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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)
HubSpot Custom Theme Builder: Website Woes We’re Leaving Behind in '24
Say goodbye to your website woes in 2024 - and say hello to a shiny new, customized website on HubSpot using our HubSpot custom theme builder.
Scaling Organizations Need to Stop Buying HubSpot Marketplace Themes
Here's why scaling organizations need to stop buying HubSpot Marketplace themes.
New Year, New Website? 6 Signs it’s Time for a Website Redesign
It's the new year - is it time for a new website redesign too? Here are some signs...
2022 Wrap-up: HubSpot Web Development Trends & 2023 Predictions
We covered some pretty good HubSpot web development projects in 2022 - here are the trends and here's what we think is in store for 2023 in HubSpot CMS.
5 Things to Add to Your Website Budget in 2023
Even if you've already created your website budget for 2023, make more room - we have a few items you probably forgot.
Upwork Developers : A Tradeoff That’s More Risky Than You Think
Upwork developers are a costly tradeoff - here's why we find it to be too risky to trust your web development to a stranger you found on Upwork.
Your Web Development Budget Restrictions are Holding You Back
Your web development budget restrictions will handicap your marketing and sales goals and cost you more than you think.
![\"18-1\"](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/18-1.png\")
It’s 2024. This is the year we finally get our shit together, right? No more messing around with technology that isn’t working for us. Nope. This year, we’re streamlining our operations, empowering our sales team, fueling up customer service and maximizing our potential. Why? Because, to be completely honest with you, we don’t have a choice. We’d have to be delusional to think that in a climate where housing, insurance, and food costs are at all time high, that we don’t need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we’re delivering big in business.
\n
Increasingly spend-conscious clients or customers, at any time, can reconfigure and optimize their budgets. In order to make sure that we’re not on the chopping block, we have to deliver value like we’ve never done before. And for some marketing and sales teams? That means we have to get real about the things holding us back.
\n\n
Website refreshes often top the list of “New Year's resolutions” for businesses, but the budget isn’t always there to get them to where they need to be. For so many small and medium-sized businesses, they’ve got big dreams of migrating their website over to HubSpot CMS. But in the past it has remained out of reach from a budget perspective, knowing that the functionality they’ve built on WordPress may be complex to develop in HubSpot CMS and the standard HubSpot theme marketplace just won’t cut it.
\n\n
Sometimes it takes a reminder of how much something is holding us back before we can make the decision to invest in the things we need. So? Here we are. Your friendly neighborhood HubSpot developer, to remind you of all the website woes you need to commit to leaving behind in 2023 as you commit to a HubSpot theme builder that finally fits exactly what you need.
\n\n
Here are the website woes you’re leaving in 2023. For good.
\n\n
Inflexible back end user interfaces
\n\n
Whether you’re on WordPress or another CMS for your website, odds are good that you’re limited by the user interface of plugins that you’ve added or overly simplified content management tools that just don’t give you the flexibility you need. HubSpot CMS is super simple, and with the right developer and a little training, your marketing team can really have some fun. But when they’re hamstrung by a poor UI or coded into a corner and unable to make edits in an efficient way because of a developer that cut corners? They’re going to be less productive and less excited about updating your website content.
\n\n
Having to go back to your developer to make updates halts any progress on work and with so many dependencies when it comes to the intricacies of marketing and workflows, your employees are apt to feel very frustrated and less productive.
\n\n
In 2022, according to Gallup, nearly 1/5th of the workforce (18%) reported feeling disengaged in their jobs. Yet, we’re not doing anything to keep them motivated by introducing the right tools (aka a properly functioning website back end) to help them succeed. Why should you invest in this?
\n\n
Because according to The University of Oxford, happy employees are 13% more productive.
\nEmployee engagement, happiness and productivity go hand and hand, yet we’re actively inhibiting our marketing and website admin employees’ productivity by refusing to invest in the tools they need to be successful. For 2024, you can commit to improved UI by making the decision to migrate over to a more user friendly CMS or investing in the development of an improved user interface on your existing website.
\n\n
Paying more for additional development to fix bugs or make improvements is only adding to your website budget. Add this to the financial impact of less productive employees? You’re taking a hit no matter how you slice it.
\n\n
Slow, bloated and poorly converting websites
\n\n
Why are we even still talking about this? Sometimes I feel like I write about the same topics over and over again. Consider the dead horse beaten. You’d think with the amount of time we spend preaching about slow loading websites, bloated WordPress sites and all of your conversion difficulties, you’d have made a change by now.
\n\n
Do yourself a favor and check out our Page Load Speed Infographic for lots of statistics on how damaging a slow loading website can be.
\n\n
A few factors that contribute to it?
\n\n
Oversized images on your website, videos that aren’t configured to load properly, misconfigured scripts, code workarounds, and more.
\n\n
Not only is this a pain in the ass for your employees trying to work on your website, but it’s a pain for the clients and customers that have to sit on that website and wait for it to load. Best practices place optimal website load speeds at 3 seconds, but the average desktop website takes 10.3 seconds to load. It decreases your conversion rate, increases your bounce rate, and decreases the customer’s desire to buy from you.
\n\n
In short? A slow, bloated website isn’t going to get you where you need to go. No matter what your budget is, no matter how much you’re forking over for paid ads, no matter how much focus you put into uploading new content and creating compelling collateral for your prospects. When you do the math on the opportunities you miss out on from a sales perspective when your website is slow loading and holding you back, you should be POURING budget into your migration onto HubSpot CMS.
\n\n
Every missed sale, every failed conversion, every prospect you lose because your website is taking too long to load, and every extra day your marketing team waits because you don’t have the processes, software and website infrastructure in place to support them - you’re losing money.
\n\n
RELATED: 6 things sending users away from your website.
\n\n
Menus or resource libraries that don't provide the whole picture.
\n\n
Your prospect or customer should be able to glance at your menu and find exactly what they need. Marketers are spending hours upon hours to create content that resounds with your audience, and you’re continuing to rely exclusively on organic search to get them there.
\n\n
Mega menus and resource libraries are the key to showcasing all of that valuable content in a central location that’s easy for them to scan, visually appealing and can be found on the most focal area of your website where prospects are already spending their time. Capitalize on their attention by expanding your website’s navigation menu and really ensure that you’re providing a snapshot into the full breadth of information available to them.
\n\n
According to HubSpot, 96% of prospects do research before they talk to a Sales Rep. By putting that information on your mega menu or into a resource library, you can increase the chances that your prospects find the information they’re looking for and spend more time on your website when they discover information they didn’t even realize they needed.
\n\n
RELATED: Why a HubSpot mega menu should be your next website investment
\n\n
Websites that aren't hosted on HubSpot
\n\n
I said what I said. If you’re a HubSpot customer (or even if you’re not a HubSpot customer yet), you’re seriously missing out by not migrating your website to HubSpot CMS. We played the game where we helped small businesses use WordPress because it was “cheaper” - but, ultimately, the cost was too great. We were constantly fixing bugs and developers wouldn’t update their plugins and it nearly always resulted in long term strife as clients tried to piecemeal grow their website on framework that wasn’t working for their business as they scaled.
\n\n
We even wrote a whole blog on why we broke up with WordPress.
\n\n
Ultimately, we’ve gone all in on HubSpot. While historically it’s been prohibitive from a budget perspective to get onto HubSpot CMS, or clients have balked at the monthly fee - ultimately you’re paying less and getting more. The maintenance happens automatically and out of the box the platform just WORKS. Not to mention it’s integrated with all your marketing, sales, reporting and analytics already and offers you plenty of room to scale as you want more features and insight into your marketing and data analytics.
\n\n
At some point, you have to scale your website to match your business as it grows. If you’re moving to HubSpot CMS for your website this year, rather than paying tens of thousands for a custom website or compromising on a low budget theme that doesn’t give you what you need - we’ve created a custom HubSpot theme builder that empowers you with a solid infrastructure, super flexible modules and can be custom tailored to the design of your choice. The best part? It starts at $10,000.
\n\n
This year you can keep doing the same thing or you can level up. With a little extra investment and a little hard work partnering with our development team you can take your website, analytics and data to the next level by leaving behind the woes that come with WordPress and the other headaches you’ve been dealing with on your existing website.
\n\n
Let’s start 2024 on the right foot.
\n\n
","rss_summary":"
It’s 2024. This is the year we finally get our shit together, right? No more messing around with technology that isn’t working for us. Nope. This year, we’re streamlining our operations, empowering our sales team, fueling up customer service and maximizing our potential. Why? Because, to be completely honest with you, we don’t have a choice. We’d have to be delusional to think that in a climate where housing, insurance, and food costs are at all time high, that we don’t need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we’re delivering big in business.
It’s 2024. This is the year we finally get our shit together, right? No more messing around with technology that isn’t working for us. Nope. This year, we’re streamlining our operations, empowering our sales team, fueling up customer service and maximizing our potential. Why? Because, to be completely honest with you, we don’t have a choice. We’d have to be delusional to think that in a climate where housing, insurance, and food costs are at all time high, that we don’t need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we’re delivering big in business.
\n
Increasingly spend-conscious clients or customers, at any time, can reconfigure and optimize their budgets. In order to make sure that we’re not on the chopping block, we have to deliver value like we’ve never done before. And for some marketing and sales teams? That means we have to get real about the things holding us back.
\n\n
Website refreshes often top the list of “New Year's resolutions” for businesses, but the budget isn’t always there to get them to where they need to be. For so many small and medium-sized businesses, they’ve got big dreams of migrating their website over to HubSpot CMS. But in the past it has remained out of reach from a budget perspective, knowing that the functionality they’ve built on WordPress may be complex to develop in HubSpot CMS and the standard HubSpot theme marketplace just won’t cut it.
\n\n
Sometimes it takes a reminder of how much something is holding us back before we can make the decision to invest in the things we need. So? Here we are. Your friendly neighborhood HubSpot developer, to remind you of all the website woes you need to commit to leaving behind in 2023 as you commit to a HubSpot theme builder that finally fits exactly what you need.
\n\n
Here are the website woes you’re leaving in 2023. For good.
\n\n
Inflexible back end user interfaces
\n\n
Whether you’re on WordPress or another CMS for your website, odds are good that you’re limited by the user interface of plugins that you’ve added or overly simplified content management tools that just don’t give you the flexibility you need. HubSpot CMS is super simple, and with the right developer and a little training, your marketing team can really have some fun. But when they’re hamstrung by a poor UI or coded into a corner and unable to make edits in an efficient way because of a developer that cut corners? They’re going to be less productive and less excited about updating your website content.
\n\n
Having to go back to your developer to make updates halts any progress on work and with so many dependencies when it comes to the intricacies of marketing and workflows, your employees are apt to feel very frustrated and less productive.
\n\n
In 2022, according to Gallup, nearly 1/5th of the workforce (18%) reported feeling disengaged in their jobs. Yet, we’re not doing anything to keep them motivated by introducing the right tools (aka a properly functioning website back end) to help them succeed. Why should you invest in this?
\n\n
Because according to The University of Oxford, happy employees are 13% more productive.
