pages, minimal feedback from a usability perspective, and stopping work once the project is done. We have long-standing relationships with all our clients to execute projects on their behalf long after a project is completed, whether it’s a single module edit or a full website overhaul. We work closely with clients to determine the best balance between their budget and wishlist, then execute properly with infrastructure that is proven to make things easy for the client.
With such a huge talent gap when it comes to HubSpot CMS developers, it’s important that you do your homework when you’re interviewing development agencies.
\n\n
To avoid these issues, during the sales process, ask who is developing your project; you can even request that you have some face time with the developer. While not all developers are able to meet with clients, depending on the agency, you can at least gain some knowledge and ask the agency for developer references, past projects, and the amount of time they’ve been working in the HubSpot CMS.
\n\n
Hiring an agency with a CEO or owner who has a lot of experience in HubSpot development is critical as well. Ask them about their process, what you should expect, the anticipated timeline, what their expectations are from you, how they’ll be handling bugs, what the QA process is, and how long they’ll support their project post-launch. You’ll also want to understand what happens if you decide the relationship isn’t working out: A lot of bigger agencies have iron-clad agreements that can be difficult to exit.
\n\n
While the majority of the experiences from the biggest HubSpot development agencies are positive, we want you to be as prepared as you can be when you’re interviewing prospective agencies. The more you know and the more questions you ask, the easier it might be to avoid potential issues down the line. While we always love to be the ones to fix any problem we’re approached with, we’d much rather you have the right experience the first time around.
\n\n
\n
","postEmailContent":"
We love big HubSpot Partner agencies (and we cannot lie). They inspire us to grow and scale and become the best in our industry. We’ve worked inside their offices and built our expertise through delivering incredible HubSpot projects and making connections that we still value today. We learned how their processes work and how they didn’t work. We have taken that experience and applied it to much of how we run our own HubSpot development agency now.
We see HubSpot case studies from partner agencies and posts on how they’ve grown their revenue by a factor of ten and doubled their staff, and we think, Wow! That’s inspiring, but it sounds like it could be pretty painful! While HubSpot has growth resources for their agency partners, we can’t help but think of the literal growing pains when we were kids; we sometimes couldn’t sleep when our bones grew. There was discomfort, and sometimes a little pain, associated with that growth.
While we love watching the growth of other HubSpot agencies, we’ve also seen the other side of that growth. Several recent prospects have approached us after they’ve found other agencies have let their projects fall through the cracks. Those agencies are encountering problems associated with quick growth, such as overwhelmed staff and quality control issues, which are causing their clients (our new prospects) to suffer.
Here are just a few of the problems fast-growing large HubSpot development agencies encounter. Use them as signs that you, as a small business selecting a HubSpot development agency, can watch out for.
We love big HubSpot Partner agencies (and we cannot lie). They inspire us to grow and scale and become the best in our industry. We’ve worked inside their offices and built our expertise through delivering incredible HubSpot projects and making connections that we still value today. We learned how their processes work and how they didn’t work. We have taken that experience and applied it to much of how we run our own HubSpot development agency now.
We see HubSpot case studies from partner agencies and posts on how they’ve grown their revenue by a factor of ten and doubled their staff, and we think, Wow! That’s inspiring, but it sounds like it could be pretty painful! While HubSpot has growth resources for their agency partners, we can’t help but think of the literal growing pains when we were kids; we sometimes couldn’t sleep when our bones grew. There was discomfort, and sometimes a little pain, associated with that growth.
While we love watching the growth of other HubSpot agencies, we’ve also seen the other side of that growth. Several recent prospects have approached us after they’ve found other agencies have let their projects fall through the cracks. Those agencies are encountering problems associated with quick growth, such as overwhelmed staff and quality control issues, which are causing their clients (our new prospects) to suffer.
Here are just a few of the problems fast-growing large HubSpot development agencies encounter. Use them as signs that you, as a small business selecting a HubSpot development agency, can watch out for.
We love big HubSpot Partner agencies (and we cannot lie). They inspire us to grow and scale and become the best in our industry. We’ve worked inside their offices and built our expertise through delivering incredible HubSpot projects and making connections that we still value today. We learned how their processes work and how they didn’t work. We have taken that experience and applied it to much of how we run our own HubSpot development agency now.
We see HubSpot case studies from partner agencies and posts on how they’ve grown their revenue by a factor of ten and doubled their staff, and we think, Wow! That’s inspiring, but it sounds like it could be pretty painful! While HubSpot has growth resources for their agency partners, we can’t help but think of the literal growing pains when we were kids; we sometimes couldn’t sleep when our bones grew. There was discomfort, and sometimes a little pain, associated with that growth.
While we love watching the growth of other HubSpot agencies, we’ve also seen the other side of that growth. Several recent prospects have approached us after they’ve found other agencies have let their projects fall through the cracks. Those agencies are encountering problems associated with quick growth, such as overwhelmed staff and quality control issues, which are causing their clients (our new prospects) to suffer.