\nEmployee engagement, happiness and productivity go hand and hand, yet we’re actively inhibiting our marketing and website admin employees’ productivity by refusing to invest in the tools they need to be successful. For 2024, you can commit to improved UI by making the decision to migrate over to a more user friendly CMS or investing in the development of an improved user interface on your existing website.
\n\n
Paying more for additional development to fix bugs or make improvements is only adding to your website budget. Add this to the financial impact of less productive employees? You’re taking a hit no matter how you slice it.
\n\n
Slow, bloated and poorly converting websites
\n\n
Why are we even still talking about this? Sometimes I feel like I write about the same topics over and over again. Consider the dead horse beaten. You’d think with the amount of time we spend preaching about slow loading websites, bloated WordPress sites and all of your conversion difficulties, you’d have made a change by now.
\n\n
Do yourself a favor and check out our Page Load Speed Infographic for lots of statistics on how damaging a slow loading website can be.
\n\n
A few factors that contribute to it?
\n\n
Oversized images on your website, videos that aren’t configured to load properly, misconfigured scripts, code workarounds, and more.
\n\n
Not only is this a pain in the ass for your employees trying to work on your website, but it’s a pain for the clients and customers that have to sit on that website and wait for it to load. Best practices place optimal website load speeds at 3 seconds, but the average desktop website takes 10.3 seconds to load. It decreases your conversion rate, increases your bounce rate, and decreases the customer’s desire to buy from you.
\n\n
In short? A slow, bloated website isn’t going to get you where you need to go. No matter what your budget is, no matter how much you’re forking over for paid ads, no matter how much focus you put into uploading new content and creating compelling collateral for your prospects. When you do the math on the opportunities you miss out on from a sales perspective when your website is slow loading and holding you back, you should be POURING budget into your migration onto HubSpot CMS.
\n\n
Every missed sale, every failed conversion, every prospect you lose because your website is taking too long to load, and every extra day your marketing team waits because you don’t have the processes, software and website infrastructure in place to support them - you’re losing money.
\n\n
RELATED: 6 things sending users away from your website.
\n\n
Menus or resource libraries that don't provide the whole picture.
\n\n
Your prospect or customer should be able to glance at your menu and find exactly what they need. Marketers are spending hours upon hours to create content that resounds with your audience, and you’re continuing to rely exclusively on organic search to get them there.
\n\n
Mega menus and resource libraries are the key to showcasing all of that valuable content in a central location that’s easy for them to scan, visually appealing and can be found on the most focal area of your website where prospects are already spending their time. Capitalize on their attention by expanding your website’s navigation menu and really ensure that you’re providing a snapshot into the full breadth of information available to them.
\n\n
According to HubSpot, 96% of prospects do research before they talk to a Sales Rep. By putting that information on your mega menu or into a resource library, you can increase the chances that your prospects find the information they’re looking for and spend more time on your website when they discover information they didn’t even realize they needed.
\n\n
RELATED: Why a HubSpot mega menu should be your next website investment
\n\n
Websites that aren't hosted on HubSpot
\n\n
I said what I said. If you’re a HubSpot customer (or even if you’re not a HubSpot customer yet), you’re seriously missing out by not migrating your website to HubSpot CMS. We played the game where we helped small businesses use WordPress because it was “cheaper” - but, ultimately, the cost was too great. We were constantly fixing bugs and developers wouldn’t update their plugins and it nearly always resulted in long term strife as clients tried to piecemeal grow their website on framework that wasn’t working for their business as they scaled.
\n\n
We even wrote a whole blog on why we broke up with WordPress.
\n\n
Ultimately, we’ve gone all in on HubSpot. While historically it’s been prohibitive from a budget perspective to get onto HubSpot CMS, or clients have balked at the monthly fee - ultimately you’re paying less and getting more. The maintenance happens automatically and out of the box the platform just WORKS. Not to mention it’s integrated with all your marketing, sales, reporting and analytics already and offers you plenty of room to scale as you want more features and insight into your marketing and data analytics.
\n\n
At some point, you have to scale your website to match your business as it grows. If you’re moving to HubSpot CMS for your website this year, rather than paying tens of thousands for a custom website or compromising on a low budget theme that doesn’t give you what you need - we’ve created a custom HubSpot theme builder that empowers you with a solid infrastructure, super flexible modules and can be custom tailored to the design of your choice. The best part? It starts at $10,000.
\n\n
This year you can keep doing the same thing or you can level up. With a little extra investment and a little hard work partnering with our development team you can take your website, analytics and data to the next level by leaving behind the woes that come with WordPress and the other headaches you’ve been dealing with on your existing website.
\n\n
Let’s start 2024 on the right foot.
\n\n
","tag_ids":[62770442823,89815248915,153634981798],"topic_ids":[62770442823,89815248915,153634981798],"post_summary":"
It’s 2024. This is the year we finally get our shit together, right? No more messing around with technology that isn’t working for us. Nope. This year, we’re streamlining our operations, empowering our sales team, fueling up customer service and maximizing our potential. Why? Because, to be completely honest with you, we don’t have a choice. We’d have to be delusional to think that in a climate where housing, insurance, and food costs are at all time high, that we don’t need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we’re delivering big in business.
It’s 2024. This is the year we finally get our shit together, right? No more messing around with technology that isn’t working for us. Nope. This year, we’re streamlining our operations, empowering our sales team, fueling up customer service and maximizing our potential. Why? Because, to be completely honest with you, we don’t have a choice. We’d have to be delusional to think that in a climate where housing, insurance, and food costs are at all time high, that we don’t need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we’re delivering big in business.
\n
Increasingly spend-conscious clients or customers, at any time, can reconfigure and optimize their budgets. In order to make sure that we’re not on the chopping block, we have to deliver value like we’ve never done before. And for some marketing and sales teams? That means we have to get real about the things holding us back.
\n\n
Website refreshes often top the list of “New Year's resolutions” for businesses, but the budget isn’t always there to get them to where they need to be. For so many small and medium-sized businesses, they’ve got big dreams of migrating their website over to HubSpot CMS. But in the past it has remained out of reach from a budget perspective, knowing that the functionality they’ve built on WordPress may be complex to develop in HubSpot CMS and the standard HubSpot theme marketplace just won’t cut it.
\n\n
Sometimes it takes a reminder of how much something is holding us back before we can make the decision to invest in the things we need. So? Here we are. Your friendly neighborhood HubSpot developer, to remind you of all the website woes you need to commit to leaving behind in 2023 as you commit to a HubSpot theme builder that finally fits exactly what you need.
\n\n
Here are the website woes you’re leaving in 2023. For good.
\n\n
Inflexible back end user interfaces
\n\n
Whether you’re on WordPress or another CMS for your website, odds are good that you’re limited by the user interface of plugins that you’ve added or overly simplified content management tools that just don’t give you the flexibility you need. HubSpot CMS is super simple, and with the right developer and a little training, your marketing team can really have some fun. But when they’re hamstrung by a poor UI or coded into a corner and unable to make edits in an efficient way because of a developer that cut corners? They’re going to be less productive and less excited about updating your website content.
\n\n
Having to go back to your developer to make updates halts any progress on work and with so many dependencies when it comes to the intricacies of marketing and workflows, your employees are apt to feel very frustrated and less productive.
\n\n
In 2022, according to Gallup, nearly 1/5th of the workforce (18%) reported feeling disengaged in their jobs. Yet, we’re not doing anything to keep them motivated by introducing the right tools (aka a properly functioning website back end) to help them succeed. Why should you invest in this?
\n\n
Because according to The University of Oxford, happy employees are 13% more productive.
\nEmployee engagement, happiness and productivity go hand and hand, yet we’re actively inhibiting our marketing and website admin employees’ productivity by refusing to invest in the tools they need to be successful. For 2024, you can commit to improved UI by making the decision to migrate over to a more user friendly CMS or investing in the development of an improved user interface on your existing website.
\n\n
Paying more for additional development to fix bugs or make improvements is only adding to your website budget. Add this to the financial impact of less productive employees? You’re taking a hit no matter how you slice it.
\n\n
Slow, bloated and poorly converting websites
\n\n
Why are we even still talking about this? Sometimes I feel like I write about the same topics over and over again. Consider the dead horse beaten. You’d think with the amount of time we spend preaching about slow loading websites, bloated WordPress sites and all of your conversion difficulties, you’d have made a change by now.
\n\n
Do yourself a favor and check out our Page Load Speed Infographic for lots of statistics on how damaging a slow loading website can be.
\n\n
A few factors that contribute to it?
\n\n
Oversized images on your website, videos that aren’t configured to load properly, misconfigured scripts, code workarounds, and more.
\n\n
Not only is this a pain in the ass for your employees trying to work on your website, but it’s a pain for the clients and customers that have to sit on that website and wait for it to load. Best practices place optimal website load speeds at 3 seconds, but the average desktop website takes 10.3 seconds to load. It decreases your conversion rate, increases your bounce rate, and decreases the customer’s desire to buy from you.
\n\n
In short? A slow, bloated website isn’t going to get you where you need to go. No matter what your budget is, no matter how much you’re forking over for paid ads, no matter how much focus you put into uploading new content and creating compelling collateral for your prospects. When you do the math on the opportunities you miss out on from a sales perspective when your website is slow loading and holding you back, you should be POURING budget into your migration onto HubSpot CMS.
\n\n
Every missed sale, every failed conversion, every prospect you lose because your website is taking too long to load, and every extra day your marketing team waits because you don’t have the processes, software and website infrastructure in place to support them - you’re losing money.
\n\n
RELATED: 6 things sending users away from your website.
\n\n
Menus or resource libraries that don't provide the whole picture.
\n\n
Your prospect or customer should be able to glance at your menu and find exactly what they need. Marketers are spending hours upon hours to create content that resounds with your audience, and you’re continuing to rely exclusively on organic search to get them there.
\n\n
Mega menus and resource libraries are the key to showcasing all of that valuable content in a central location that’s easy for them to scan, visually appealing and can be found on the most focal area of your website where prospects are already spending their time. Capitalize on their attention by expanding your website’s navigation menu and really ensure that you’re providing a snapshot into the full breadth of information available to them.
\n\n
According to HubSpot, 96% of prospects do research before they talk to a Sales Rep. By putting that information on your mega menu or into a resource library, you can increase the chances that your prospects find the information they’re looking for and spend more time on your website when they discover information they didn’t even realize they needed.
\n\n
RELATED: Why a HubSpot mega menu should be your next website investment
\n\n
Websites that aren't hosted on HubSpot
\n\n
I said what I said. If you’re a HubSpot customer (or even if you’re not a HubSpot customer yet), you’re seriously missing out by not migrating your website to HubSpot CMS. We played the game where we helped small businesses use WordPress because it was “cheaper” - but, ultimately, the cost was too great. We were constantly fixing bugs and developers wouldn’t update their plugins and it nearly always resulted in long term strife as clients tried to piecemeal grow their website on framework that wasn’t working for their business as they scaled.
\n\n
We even wrote a whole blog on why we broke up with WordPress.
\n\n
Ultimately, we’ve gone all in on HubSpot. While historically it’s been prohibitive from a budget perspective to get onto HubSpot CMS, or clients have balked at the monthly fee - ultimately you’re paying less and getting more. The maintenance happens automatically and out of the box the platform just WORKS. Not to mention it’s integrated with all your marketing, sales, reporting and analytics already and offers you plenty of room to scale as you want more features and insight into your marketing and data analytics.
\n\n
At some point, you have to scale your website to match your business as it grows. If you’re moving to HubSpot CMS for your website this year, rather than paying tens of thousands for a custom website or compromising on a low budget theme that doesn’t give you what you need - we’ve created a custom HubSpot theme builder that empowers you with a solid infrastructure, super flexible modules and can be custom tailored to the design of your choice. The best part? It starts at $10,000.
\n\n
This year you can keep doing the same thing or you can level up. With a little extra investment and a little hard work partnering with our development team you can take your website, analytics and data to the next level by leaving behind the woes that come with WordPress and the other headaches you’ve been dealing with on your existing website.
\n\n
Let’s start 2024 on the right foot.
\n\n
","postBodyRss":"
It’s 2024. This is the year we finally get our shit together, right? No more messing around with technology that isn’t working for us. Nope. This year, we’re streamlining our operations, empowering our sales team, fueling up customer service and maximizing our potential. Why? Because, to be completely honest with you, we don’t have a choice. We’d have to be delusional to think that in a climate where housing, insurance, and food costs are at all time high, that we don’t need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we’re delivering big in business.
\n
Increasingly spend-conscious clients or customers, at any time, can reconfigure and optimize their budgets. In order to make sure that we’re not on the chopping block, we have to deliver value like we’ve never done before. And for some marketing and sales teams? That means we have to get real about the things holding us back.
\n\n
Website refreshes often top the list of “New Year's resolutions” for businesses, but the budget isn’t always there to get them to where they need to be. For so many small and medium-sized businesses, they’ve got big dreams of migrating their website over to HubSpot CMS. But in the past it has remained out of reach from a budget perspective, knowing that the functionality they’ve built on WordPress may be complex to develop in HubSpot CMS and the standard HubSpot theme marketplace just won’t cut it.
\n\n
Sometimes it takes a reminder of how much something is holding us back before we can make the decision to invest in the things we need. So? Here we are. Your friendly neighborhood HubSpot developer, to remind you of all the website woes you need to commit to leaving behind in 2023 as you commit to a HubSpot theme builder that finally fits exactly what you need.
\n\n
Here are the website woes you’re leaving in 2023. For good.
\n\n
Inflexible back end user interfaces
\n\n
Whether you’re on WordPress or another CMS for your website, odds are good that you’re limited by the user interface of plugins that you’ve added or overly simplified content management tools that just don’t give you the flexibility you need. HubSpot CMS is super simple, and with the right developer and a little training, your marketing team can really have some fun. But when they’re hamstrung by a poor UI or coded into a corner and unable to make edits in an efficient way because of a developer that cut corners? They’re going to be less productive and less excited about updating your website content.
\n\n
Having to go back to your developer to make updates halts any progress on work and with so many dependencies when it comes to the intricacies of marketing and workflows, your employees are apt to feel very frustrated and less productive.
\n\n
In 2022, according to Gallup, nearly 1/5th of the workforce (18%) reported feeling disengaged in their jobs. Yet, we’re not doing anything to keep them motivated by introducing the right tools (aka a properly functioning website back end) to help them succeed. Why should you invest in this?
\n\n
Because according to The University of Oxford, happy employees are 13% more productive.
\nEmployee engagement, happiness and productivity go hand and hand, yet we’re actively inhibiting our marketing and website admin employees’ productivity by refusing to invest in the tools they need to be successful. For 2024, you can commit to improved UI by making the decision to migrate over to a more user friendly CMS or investing in the development of an improved user interface on your existing website.
\n\n
Paying more for additional development to fix bugs or make improvements is only adding to your website budget. Add this to the financial impact of less productive employees? You’re taking a hit no matter how you slice it.
\n\n
Slow, bloated and poorly converting websites
\n\n
Why are we even still talking about this? Sometimes I feel like I write about the same topics over and over again. Consider the dead horse beaten. You’d think with the amount of time we spend preaching about slow loading websites, bloated WordPress sites and all of your conversion difficulties, you’d have made a change by now.
\n\n
Do yourself a favor and check out our Page Load Speed Infographic for lots of statistics on how damaging a slow loading website can be.
\n\n
A few factors that contribute to it?
\n\n
Oversized images on your website, videos that aren’t configured to load properly, misconfigured scripts, code workarounds, and more.
\n\n
Not only is this a pain in the ass for your employees trying to work on your website, but it’s a pain for the clients and customers that have to sit on that website and wait for it to load. Best practices place optimal website load speeds at 3 seconds, but the average desktop website takes 10.3 seconds to load. It decreases your conversion rate, increases your bounce rate, and decreases the customer’s desire to buy from you.
\n\n
In short? A slow, bloated website isn’t going to get you where you need to go. No matter what your budget is, no matter how much you’re forking over for paid ads, no matter how much focus you put into uploading new content and creating compelling collateral for your prospects. When you do the math on the opportunities you miss out on from a sales perspective when your website is slow loading and holding you back, you should be POURING budget into your migration onto HubSpot CMS.
\n\n
Every missed sale, every failed conversion, every prospect you lose because your website is taking too long to load, and every extra day your marketing team waits because you don’t have the processes, software and website infrastructure in place to support them - you’re losing money.
\n\n
RELATED: 6 things sending users away from your website.
\n\n
Menus or resource libraries that don't provide the whole picture.
\n\n
Your prospect or customer should be able to glance at your menu and find exactly what they need. Marketers are spending hours upon hours to create content that resounds with your audience, and you’re continuing to rely exclusively on organic search to get them there.
\n\n
Mega menus and resource libraries are the key to showcasing all of that valuable content in a central location that’s easy for them to scan, visually appealing and can be found on the most focal area of your website where prospects are already spending their time. Capitalize on their attention by expanding your website’s navigation menu and really ensure that you’re providing a snapshot into the full breadth of information available to them.
\n\n
According to HubSpot, 96% of prospects do research before they talk to a Sales Rep. By putting that information on your mega menu or into a resource library, you can increase the chances that your prospects find the information they’re looking for and spend more time on your website when they discover information they didn’t even realize they needed.
\n\n
RELATED: Why a HubSpot mega menu should be your next website investment
\n\n
Websites that aren't hosted on HubSpot
\n\n
I said what I said. If you’re a HubSpot customer (or even if you’re not a HubSpot customer yet), you’re seriously missing out by not migrating your website to HubSpot CMS. We played the game where we helped small businesses use WordPress because it was “cheaper” - but, ultimately, the cost was too great. We were constantly fixing bugs and developers wouldn’t update their plugins and it nearly always resulted in long term strife as clients tried to piecemeal grow their website on framework that wasn’t working for their business as they scaled.
\n\n
We even wrote a whole blog on why we broke up with WordPress.
\n\n
Ultimately, we’ve gone all in on HubSpot. While historically it’s been prohibitive from a budget perspective to get onto HubSpot CMS, or clients have balked at the monthly fee - ultimately you’re paying less and getting more. The maintenance happens automatically and out of the box the platform just WORKS. Not to mention it’s integrated with all your marketing, sales, reporting and analytics already and offers you plenty of room to scale as you want more features and insight into your marketing and data analytics.
\n\n
At some point, you have to scale your website to match your business as it grows. If you’re moving to HubSpot CMS for your website this year, rather than paying tens of thousands for a custom website or compromising on a low budget theme that doesn’t give you what you need - we’ve created a custom HubSpot theme builder that empowers you with a solid infrastructure, super flexible modules and can be custom tailored to the design of your choice. The best part? It starts at $10,000.
\n\n
This year you can keep doing the same thing or you can level up. With a little extra investment and a little hard work partnering with our development team you can take your website, analytics and data to the next level by leaving behind the woes that come with WordPress and the other headaches you’ve been dealing with on your existing website.
\n\n
Let’s start 2024 on the right foot.
\n\n
","postEmailContent":"
It’s 2024. This is the year we finally get our shit together, right? No more messing around with technology that isn’t working for us. Nope. This year, we’re streamlining our operations, empowering our sales team, fueling up customer service and maximizing our potential. Why? Because, to be completely honest with you, we don’t have a choice. We’d have to be delusional to think that in a climate where housing, insurance, and food costs are at all time high, that we don’t need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we’re delivering big in business.
","postFeaturedImageIfEnabled":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/custom%20development.png","postListContent":"It’s 2024. This is the year we finally get our shit together, right? No more messing around with technology that isn’t working for us. Nope. This year, we’re streamlining our operations, empowering our sales team, fueling up customer service and maximizing our potential. Why? Because, to be completely honest with you, we don’t have a choice. We’d have to be delusional to think that in a climate where housing, insurance, and food costs are at all time high, that we don’t need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we’re delivering big in business.
","postListSummaryFeaturedImage":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/custom%20development.png","postRssContent":"It’s 2024. This is the year we finally get our shit together, right? No more messing around with technology that isn’t working for us. Nope. This year, we’re streamlining our operations, empowering our sales team, fueling up customer service and maximizing our potential. Why? Because, to be completely honest with you, we don’t have a choice. We’d have to be delusional to think that in a climate where housing, insurance, and food costs are at all time high, that we don’t need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we’re delivering big in business.
","postRssSummaryFeaturedImage":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/custom%20development.png","postSummary":"It’s 2024. This is the year we finally get our shit together, right? No more messing around with technology that isn’t working for us. Nope. This year, we’re streamlining our operations, empowering our sales team, fueling up customer service and maximizing our potential. Why? Because, to be completely honest with you, we don’t have a choice. We’d have to be delusional to think that in a climate where housing, insurance, and food costs are at all time high, that we don’t need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we’re delivering big in business.
It’s 2024. This is the year we finally get our shit together, right? No more messing around with technology that isn’t working for us. Nope. This year, we’re streamlining our operations, empowering our sales team, fueling up customer service and maximizing our potential. Why? Because, to be completely honest with you, we don’t have a choice. We’d have to be delusional to think that in a climate where housing, insurance, and food costs are at all time high, that we don’t need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we’re delivering big in business.