Here are just a few of the problems fast-growing large HubSpot development agencies encounter. Use them as signs that you, as a small business selecting a HubSpot development agency, can watch out for.
We love big HubSpot Partner agencies (and we cannot lie). They inspire us to grow and scale and become the best in our industry. We’ve worked inside their offices and built our expertise through delivering incredible HubSpot projects and making connections that we still value today. We learned how their processes work and how they didn’t work. We have taken that experience and applied it to much of how we run our own HubSpot development agency now.
We see HubSpot case studies from partner agencies and posts on how they’ve grown their revenue by a factor of ten and doubled their staff, and we think, Wow! That’s inspiring, but it sounds like it could be pretty painful! While HubSpot has growth resources for their agency partners, we can’t help but think of the literal growing pains when we were kids; we sometimes couldn’t sleep when our bones grew. There was discomfort, and sometimes a little pain, associated with that growth.
While we love watching the growth of other HubSpot agencies, we’ve also seen the other side of that growth. Several recent prospects have approached us after they’ve found other agencies have let their projects fall through the cracks. Those agencies are encountering problems associated with quick growth, such as overwhelmed staff and quality control issues, which are causing their clients (our new prospects) to suffer.
Here are just a few of the problems fast-growing large HubSpot development agencies encounter. Use them as signs that you, as a small business selecting a HubSpot development agency, can watch out for.
We love big HubSpot Partner agencies (and we cannot lie). They inspire us to grow and scale and become the best in our industry. We’ve worked inside their offices and built our expertise through delivering incredible HubSpot projects and making connections that we still value today. We learned how their processes work and how they didn’t work. We have taken that experience and applied it to much of how we run our own HubSpot development agency now.
We see HubSpot case studies from partner agencies and posts on how they’ve grown their revenue by a factor of ten and doubled their staff, and we think, Wow! That’s inspiring, but it sounds like it could be pretty painful! While HubSpot has growth resources for their agency partners, we can’t help but think of the literal growing pains when we were kids; we sometimes couldn’t sleep when our bones grew. There was discomfort, and sometimes a little pain, associated with that growth.
While we love watching the growth of other HubSpot agencies, we’ve also seen the other side of that growth. Several recent prospects have approached us after they’ve found other agencies have let their projects fall through the cracks. Those agencies are encountering problems associated with quick growth, such as overwhelmed staff and quality control issues, which are causing their clients (our new prospects) to suffer.
Here are just a few of the problems fast-growing large HubSpot development agencies encounter. Use them as signs that you, as a small business selecting a HubSpot development agency, can watch out for.
We love big HubSpot Partner agencies (and we cannot lie). They inspire us to grow and scale and become the best in our industry. We’ve worked inside their offices and built our expertise through delivering incredible HubSpot projects and making connections that we still value today. We learned how their processes work and how they didn’t work. We have taken that experience and applied it to much of how we run our own HubSpot development agency now.
We see HubSpot case studies from partner agencies and posts on how they’ve grown their revenue by a factor of ten and doubled their staff, and we think, Wow! That’s inspiring, but it sounds like it could be pretty painful! While HubSpot has growth resources for their agency partners, we can’t help but think of the literal growing pains when we were kids; we sometimes couldn’t sleep when our bones grew. There was discomfort, and sometimes a little pain, associated with that growth.
While we love watching the growth of other HubSpot agencies, we’ve also seen the other side of that growth. Several recent prospects have approached us after they’ve found other agencies have let their projects fall through the cracks. Those agencies are encountering problems associated with quick growth, such as overwhelmed staff and quality control issues, which are causing their clients (our new prospects) to suffer.
Here are just a few of the problems fast-growing large HubSpot development agencies encounter. Use them as signs that you, as a small business selecting a HubSpot development agency, can watch out for.
Their talent is sometimes oversold
\n
Top agencies typically garner the top talent — until they don’t. A specialized HubSpot partner soon discovers that not many employees have extensive experience in HubSpot development. While the pool of seasoned HubSpot developers is growing daily, the demand is growing at a far greater pace. An agency might have a few talented, seasoned developers working for it, but the developers cannot keep up with the workload the agency is bringing on, especially if they’re a Diamond or Elite HubSpot Partner that is constantly funneled leads from HubSpot onboarding reps. In addition, those top agencies lose talent as developers go out on their own to become freelancers or open their own HubSpot development agencies. The combination of the deficit in talent and the slowdowns from overworked talent can be felt across the organization.
What to watch for:
\n
A development agency is only as good as its development team, so if they struggle with high turnover or you’re being shifted around to new account reps on the regular, you may want to explore what changes are going on inside the agency. Of course, many agencies run deep in expertise on HubSpot development, typically those whose CEOs and owners are developers themselves: A developer-run agency is often better situated from a depth-of-talent perspective than other agencies.
Check in with the agency and find out where their talent comes from and how they vet their developers, how those developers hone their skills, and what recent projects they’ve completed. Sift through those projects and check load times, bugs, and usability issues to determine how their work is holding up.