","postTemplate":"deckerdevs-theme/templates/blog-content.html","previewImageSrc":null,"previewKey":"xOheeaJX","previousPostFeaturedImage":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/25-1.png","previousPostFeaturedImageAltText":"","previousPostName":"3 Reasons to Choose a HubSpot CMS Theme Builder Over Boxed Templates","previousPostSlug":"blogs/3-reasons-to-choose-a-hubspot-cms-theme-builder-over-boxed-templates","processingStatus":"PUBLISHED","propertyForDynamicPageCanonicalUrl":null,"propertyForDynamicPageFeaturedImage":null,"propertyForDynamicPageMetaDescription":null,"propertyForDynamicPageSlug":null,"propertyForDynamicPageTitle":null,"publicAccessRules":[],"publicAccessRulesEnabled":false,"publishDate":1706288627000,"publishDateLocalTime":1706288627000,"publishDateLocalized":{"date":1706288627000,"format":"medium","language":null},"publishImmediately":true,"publishTimezoneOffset":null,"publishedAt":1722238000610,"publishedByEmail":null,"publishedById":61310730,"publishedByName":null,"publishedUrl":"https://deckerdevs.com/blogs/hubspot-custom-theme-builder-website-woes-were-leaving-behind-in-2024","resolvedDomain":"deckerdevs.com","resolvedLanguage":null,"rssBody":"It’s 2024. This is the year we finally get our shit together, right? No more messing around with technology that isn’t working for us. Nope. This year, we’re streamlining our operations, empowering our sales team, fueling up customer service and maximizing our potential. Why? Because, to be completely honest with you, we don’t have a choice. We’d have to be delusional to think that in a climate where housing, insurance, and food costs are at all time high, that we don’t need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we’re delivering big in business.
\n
Increasingly spend-conscious clients or customers, at any time, can reconfigure and optimize their budgets. In order to make sure that we’re not on the chopping block, we have to deliver value like we’ve never done before. And for some marketing and sales teams? That means we have to get real about the things holding us back.
\n\n
Website refreshes often top the list of “New Year's resolutions” for businesses, but the budget isn’t always there to get them to where they need to be. For so many small and medium-sized businesses, they’ve got big dreams of migrating their website over to HubSpot CMS. But in the past it has remained out of reach from a budget perspective, knowing that the functionality they’ve built on WordPress may be complex to develop in HubSpot CMS and the standard HubSpot theme marketplace just won’t cut it.
\n\n
Sometimes it takes a reminder of how much something is holding us back before we can make the decision to invest in the things we need. So? Here we are. Your friendly neighborhood HubSpot developer, to remind you of all the website woes you need to commit to leaving behind in 2023 as you commit to a HubSpot theme builder that finally fits exactly what you need.
\n\n
Here are the website woes you’re leaving in 2023. For good.
\n\n
Inflexible back end user interfaces
\n\n
Whether you’re on WordPress or another CMS for your website, odds are good that you’re limited by the user interface of plugins that you’ve added or overly simplified content management tools that just don’t give you the flexibility you need. HubSpot CMS is super simple, and with the right developer and a little training, your marketing team can really have some fun. But when they’re hamstrung by a poor UI or coded into a corner and unable to make edits in an efficient way because of a developer that cut corners? They’re going to be less productive and less excited about updating your website content.
\n\n
Having to go back to your developer to make updates halts any progress on work and with so many dependencies when it comes to the intricacies of marketing and workflows, your employees are apt to feel very frustrated and less productive.
\n\n
In 2022, according to Gallup, nearly 1/5th of the workforce (18%) reported feeling disengaged in their jobs. Yet, we’re not doing anything to keep them motivated by introducing the right tools (aka a properly functioning website back end) to help them succeed. Why should you invest in this?
\n\n
Because according to The University of Oxford, happy employees are 13% more productive.
\nEmployee engagement, happiness and productivity go hand and hand, yet we’re actively inhibiting our marketing and website admin employees’ productivity by refusing to invest in the tools they need to be successful. For 2024, you can commit to improved UI by making the decision to migrate over to a more user friendly CMS or investing in the development of an improved user interface on your existing website.
\n\n
Paying more for additional development to fix bugs or make improvements is only adding to your website budget. Add this to the financial impact of less productive employees? You’re taking a hit no matter how you slice it.
\n\n
Slow, bloated and poorly converting websites
\n\n
Why are we even still talking about this? Sometimes I feel like I write about the same topics over and over again. Consider the dead horse beaten. You’d think with the amount of time we spend preaching about slow loading websites, bloated WordPress sites and all of your conversion difficulties, you’d have made a change by now.
\n\n
Do yourself a favor and check out our Page Load Speed Infographic for lots of statistics on how damaging a slow loading website can be.
\n\n
A few factors that contribute to it?
\n\n
Oversized images on your website, videos that aren’t configured to load properly, misconfigured scripts, code workarounds, and more.
\n\n
Not only is this a pain in the ass for your employees trying to work on your website, but it’s a pain for the clients and customers that have to sit on that website and wait for it to load. Best practices place optimal website load speeds at 3 seconds, but the average desktop website takes 10.3 seconds to load. It decreases your conversion rate, increases your bounce rate, and decreases the customer’s desire to buy from you.
\n\n
In short? A slow, bloated website isn’t going to get you where you need to go. No matter what your budget is, no matter how much you’re forking over for paid ads, no matter how much focus you put into uploading new content and creating compelling collateral for your prospects. When you do the math on the opportunities you miss out on from a sales perspective when your website is slow loading and holding you back, you should be POURING budget into your migration onto HubSpot CMS.
\n\n
Every missed sale, every failed conversion, every prospect you lose because your website is taking too long to load, and every extra day your marketing team waits because you don’t have the processes, software and website infrastructure in place to support them - you’re losing money.
\n\n
RELATED: 6 things sending users away from your website.
\n\n
Menus or resource libraries that don't provide the whole picture.
\n\n
Your prospect or customer should be able to glance at your menu and find exactly what they need. Marketers are spending hours upon hours to create content that resounds with your audience, and you’re continuing to rely exclusively on organic search to get them there.
\n\n
Mega menus and resource libraries are the key to showcasing all of that valuable content in a central location that’s easy for them to scan, visually appealing and can be found on the most focal area of your website where prospects are already spending their time. Capitalize on their attention by expanding your website’s navigation menu and really ensure that you’re providing a snapshot into the full breadth of information available to them.
\n\n
According to HubSpot, 96% of prospects do research before they talk to a Sales Rep. By putting that information on your mega menu or into a resource library, you can increase the chances that your prospects find the information they’re looking for and spend more time on your website when they discover information they didn’t even realize they needed.
\n\n
RELATED: Why a HubSpot mega menu should be your next website investment
\n\n
Websites that aren't hosted on HubSpot
\n\n
I said what I said. If you’re a HubSpot customer (or even if you’re not a HubSpot customer yet), you’re seriously missing out by not migrating your website to HubSpot CMS. We played the game where we helped small businesses use WordPress because it was “cheaper” - but, ultimately, the cost was too great. We were constantly fixing bugs and developers wouldn’t update their plugins and it nearly always resulted in long term strife as clients tried to piecemeal grow their website on framework that wasn’t working for their business as they scaled.
\n\n
We even wrote a whole blog on why we broke up with WordPress.
\n\n
Ultimately, we’ve gone all in on HubSpot. While historically it’s been prohibitive from a budget perspective to get onto HubSpot CMS, or clients have balked at the monthly fee - ultimately you’re paying less and getting more. The maintenance happens automatically and out of the box the platform just WORKS. Not to mention it’s integrated with all your marketing, sales, reporting and analytics already and offers you plenty of room to scale as you want more features and insight into your marketing and data analytics.
\n\n
At some point, you have to scale your website to match your business as it grows. If you’re moving to HubSpot CMS for your website this year, rather than paying tens of thousands for a custom website or compromising on a low budget theme that doesn’t give you what you need - we’ve created a custom HubSpot theme builder that empowers you with a solid infrastructure, super flexible modules and can be custom tailored to the design of your choice. The best part? It starts at $10,000.
\n\n
This year you can keep doing the same thing or you can level up. With a little extra investment and a little hard work partnering with our development team you can take your website, analytics and data to the next level by leaving behind the woes that come with WordPress and the other headaches you’ve been dealing with on your existing website.
\n\n
Let’s start 2024 on the right foot.
\n\n
","rssSummary":"
It’s 2024. This is the year we finally get our shit together, right? No more messing around with technology that isn’t working for us. Nope. This year, we’re streamlining our operations, empowering our sales team, fueling up customer service and maximizing our potential. Why? Because, to be completely honest with you, we don’t have a choice. We’d have to be delusional to think that in a climate where housing, insurance, and food costs are at all time high, that we don’t need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that we’re delivering big in business.
Like so many other things that we write about, this one might rub some people the wrong way, but sometimes these discussions are warranted.
::deep breath:: Soooo, here we go:
We want scaling organizations to stop buying HubSpot Marketplace themes.
![](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/NO!%20GOD%20PLEASE%20NO!!-jpg.jpeg\")
At the end of a long negotiation for HubSpot software, all any business wants to do is get migrated over to HubSpot’s marketing and automation tools as quickly as possible, especially if they’re paying for CMS Hub.
Many HubSpot reps and even some creative agencies send clients that have smaller budgets (or who have spent most of their budgets on their HubSpot contract) to the HubSpot Marketplace to browse new themes for their blog or website pitching it as a quick and easy way to get started. While for some businesses the HubSpot theme marketplace is a great way to save money with a boxed solution that can seemingly be implemented fairly easily; in reality, it’s not always a one-size-fits-all solution. Each business is unique.
For scaling organizations, they may run into issues with the HubSpot Marketplace themes that they purchase as they grow. While HubSpot template themes are a great way for the average small business to get onto HubSpot CMS and we never want to discourage a small business away from HubSpot, for scaling businesses HubSpot Marketplace themes may not be the way to go.
As an organization grows in its journey with Hubspot and on HubSpot CMS, they often come to us looking to have us modify or fix their theme. We’ve seen many different types of issues with HubSpot marketplace templates - issues with how their logo appears, formatting issues, implementation, page speed and optimization issues - you name it, we’ve encountered a frustrated business that thought they could just buy a plug and play theme and didn’t quite get what they wanted.
Here are a few reasons that we think you should think twice as a growing organization before you buy a HubSpot marketplace theme, how to approach it if you are a business that does have to purchase a boxed template HubSpot theme, and a suggestion that we think might give you the best compromise between a totally custom website overhaul and a boxed theme that may not suit your needs.
Looks aren’t everything.
\n
HubSpot has a really amazing, thorough process for ensuring that only quality HubSpot templates are submitted on their marketplace. They require thorough documentation, screenshots, live proof of concept and support. In theory, this is a great way to provide accessible websites that work on HubSpot CMS. In reality, these themes are sometimes coded in a way that doesn’t suit your growing business as you scale or needs to be customized, integrated and better organized to suit your marketing content and the unique journey of your buyer.
Related: Website Quality Assurance - Why you need QA in HubSpot CMS Development
\nAny number of things could be hidden behind a HubSpot theme that you purchase, including: poor back end user interface, a lagging, slow website and sometimes? A really dissatisfied customer whose HubSpot launch is now delayed until they can find someone to fix their theme, often for more than they originally paid. It’s not always a hard time, but even just small fixes can sometimes be cumbersome for a new developer to implement if the foundation isn’t set up the right way.
Looks matter, but what’s the use in having a theme that looks pretty in demo, but isn’t actually functioning for your needs?
Usability first.
\n
“We’ll get by with a template for now, then we’ll develop a custom site later on.”
Initial HubSpot contract layouts can leave a business’ marketing or development budget depleted. In so many cases, organizations are compromising on their development - but at what expense? A clunky interface that isn’t intuitive can impact an employee’s productivity and overall happiness.
A poor back end user interface means that your employees simply cannot operate efficiently. And when they can’t post content efficiently or are constantly running into roadblocks in their everyday tasks, it can be wearing on them and a huge time suck. According to The CFO, an online business publication, inefficient processes waste nearly a third of employees time. And with job unhappiness at an all time high as of August 2022, according to CNBC, companies should be doing everything they can to make sure their employees are productive, happy and able to effectively get the job done.
Why? Happy workers are 13% more productive, according to Oxford University.
When you’re considering your HubSpot budget, you need to consider not only which Hubs you’ll need, how to secure them at the best value, but how you can situate your company to be most successful inside HubSpot by choosing a framework or theme that truly suits your needs.
You have little ability to customize.
\n
Hindsight is 20/20, isn’t it? The top complaint we receive when we get clients that are already working inside HubSpot is — I wish I would’ve known. They wish they would’ve looked closer at their data needs, they wish they would’ve bought the right tiers from the outset, they wish they wouldn’t have wasted money with an inexperienced, order-taker developer and they wish they would’ve gotten set up the right way from the start.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot CMS developer? Your website isn’t a sub sandwich.
\n
The HubSpot Marketplace Themes, whether they’re free or paid, lock you into either using that development agency for your improvements or will eventually require you to pay someone that is going to take longer to accomplish your goals, because they’re working in someone else’s code foundation. In the world of HubSpot Development, there are many ways to build the same framework, and because there’s a lacking centralized knowledge base for HubSpot developers right now (we hope that’s not always the case), it’s a bit Wild West out there sometimes.
Trying to customize an existing template can break functionality and will usually require a bit of an investment for another HubSpot CMS developer to familiarize themselves with how everything has been set up and go poking around before they make your improvements.
Ideally, you’ll vet the company offering the template from the start, question them about their expertise and make sure they’re a fit to work with long term and use your theme as a framework to build on. Just make sure that your framework actually has a stable foundation and can accommodate your needs as you grow.
Related: 7 HubSpot CMS Developer Interview Questions to Ask - Part 1
\n
If you already purchased a HubSpot Marketplace Theme, there’s no need to go out and spend thousands on a new website (yet). But as you grow, you may find that it’s not working as well for you. Odds are good that you can work with the company that developed the theme to customize it to suit your needs. Even if not, there are always ways to work around the infrastructure that you have while you make plans to redesign your site and build a new custom HubSpot framework that will better suit your needs.
What’s most important is finding the right development and technical partner. One that will look at your processes from front to back and really dig into what your needs are and how your HubSpot framework, your data architecture and the processes you’ve put in place will work for your organization in the long term. Ideally, that partner will grow with you in a long term relationship as you scale and continue to improve your marketing and brand over time.
Most often, what we find is that customized design inside a tried and true framework built with the bones you need to grow is the best solution for a business starting out on HubSpot CMS that isn’t quite ready to go all in on a custom build.
\n
Like so many other things that we write about, this one might rub some people the wrong way, but sometimes these discussions are warranted.
::deep breath:: Soooo, here we go:
We want scaling organizations to stop buying HubSpot Marketplace themes.
Like so many other things that we write about, this one might rub some people the wrong way, but sometimes these discussions are warranted.
::deep breath:: Soooo, here we go:
We want scaling organizations to stop buying HubSpot Marketplace themes.
At the end of a long negotiation for HubSpot software, all any business wants to do is get migrated over to HubSpot’s marketing and automation tools as quickly as possible, especially if they’re paying for CMS Hub.
Many HubSpot reps and even some creative agencies send clients that have smaller budgets (or who have spent most of their budgets on their HubSpot contract) to the HubSpot Marketplace to browse new themes for their blog or website pitching it as a quick and easy way to get started. While for some businesses the HubSpot theme marketplace is a great way to save money with a boxed solution that can seemingly be implemented fairly easily; in reality, it’s not always a one-size-fits-all solution. Each business is unique.
For scaling organizations, they may run into issues with the HubSpot Marketplace themes that they purchase as they grow. While HubSpot template themes are a great way for the average small business to get onto HubSpot CMS and we never want to discourage a small business away from HubSpot, for scaling businesses HubSpot Marketplace themes may not be the way to go.
As an organization grows in its journey with Hubspot and on HubSpot CMS, they often come to us looking to have us modify or fix their theme. We’ve seen many different types of issues with HubSpot marketplace templates - issues with how their logo appears, formatting issues, implementation, page speed and optimization issues - you name it, we’ve encountered a frustrated business that thought they could just buy a plug and play theme and didn’t quite get what they wanted.
Here are a few reasons that we think you should think twice as a growing organization before you buy a HubSpot marketplace theme, how to approach it if you are a business that does have to purchase a boxed template HubSpot theme, and a suggestion that we think might give you the best compromise between a totally custom website overhaul and a boxed theme that may not suit your needs.
Looks aren’t everything.
\n
HubSpot has a really amazing, thorough process for ensuring that only quality HubSpot templates are submitted on their marketplace. They require thorough documentation, screenshots, live proof of concept and support. In theory, this is a great way to provide accessible websites that work on HubSpot CMS. In reality, these themes are sometimes coded in a way that doesn’t suit your growing business as you scale or needs to be customized, integrated and better organized to suit your marketing content and the unique journey of your buyer.
Related: Website Quality Assurance - Why you need QA in HubSpot CMS Development
\nAny number of things could be hidden behind a HubSpot theme that you purchase, including: poor back end user interface, a lagging, slow website and sometimes? A really dissatisfied customer whose HubSpot launch is now delayed until they can find someone to fix their theme, often for more than they originally paid. It’s not always a hard time, but even just small fixes can sometimes be cumbersome for a new developer to implement if the foundation isn’t set up the right way.
Looks matter, but what’s the use in having a theme that looks pretty in demo, but isn’t actually functioning for your needs?
Usability first.
\n
“We’ll get by with a template for now, then we’ll develop a custom site later on.”
Initial HubSpot contract layouts can leave a business’ marketing or development budget depleted. In so many cases, organizations are compromising on their development - but at what expense? A clunky interface that isn’t intuitive can impact an employee’s productivity and overall happiness.
A poor back end user interface means that your employees simply cannot operate efficiently. And when they can’t post content efficiently or are constantly running into roadblocks in their everyday tasks, it can be wearing on them and a huge time suck. According to The CFO, an online business publication, inefficient processes waste nearly a third of employees time. And with job unhappiness at an all time high as of August 2022, according to CNBC, companies should be doing everything they can to make sure their employees are productive, happy and able to effectively get the job done.
Why? Happy workers are 13% more productive, according to Oxford University.
When you’re considering your HubSpot budget, you need to consider not only which Hubs you’ll need, how to secure them at the best value, but how you can situate your company to be most successful inside HubSpot by choosing a framework or theme that truly suits your needs.
You have little ability to customize.
\n
Hindsight is 20/20, isn’t it? The top complaint we receive when we get clients that are already working inside HubSpot is — I wish I would’ve known. They wish they would’ve looked closer at their data needs, they wish they would’ve bought the right tiers from the outset, they wish they wouldn’t have wasted money with an inexperienced, order-taker developer and they wish they would’ve gotten set up the right way from the start.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot CMS developer? Your website isn’t a sub sandwich.
\n
The HubSpot Marketplace Themes, whether they’re free or paid, lock you into either using that development agency for your improvements or will eventually require you to pay someone that is going to take longer to accomplish your goals, because they’re working in someone else’s code foundation. In the world of HubSpot Development, there are many ways to build the same framework, and because there’s a lacking centralized knowledge base for HubSpot developers right now (we hope that’s not always the case), it’s a bit Wild West out there sometimes.
Trying to customize an existing template can break functionality and will usually require a bit of an investment for another HubSpot CMS developer to familiarize themselves with how everything has been set up and go poking around before they make your improvements.
Ideally, you’ll vet the company offering the template from the start, question them about their expertise and make sure they’re a fit to work with long term and use your theme as a framework to build on. Just make sure that your framework actually has a stable foundation and can accommodate your needs as you grow.
Related: 7 HubSpot CMS Developer Interview Questions to Ask - Part 1
\n
If you already purchased a HubSpot Marketplace Theme, there’s no need to go out and spend thousands on a new website (yet). But as you grow, you may find that it’s not working as well for you. Odds are good that you can work with the company that developed the theme to customize it to suit your needs. Even if not, there are always ways to work around the infrastructure that you have while you make plans to redesign your site and build a new custom HubSpot framework that will better suit your needs.
What’s most important is finding the right development and technical partner. One that will look at your processes from front to back and really dig into what your needs are and how your HubSpot framework, your data architecture and the processes you’ve put in place will work for your organization in the long term. Ideally, that partner will grow with you in a long term relationship as you scale and continue to improve your marketing and brand over time.
Most often, what we find is that customized design inside a tried and true framework built with the bones you need to grow is the best solution for a business starting out on HubSpot CMS that isn’t quite ready to go all in on a custom build.
\n
Like so many other things that we write about, this one might rub some people the wrong way, but sometimes these discussions are warranted.
::deep breath:: Soooo, here we go:
We want scaling organizations to stop buying HubSpot Marketplace themes.
Like so many other things that we write about, this one might rub some people the wrong way, but sometimes these discussions are warranted.
::deep breath:: Soooo, here we go:
We want scaling organizations to stop buying HubSpot Marketplace themes.
At the end of a long negotiation for HubSpot software, all any business wants to do is get migrated over to HubSpot’s marketing and automation tools as quickly as possible, especially if they’re paying for CMS Hub.
Many HubSpot reps and even some creative agencies send clients that have smaller budgets (or who have spent most of their budgets on their HubSpot contract) to the HubSpot Marketplace to browse new themes for their blog or website pitching it as a quick and easy way to get started. While for some businesses the HubSpot theme marketplace is a great way to save money with a boxed solution that can seemingly be implemented fairly easily; in reality, it’s not always a one-size-fits-all solution. Each business is unique.
For scaling organizations, they may run into issues with the HubSpot Marketplace themes that they purchase as they grow. While HubSpot template themes are a great way for the average small business to get onto HubSpot CMS and we never want to discourage a small business away from HubSpot, for scaling businesses HubSpot Marketplace themes may not be the way to go.
As an organization grows in its journey with Hubspot and on HubSpot CMS, they often come to us looking to have us modify or fix their theme. We’ve seen many different types of issues with HubSpot marketplace templates - issues with how their logo appears, formatting issues, implementation, page speed and optimization issues - you name it, we’ve encountered a frustrated business that thought they could just buy a plug and play theme and didn’t quite get what they wanted.
Here are a few reasons that we think you should think twice as a growing organization before you buy a HubSpot marketplace theme, how to approach it if you are a business that does have to purchase a boxed template HubSpot theme, and a suggestion that we think might give you the best compromise between a totally custom website overhaul and a boxed theme that may not suit your needs.
Looks aren’t everything.