Their team is underpaid
\n
Here’s the real truth when it comes to agency life: Developers are not always compensated properly. I said what I said. One of the reasons our owner left the majority of the agencies that he worked within was a heavy workload and compensation that wasn’t commensurate with expertise. It’s a difficult position to be in, as an agency, since clients can be sensitive when it comes to billable time and per-hour billable rates. But as in almost every aspect of life, you get what you pay for. If a client isn’t paying a significant monthly fee, you can almost guarantee that their talent is subpar or very underpaid (and likely to leave).
What to watch for:
\n
Agencies that are willing to discount their hourly rates significantly can only afford to do so because they either have lower overhead or they’re paying their teams much less than they’re charging for margins. If they also charge a low hourly rate to begin with, they’re probably outsourcing work to inexperienced developers who may not be qualified to cleanly code and develop with a lot of intention inside the HubSpot CMS.
Related: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\n\n
Their team is overwhelmed
\n
When becoming a HubSpot partner and the associated boost in lead generation result in a tenfold revenue growth or the doubling of staff, you can almost guarantee that teams are overwhelmed. When a lot of new employees are introduced, new team structures are established, or new clients are assigned to existing teams (which, let’s face it, is a major issue during this widespread period of \"employee shortages\"), developers will be overwhelmed with a massive amount of work. Overwhelmed and unhappy employees are 10% less productive. We probably don’t need to go over how unproductive employees affect the client experience, but there’s a lot of research out there: Dissatisfied employees are two and a half times more likely to say they do not provide excellent customer service and twice as likely to say they do not deliver quality outcomes.
What to watch for:
\n
Many prospects approach us with partially developed websites. Quality assurance is among the most important aspects of our delivery and launch process at deckerdevs. If you notice that you’re approaching the finish line with your project and running into an alarming number of unresolved issues that your development team didn’t seem to catch, this may be a red flag. If you’re not hearing back from your account executive or developer, or it's taking days or weeks to get changes completed, these are also signs that their teams are overwhelmed.
Their team has underwhelming skills
\n
From slowly loading pages to poorly coded sites to ill-conceived resource centers to hard-coded modules and lots of bugs and script errors: We’ve seen a lot of things that you should never see coming from big agencies. People paying the premiums that the biggest HubSpot agencies get deserve better. The executive teams at those agencies probably agree.
What to watch for:
\n
Red flags include buggy websites, rationalizing why a new feature can’t be added, slow-loading pages, minimal feedback from a usability perspective, and stopping work once the project is done. We have long-standing relationships with all our clients to execute projects on their behalf long after a project is completed, whether it’s a single module edit or a full website overhaul. We work closely with clients to determine the best balance between their budget and wishlist, then execute properly with infrastructure that is proven to make things easy for the client.
With such a huge talent gap when it comes to HubSpot CMS developers, it’s important that you do your homework when you’re interviewing development agencies.
\n\n
To avoid these issues, during the sales process, ask who is developing your project; you can even request that you have some face time with the developer. While not all developers are able to meet with clients, depending on the agency, you can at least gain some knowledge and ask the agency for developer references, past projects, and the amount of time they’ve been working in the HubSpot CMS.
\n\n
Hiring an agency with a CEO or owner who has a lot of experience in HubSpot development is critical as well. Ask them about their process, what you should expect, the anticipated timeline, what their expectations are from you, how they’ll be handling bugs, what the QA process is, and how long they’ll support their project post-launch. You’ll also want to understand what happens if you decide the relationship isn’t working out: A lot of bigger agencies have iron-clad agreements that can be difficult to exit.
\n\n
While the majority of the experiences from the biggest HubSpot development agencies are positive, we want you to be as prepared as you can be when you’re interviewing prospective agencies. The more you know and the more questions you ask, the easier it might be to avoid potential issues down the line. While we always love to be the ones to fix any problem we’re approached with, we’d much rather you have the right experience the first time around.
\n\n
\n
","rssSummary":"
We love big HubSpot Partner agencies (and we cannot lie). They inspire us to grow and scale and become the best in our industry. We’ve worked inside their offices and built our expertise through delivering incredible HubSpot projects and making connections that we still value today. We learned how their processes work and how they didn’t work. We have taken that experience and applied it to much of how we run our own HubSpot development agency now.
We see HubSpot case studies from partner agencies and posts on how they’ve grown their revenue by a factor of ten and doubled their staff, and we think, Wow! That’s inspiring, but it sounds like it could be pretty painful! While HubSpot has growth resources for their agency partners, we can’t help but think of the literal growing pains when we were kids; we sometimes couldn’t sleep when our bones grew. There was discomfort, and sometimes a little pain, associated with that growth.
While we love watching the growth of other HubSpot agencies, we’ve also seen the other side of that growth. Several recent prospects have approached us after they’ve found other agencies have let their projects fall through the cracks. Those agencies are encountering problems associated with quick growth, such as overwhelmed staff and quality control issues, which are causing their clients (our new prospects) to suffer.
Here are just a few of the problems fast-growing large HubSpot development agencies encounter. Use them as signs that you, as a small business selecting a HubSpot development agency, can watch out for.