\n
HubSpot has a really amazing, thorough process for ensuring that only quality HubSpot templates are submitted on their marketplace. They require thorough documentation, screenshots, live proof of concept and support. In theory, this is a great way to provide accessible websites that work on HubSpot CMS. In reality, these themes are sometimes coded in a way that doesn’t suit your growing business as you scale or needs to be customized, integrated and better organized to suit your marketing content and the unique journey of your buyer.
Related: Website Quality Assurance - Why you need QA in HubSpot CMS Development
\nAny number of things could be hidden behind a HubSpot theme that you purchase, including: poor back end user interface, a lagging, slow website and sometimes? A really dissatisfied customer whose HubSpot launch is now delayed until they can find someone to fix their theme, often for more than they originally paid. It’s not always a hard time, but even just small fixes can sometimes be cumbersome for a new developer to implement if the foundation isn’t set up the right way.
Looks matter, but what’s the use in having a theme that looks pretty in demo, but isn’t actually functioning for your needs?
Usability first.
\n
“We’ll get by with a template for now, then we’ll develop a custom site later on.”
Initial HubSpot contract layouts can leave a business’ marketing or development budget depleted. In so many cases, organizations are compromising on their development - but at what expense? A clunky interface that isn’t intuitive can impact an employee’s productivity and overall happiness.
A poor back end user interface means that your employees simply cannot operate efficiently. And when they can’t post content efficiently or are constantly running into roadblocks in their everyday tasks, it can be wearing on them and a huge time suck. According to The CFO, an online business publication, inefficient processes waste nearly a third of employees time. And with job unhappiness at an all time high as of August 2022, according to CNBC, companies should be doing everything they can to make sure their employees are productive, happy and able to effectively get the job done.
Why? Happy workers are 13% more productive, according to Oxford University.
When you’re considering your HubSpot budget, you need to consider not only which Hubs you’ll need, how to secure them at the best value, but how you can situate your company to be most successful inside HubSpot by choosing a framework or theme that truly suits your needs.
You have little ability to customize.
\n
Hindsight is 20/20, isn’t it? The top complaint we receive when we get clients that are already working inside HubSpot is — I wish I would’ve known. They wish they would’ve looked closer at their data needs, they wish they would’ve bought the right tiers from the outset, they wish they wouldn’t have wasted money with an inexperienced, order-taker developer and they wish they would’ve gotten set up the right way from the start.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot CMS developer? Your website isn’t a sub sandwich.
\n
The HubSpot Marketplace Themes, whether they’re free or paid, lock you into either using that development agency for your improvements or will eventually require you to pay someone that is going to take longer to accomplish your goals, because they’re working in someone else’s code foundation. In the world of HubSpot Development, there are many ways to build the same framework, and because there’s a lacking centralized knowledge base for HubSpot developers right now (we hope that’s not always the case), it’s a bit Wild West out there sometimes.
Trying to customize an existing template can break functionality and will usually require a bit of an investment for another HubSpot CMS developer to familiarize themselves with how everything has been set up and go poking around before they make your improvements.
Ideally, you’ll vet the company offering the template from the start, question them about their expertise and make sure they’re a fit to work with long term and use your theme as a framework to build on. Just make sure that your framework actually has a stable foundation and can accommodate your needs as you grow.
Related: 7 HubSpot CMS Developer Interview Questions to Ask - Part 1
\n
If you already purchased a HubSpot Marketplace Theme, there’s no need to go out and spend thousands on a new website (yet). But as you grow, you may find that it’s not working as well for you. Odds are good that you can work with the company that developed the theme to customize it to suit your needs. Even if not, there are always ways to work around the infrastructure that you have while you make plans to redesign your site and build a new custom HubSpot framework that will better suit your needs.
What’s most important is finding the right development and technical partner. One that will look at your processes from front to back and really dig into what your needs are and how your HubSpot framework, your data architecture and the processes you’ve put in place will work for your organization in the long term. Ideally, that partner will grow with you in a long term relationship as you scale and continue to improve your marketing and brand over time.
Most often, what we find is that customized design inside a tried and true framework built with the bones you need to grow is the best solution for a business starting out on HubSpot CMS that isn’t quite ready to go all in on a custom build.
\n
Like so many other things that we write about, this one might rub some people the wrong way, but sometimes these discussions are warranted.
::deep breath:: Soooo, here we go:
We want scaling organizations to stop buying HubSpot Marketplace themes.
At the end of a long negotiation for HubSpot software, all any business wants to do is get migrated over to HubSpot’s marketing and automation tools as quickly as possible, especially if they’re paying for CMS Hub.
Many HubSpot reps and even some creative agencies send clients that have smaller budgets (or who have spent most of their budgets on their HubSpot contract) to the HubSpot Marketplace to browse new themes for their blog or website pitching it as a quick and easy way to get started. While for some businesses the HubSpot theme marketplace is a great way to save money with a boxed solution that can seemingly be implemented fairly easily; in reality, it’s not always a one-size-fits-all solution. Each business is unique.
For scaling organizations, they may run into issues with the HubSpot Marketplace themes that they purchase as they grow. While HubSpot template themes are a great way for the average small business to get onto HubSpot CMS and we never want to discourage a small business away from HubSpot, for scaling businesses HubSpot Marketplace themes may not be the way to go.
As an organization grows in its journey with Hubspot and on HubSpot CMS, they often come to us looking to have us modify or fix their theme. We’ve seen many different types of issues with HubSpot marketplace templates - issues with how their logo appears, formatting issues, implementation, page speed and optimization issues - you name it, we’ve encountered a frustrated business that thought they could just buy a plug and play theme and didn’t quite get what they wanted.
Here are a few reasons that we think you should think twice as a growing organization before you buy a HubSpot marketplace theme, how to approach it if you are a business that does have to purchase a boxed template HubSpot theme, and a suggestion that we think might give you the best compromise between a totally custom website overhaul and a boxed theme that may not suit your needs.
Looks aren’t everything.
\n
HubSpot has a really amazing, thorough process for ensuring that only quality HubSpot templates are submitted on their marketplace. They require thorough documentation, screenshots, live proof of concept and support. In theory, this is a great way to provide accessible websites that work on HubSpot CMS. In reality, these themes are sometimes coded in a way that doesn’t suit your growing business as you scale or needs to be customized, integrated and better organized to suit your marketing content and the unique journey of your buyer.
Related: Website Quality Assurance - Why you need QA in HubSpot CMS Development
\nAny number of things could be hidden behind a HubSpot theme that you purchase, including: poor back end user interface, a lagging, slow website and sometimes? A really dissatisfied customer whose HubSpot launch is now delayed until they can find someone to fix their theme, often for more than they originally paid. It’s not always a hard time, but even just small fixes can sometimes be cumbersome for a new developer to implement if the foundation isn’t set up the right way.
Looks matter, but what’s the use in having a theme that looks pretty in demo, but isn’t actually functioning for your needs?
Usability first.
\n
“We’ll get by with a template for now, then we’ll develop a custom site later on.”
Initial HubSpot contract layouts can leave a business’ marketing or development budget depleted. In so many cases, organizations are compromising on their development - but at what expense? A clunky interface that isn’t intuitive can impact an employee’s productivity and overall happiness.
A poor back end user interface means that your employees simply cannot operate efficiently. And when they can’t post content efficiently or are constantly running into roadblocks in their everyday tasks, it can be wearing on them and a huge time suck. According to The CFO, an online business publication, inefficient processes waste nearly a third of employees time. And with job unhappiness at an all time high as of August 2022, according to CNBC, companies should be doing everything they can to make sure their employees are productive, happy and able to effectively get the job done.
Why? Happy workers are 13% more productive, according to Oxford University.
When you’re considering your HubSpot budget, you need to consider not only which Hubs you’ll need, how to secure them at the best value, but how you can situate your company to be most successful inside HubSpot by choosing a framework or theme that truly suits your needs.
You have little ability to customize.
\n
Hindsight is 20/20, isn’t it? The top complaint we receive when we get clients that are already working inside HubSpot is — I wish I would’ve known. They wish they would’ve looked closer at their data needs, they wish they would’ve bought the right tiers from the outset, they wish they wouldn’t have wasted money with an inexperienced, order-taker developer and they wish they would’ve gotten set up the right way from the start.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot CMS developer? Your website isn’t a sub sandwich.
\n
The HubSpot Marketplace Themes, whether they’re free or paid, lock you into either using that development agency for your improvements or will eventually require you to pay someone that is going to take longer to accomplish your goals, because they’re working in someone else’s code foundation. In the world of HubSpot Development, there are many ways to build the same framework, and because there’s a lacking centralized knowledge base for HubSpot developers right now (we hope that’s not always the case), it’s a bit Wild West out there sometimes.
Trying to customize an existing template can break functionality and will usually require a bit of an investment for another HubSpot CMS developer to familiarize themselves with how everything has been set up and go poking around before they make your improvements.
Ideally, you’ll vet the company offering the template from the start, question them about their expertise and make sure they’re a fit to work with long term and use your theme as a framework to build on. Just make sure that your framework actually has a stable foundation and can accommodate your needs as you grow.
Related: 7 HubSpot CMS Developer Interview Questions to Ask - Part 1
\n
If you already purchased a HubSpot Marketplace Theme, there’s no need to go out and spend thousands on a new website (yet). But as you grow, you may find that it’s not working as well for you. Odds are good that you can work with the company that developed the theme to customize it to suit your needs. Even if not, there are always ways to work around the infrastructure that you have while you make plans to redesign your site and build a new custom HubSpot framework that will better suit your needs.
What’s most important is finding the right development and technical partner. One that will look at your processes from front to back and really dig into what your needs are and how your HubSpot framework, your data architecture and the processes you’ve put in place will work for your organization in the long term. Ideally, that partner will grow with you in a long term relationship as you scale and continue to improve your marketing and brand over time.
Most often, what we find is that customized design inside a tried and true framework built with the bones you need to grow is the best solution for a business starting out on HubSpot CMS that isn’t quite ready to go all in on a custom build.
\n
Like so many other things that we write about, this one might rub some people the wrong way, but sometimes these discussions are warranted.
::deep breath:: Soooo, here we go:
We want scaling organizations to stop buying HubSpot Marketplace themes.
Like so many other things that we write about, this one might rub some people the wrong way, but sometimes these discussions are warranted.
::deep breath:: Soooo, here we go:
We want scaling organizations to stop buying HubSpot Marketplace themes.
Like so many other things that we write about, this one might rub some people the wrong way, but sometimes these discussions are warranted.
::deep breath:: Soooo, here we go:
We want scaling organizations to stop buying HubSpot Marketplace themes.
Like so many other things that we write about, this one might rub some people the wrong way, but sometimes these discussions are warranted.
::deep breath:: Soooo, here we go:
We want scaling organizations to stop buying HubSpot Marketplace themes.
Like so many other things that we write about, this one might rub some people the wrong way, but sometimes these discussions are warranted.
::deep breath:: Soooo, here we go:
We want scaling organizations to stop buying HubSpot Marketplace themes.
Like so many other things that we write about, this one might rub some people the wrong way, but sometimes these discussions are warranted.
::deep breath:: Soooo, here we go:
We want scaling organizations to stop buying HubSpot Marketplace themes.
At the end of a long negotiation for HubSpot software, all any business wants to do is get migrated over to HubSpot’s marketing and automation tools as quickly as possible, especially if they’re paying for CMS Hub.
Many HubSpot reps and even some creative agencies send clients that have smaller budgets (or who have spent most of their budgets on their HubSpot contract) to the HubSpot Marketplace to browse new themes for their blog or website pitching it as a quick and easy way to get started. While for some businesses the HubSpot theme marketplace is a great way to save money with a boxed solution that can seemingly be implemented fairly easily; in reality, it’s not always a one-size-fits-all solution. Each business is unique.
For scaling organizations, they may run into issues with the HubSpot Marketplace themes that they purchase as they grow. While HubSpot template themes are a great way for the average small business to get onto HubSpot CMS and we never want to discourage a small business away from HubSpot, for scaling businesses HubSpot Marketplace themes may not be the way to go.
As an organization grows in its journey with Hubspot and on HubSpot CMS, they often come to us looking to have us modify or fix their theme. We’ve seen many different types of issues with HubSpot marketplace templates - issues with how their logo appears, formatting issues, implementation, page speed and optimization issues - you name it, we’ve encountered a frustrated business that thought they could just buy a plug and play theme and didn’t quite get what they wanted.
Here are a few reasons that we think you should think twice as a growing organization before you buy a HubSpot marketplace theme, how to approach it if you are a business that does have to purchase a boxed template HubSpot theme, and a suggestion that we think might give you the best compromise between a totally custom website overhaul and a boxed theme that may not suit your needs.
Looks aren’t everything.
\n
HubSpot has a really amazing, thorough process for ensuring that only quality HubSpot templates are submitted on their marketplace. They require thorough documentation, screenshots, live proof of concept and support. In theory, this is a great way to provide accessible websites that work on HubSpot CMS. In reality, these themes are sometimes coded in a way that doesn’t suit your growing business as you scale or needs to be customized, integrated and better organized to suit your marketing content and the unique journey of your buyer.
Related: Website Quality Assurance - Why you need QA in HubSpot CMS Development
\nAny number of things could be hidden behind a HubSpot theme that you purchase, including: poor back end user interface, a lagging, slow website and sometimes? A really dissatisfied customer whose HubSpot launch is now delayed until they can find someone to fix their theme, often for more than they originally paid. It’s not always a hard time, but even just small fixes can sometimes be cumbersome for a new developer to implement if the foundation isn’t set up the right way.
Looks matter, but what’s the use in having a theme that looks pretty in demo, but isn’t actually functioning for your needs?
Usability first.
\n
“We’ll get by with a template for now, then we’ll develop a custom site later on.”
Initial HubSpot contract layouts can leave a business’ marketing or development budget depleted. In so many cases, organizations are compromising on their development - but at what expense? A clunky interface that isn’t intuitive can impact an employee’s productivity and overall happiness.
A poor back end user interface means that your employees simply cannot operate efficiently. And when they can’t post content efficiently or are constantly running into roadblocks in their everyday tasks, it can be wearing on them and a huge time suck. According to The CFO, an online business publication, inefficient processes waste nearly a third of employees time. And with job unhappiness at an all time high as of August 2022, according to CNBC, companies should be doing everything they can to make sure their employees are productive, happy and able to effectively get the job done.
Why? Happy workers are 13% more productive, according to Oxford University.
When you’re considering your HubSpot budget, you need to consider not only which Hubs you’ll need, how to secure them at the best value, but how you can situate your company to be most successful inside HubSpot by choosing a framework or theme that truly suits your needs.
You have little ability to customize.
\n
Hindsight is 20/20, isn’t it? The top complaint we receive when we get clients that are already working inside HubSpot is — I wish I would’ve known. They wish they would’ve looked closer at their data needs, they wish they would’ve bought the right tiers from the outset, they wish they wouldn’t have wasted money with an inexperienced, order-taker developer and they wish they would’ve gotten set up the right way from the start.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot CMS developer? Your website isn’t a sub sandwich.
\n
The HubSpot Marketplace Themes, whether they’re free or paid, lock you into either using that development agency for your improvements or will eventually require you to pay someone that is going to take longer to accomplish your goals, because they’re working in someone else’s code foundation. In the world of HubSpot Development, there are many ways to build the same framework, and because there’s a lacking centralized knowledge base for HubSpot developers right now (we hope that’s not always the case), it’s a bit Wild West out there sometimes.
Trying to customize an existing template can break functionality and will usually require a bit of an investment for another HubSpot CMS developer to familiarize themselves with how everything has been set up and go poking around before they make your improvements.
Ideally, you’ll vet the company offering the template from the start, question them about their expertise and make sure they’re a fit to work with long term and use your theme as a framework to build on. Just make sure that your framework actually has a stable foundation and can accommodate your needs as you grow.
Related: 7 HubSpot CMS Developer Interview Questions to Ask - Part 1
\n
If you already purchased a HubSpot Marketplace Theme, there’s no need to go out and spend thousands on a new website (yet). But as you grow, you may find that it’s not working as well for you. Odds are good that you can work with the company that developed the theme to customize it to suit your needs. Even if not, there are always ways to work around the infrastructure that you have while you make plans to redesign your site and build a new custom HubSpot framework that will better suit your needs.
What’s most important is finding the right development and technical partner. One that will look at your processes from front to back and really dig into what your needs are and how your HubSpot framework, your data architecture and the processes you’ve put in place will work for your organization in the long term. Ideally, that partner will grow with you in a long term relationship as you scale and continue to improve your marketing and brand over time.
Most often, what we find is that customized design inside a tried and true framework built with the bones you need to grow is the best solution for a business starting out on HubSpot CMS that isn’t quite ready to go all in on a custom build.
\n
Like so many other things that we write about, this one might rub some people the wrong way, but sometimes these discussions are warranted.
::deep breath:: Soooo, here we go:
We want scaling organizations to stop buying HubSpot Marketplace themes.
![\"The](\"https://lolalambchops.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/New-Year-New-You-Meme.jpeg\")
It’s that time of year. Starting January 1 (and even before then) we talk about reinventing our brands, our marketing focus and our vision. We assess whether or not our website messaging is still keeping up with our brand, as well as our traffic and inbound marketing demands that we place on our website.
Around here we are huge advocates for making improvements to your existing website with the continuous improvement model. The idea behind continuous improvement is to create a sustainable monthly budget for your website development work and continue to improve your website over time, rather than doing a full overhaul every few years. However, this requires your website to actually still be functioning for your needs.
That’s what this article is all about - determining whether or not your existing website still serves you. Here are some points to help you determine whether you need a full website redesign or if you can just go ahead and adopt the continuous improvement model.
Related: HubSpot CMS Web Design - The Continuous Improvement Model
\nYour marketing team hates your website
\nWebsite usability and user experience for the people that work behind the scenes uploading content and creating landing pages is one of the most important aspects of the success of your website. Your marketers should be able to add content with ease and easily suggest improvements that make their lives easier. If your marketing team is handicapped by the functionality behind the scenes or has a mile-long list of feature requests, it’s probably time to re-do your website.
\nThe framework and platform that your website is built on is one of the most important aspects of the long term success of your website - if yours is failing your marketing team and they’re becoming increasingly frustrated with the handicaps behind the scenes, it’s time for an upgrade.
Your website is starting to run more slowly or break more often
\nIf you’re on Wordpress, you’ll definitely see this a little more than if you’re on HubSpot. Website bloat is such a huge issue with businesses that start with a simple website and add increasing functionality as they grow. Your WordPress plugins aren’t always properly maintained, they can also bog down your main theme framework and add security holes if the original developer isn’t maintaining and updating them properly.
Lack of updates for your WordPress website plugins can also cause your website to break or go down. Never underestimate how costly it is for a website to go down. Oshyn breaks down the true cost of website downtime here.
We refer back very frequently to this blog that breaks down the factors bogging down your website, and even beyond plugins for WordPress websites, there are a lot of factors like large images, legacy code and scripts that bog down your website over time. We often are asked to perform website speed performance audits to determine what factors are holding a website back from a a better score in Google Core Vitals. If your score is looking a little high, it’s worth exploring a website redesign to get your page speed in line.
Your website is not ranking as well as it used to
\nSearch engine rankings change almost constantly and over the last few years Google has really focused even more on quality original content, organic keyword optimization, page speed, usability and mobile friendliness. If your website is aging, you might not have a mobile optimized menu, your content library might not be very user friendly, your keyword frequency could seem a little unnatural, or your page speed might be suffering.
Finding a website framework on a platform that is simple and can still perform matters. Unfortunately when frameworks and platforms are selected, price and aesthetics are usually the first consideration and those don’t always serve your buyer or give you the best opportunity to succeed.
Related: It’s time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS
\nYou’ve been through a few different developers.
\nNot every developer is created equal. It’s the most obvious statement to make, but not many people realize how important it is to find and stick with a skilled developer. Computan.com described it best:
“Asking a new developer to work on an old developer’s code is like asking a cook to continue making a dish that the old cook has left unfinished. There’s so little time and the customer is waiting on the table. The new chef has to figure out what ingredients are in the dish, how much more time it needs in the oven, and what more needs to be added.”
It makes things a little more difficult. Not to mention the previous developer might have had different skills, different coding standards, and their documentation might be inadequate. A gifted chef can easily replicate the recipe if these things are honored, but if the developer that came before them didn’t leave behind proper documentation or didn’t uphold best practice coding standards, things can get complicated quickly.
On many occasions we’ve had projects referred to us that other developers couldn’t get to the finish line. We jokingly say that we’re the final destination for Wordpress and HubSpot projects - in the least cryptic way possible. Our clients and supporters know that we’re more than capable of taking a partially completed dish and turning into a work of art.
If you’ve been through a few different developers with your website, documentation and coding standards may be all over the place. Your framework might be a bit of a mess and it may be best to just start from scratch. It’ll help your new development partner work more efficiently and you’ll get more from your budget as a result.
It no longer reflects your brand
\nBrand transformations happen over time, especially when company leadership changes. Even just a listen to a new inspiring book can send off the executive team into crafting a new vision and mission story. As your business grows, you’ll likely shift who you’re serving, how you’re serving them and how you communicate your brand’s individual story. The website that you started with or even that saw you through the last few years of your journey may not be the website that will get you to the next level.
After you take a deep dive into who your organization is, what needs you serve for your clients and customers and how you want to organize your content and serve your customers moving forward, you may find that a website redesign is not only necessary, but will help you grow into the goals you’re trying to achieve in the next few years.
You’ve re-evaluated your customer journey
\nAs we mentioned above, the evolution of your customer base and product offerings happens over time to any successful business. Evolution in business is as critical as operations management in what our friend Simon Sinek calls The Infinite Game (read this book) of business. Every so often, good marketers know that they need to explore the buyer journey in relation to the entire lifetime of any customer and continue to service needs long after they’ve made a buying decision.
Adding client login portals, special calculators, automations, smart content and other elements to your website is the perfect way to continue to cultivate your customer relationships in a complex customer journey, but that has to be done on a framework and platform that can handle all of that. If you’ve got a WordPress website or poorly coded framework in HubSpot - you’re going to be handicapped.
Related: 5 Things to Add to your Website Budget in 2023
\n
Odds are good that you have some aggressive growth plans for 2023.
“This is the year we _______!” (fill in the blank). After Covid shutdowns, massive supply chain issues, inflation, freight costs and other rising costs, 2020-2022 have been a wild ride for most businesses. But this year is a different story. If you’re getting ready to supercharge your marketing efforts in an attempt to attain your huge goals that you’ve set for this year, you need to make sure that your website is equipped to handle that.
We hope that you’re taking the time to really unpack your existing efforts and website as compared to the goals that you have for this year. Partnering up with a skilled developer, putting your website onto a stable platform and selecting the right framework will do wonders for your 2023 website goals and help you better communicate with your chosen audience.
When it comes to HubSpot CMS, development can be particularly pricey. Thankfully, we’ve developed a more cost effective wireframe option for smaller businesses that want to transfer to HubSpot CMS. The wireframe allows you to choose from a number of extremely versatile modules and can be styled to your unique design. It’s optimized, super fast and will provide you with a great foundation towards optimizing your search rankings. We’re piloting this option for a few of our best clients right now and they’re loving the results.
Thinking of a new website in the new year? We can help with that.
It’s that time of year. Starting January 1 (and even before then) we talk about reinventing our brands, our marketing focus and our vision. We assess whether or not our website messaging is still keeping up with our brand, as well as our traffic and inbound marketing demands that we place on our website.
Around here we are huge advocates for making improvements to your existing website with the continuous improvement model. The idea behind continuous improvement is to create a sustainable monthly budget for your website development work and continue to improve your website over time, rather than doing a full overhaul every few years. However, this requires your website to actually still be functioning for your needs.
That’s what this article is all about - determining whether or not your existing website still serves you. Here are some points to help you determine whether you need a full website redesign or if you can just go ahead and adopt the continuous improvement model.
It’s that time of year. Starting January 1 (and even before then) we talk about reinventing our brands, our marketing focus and our vision. We assess whether or not our website messaging is still keeping up with our brand, as well as our traffic and inbound marketing demands that we place on our website.
Around here we are huge advocates for making improvements to your existing website with the continuous improvement model. The idea behind continuous improvement is to create a sustainable monthly budget for your website development work and continue to improve your website over time, rather than doing a full overhaul every few years. However, this requires your website to actually still be functioning for your needs.
That’s what this article is all about - determining whether or not your existing website still serves you. Here are some points to help you determine whether you need a full website redesign or if you can just go ahead and adopt the continuous improvement model.
Related: HubSpot CMS Web Design - The Continuous Improvement Model
\nYour marketing team hates your website
\nWebsite usability and user experience for the people that work behind the scenes uploading content and creating landing pages is one of the most important aspects of the success of your website. Your marketers should be able to add content with ease and easily suggest improvements that make their lives easier. If your marketing team is handicapped by the functionality behind the scenes or has a mile-long list of feature requests, it’s probably time to re-do your website.
\nThe framework and platform that your website is built on is one of the most important aspects of the long term success of your website - if yours is failing your marketing team and they’re becoming increasingly frustrated with the handicaps behind the scenes, it’s time for an upgrade.
Your website is starting to run more slowly or break more often
\nIf you’re on Wordpress, you’ll definitely see this a little more than if you’re on HubSpot. Website bloat is such a huge issue with businesses that start with a simple website and add increasing functionality as they grow. Your WordPress plugins aren’t always properly maintained, they can also bog down your main theme framework and add security holes if the original developer isn’t maintaining and updating them properly.
Lack of updates for your WordPress website plugins can also cause your website to break or go down. Never underestimate how costly it is for a website to go down. Oshyn breaks down the true cost of website downtime here.
We refer back very frequently to this blog that breaks down the factors bogging down your website, and even beyond plugins for WordPress websites, there are a lot of factors like large images, legacy code and scripts that bog down your website over time. We often are asked to perform website speed performance audits to determine what factors are holding a website back from a a better score in Google Core Vitals. If your score is looking a little high, it’s worth exploring a website redesign to get your page speed in line.
Your website is not ranking as well as it used to
\nSearch engine rankings change almost constantly and over the last few years Google has really focused even more on quality original content, organic keyword optimization, page speed, usability and mobile friendliness. If your website is aging, you might not have a mobile optimized menu, your content library might not be very user friendly, your keyword frequency could seem a little unnatural, or your page speed might be suffering.
Finding a website framework on a platform that is simple and can still perform matters. Unfortunately when frameworks and platforms are selected, price and aesthetics are usually the first consideration and those don’t always serve your buyer or give you the best opportunity to succeed.
Related: It’s time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS
\nYou’ve been through a few different developers.
\nNot every developer is created equal. It’s the most obvious statement to make, but not many people realize how important it is to find and stick with a skilled developer. Computan.com described it best:
“Asking a new developer to work on an old developer’s code is like asking a cook to continue making a dish that the old cook has left unfinished. There’s so little time and the customer is waiting on the table. The new chef has to figure out what ingredients are in the dish, how much more time it needs in the oven, and what more needs to be added.”
It makes things a little more difficult. Not to mention the previous developer might have had different skills, different coding standards, and their documentation might be inadequate. A gifted chef can easily replicate the recipe if these things are honored, but if the developer that came before them didn’t leave behind proper documentation or didn’t uphold best practice coding standards, things can get complicated quickly.
On many occasions we’ve had projects referred to us that other developers couldn’t get to the finish line. We jokingly say that we’re the final destination for Wordpress and HubSpot projects - in the least cryptic way possible. Our clients and supporters know that we’re more than capable of taking a partially completed dish and turning into a work of art.
If you’ve been through a few different developers with your website, documentation and coding standards may be all over the place. Your framework might be a bit of a mess and it may be best to just start from scratch. It’ll help your new development partner work more efficiently and you’ll get more from your budget as a result.
It no longer reflects your brand
\nBrand transformations happen over time, especially when company leadership changes. Even just a listen to a new inspiring book can send off the executive team into crafting a new vision and mission story. As your business grows, you’ll likely shift who you’re serving, how you’re serving them and how you communicate your brand’s individual story. The website that you started with or even that saw you through the last few years of your journey may not be the website that will get you to the next level.
After you take a deep dive into who your organization is, what needs you serve for your clients and customers and how you want to organize your content and serve your customers moving forward, you may find that a website redesign is not only necessary, but will help you grow into the goals you’re trying to achieve in the next few years.
You’ve re-evaluated your customer journey
\nAs we mentioned above, the evolution of your customer base and product offerings happens over time to any successful business. Evolution in business is as critical as operations management in what our friend Simon Sinek calls The Infinite Game (read this book) of business. Every so often, good marketers know that they need to explore the buyer journey in relation to the entire lifetime of any customer and continue to service needs long after they’ve made a buying decision.
Adding client login portals, special calculators, automations, smart content and other elements to your website is the perfect way to continue to cultivate your customer relationships in a complex customer journey, but that has to be done on a framework and platform that can handle all of that. If you’ve got a WordPress website or poorly coded framework in HubSpot - you’re going to be handicapped.
Related: 5 Things to Add to your Website Budget in 2023
\n
Odds are good that you have some aggressive growth plans for 2023.
“This is the year we _______!” (fill in the blank). After Covid shutdowns, massive supply chain issues, inflation, freight costs and other rising costs, 2020-2022 have been a wild ride for most businesses. But this year is a different story. If you’re getting ready to supercharge your marketing efforts in an attempt to attain your huge goals that you’ve set for this year, you need to make sure that your website is equipped to handle that.
We hope that you’re taking the time to really unpack your existing efforts and website as compared to the goals that you have for this year. Partnering up with a skilled developer, putting your website onto a stable platform and selecting the right framework will do wonders for your 2023 website goals and help you better communicate with your chosen audience.
When it comes to HubSpot CMS, development can be particularly pricey. Thankfully, we’ve developed a more cost effective wireframe option for smaller businesses that want to transfer to HubSpot CMS. The wireframe allows you to choose from a number of extremely versatile modules and can be styled to your unique design. It’s optimized, super fast and will provide you with a great foundation towards optimizing your search rankings. We’re piloting this option for a few of our best clients right now and they’re loving the results.
Thinking of a new website in the new year? We can help with that.
It’s that time of year. Starting January 1 (and even before then) we talk about reinventing our brands, our marketing focus and our vision. We assess whether or not our website messaging is still keeping up with our brand, as well as our traffic and inbound marketing demands that we place on our website.
Around here we are huge advocates for making improvements to your existing website with the continuous improvement model. The idea behind continuous improvement is to create a sustainable monthly budget for your website development work and continue to improve your website over time, rather than doing a full overhaul every few years. However, this requires your website to actually still be functioning for your needs.
That’s what this article is all about - determining whether or not your existing website still serves you. Here are some points to help you determine whether you need a full website redesign or if you can just go ahead and adopt the continuous improvement model.
It’s that time of year. Starting January 1 (and even before then) we talk about reinventing our brands, our marketing focus and our vision. We assess whether or not our website messaging is still keeping up with our brand, as well as our traffic and inbound marketing demands that we place on our website.
Around here we are huge advocates for making improvements to your existing website with the continuous improvement model. The idea behind continuous improvement is to create a sustainable monthly budget for your website development work and continue to improve your website over time, rather than doing a full overhaul every few years. However, this requires your website to actually still be functioning for your needs.
That’s what this article is all about - determining whether or not your existing website still serves you. Here are some points to help you determine whether you need a full website redesign or if you can just go ahead and adopt the continuous improvement model.
Related: HubSpot CMS Web Design - The Continuous Improvement Model
\nYour marketing team hates your website
\nWebsite usability and user experience for the people that work behind the scenes uploading content and creating landing pages is one of the most important aspects of the success of your website. Your marketers should be able to add content with ease and easily suggest improvements that make their lives easier. If your marketing team is handicapped by the functionality behind the scenes or has a mile-long list of feature requests, it’s probably time to re-do your website.
\nThe framework and platform that your website is built on is one of the most important aspects of the long term success of your website - if yours is failing your marketing team and they’re becoming increasingly frustrated with the handicaps behind the scenes, it’s time for an upgrade.
Your website is starting to run more slowly or break more often
\nIf you’re on Wordpress, you’ll definitely see this a little more than if you’re on HubSpot. Website bloat is such a huge issue with businesses that start with a simple website and add increasing functionality as they grow. Your WordPress plugins aren’t always properly maintained, they can also bog down your main theme framework and add security holes if the original developer isn’t maintaining and updating them properly.
Lack of updates for your WordPress website plugins can also cause your website to break or go down. Never underestimate how costly it is for a website to go down. Oshyn breaks down the true cost of website downtime here.
We refer back very frequently to this blog that breaks down the factors bogging down your website, and even beyond plugins for WordPress websites, there are a lot of factors like large images, legacy code and scripts that bog down your website over time. We often are asked to perform website speed performance audits to determine what factors are holding a website back from a a better score in Google Core Vitals. If your score is looking a little high, it’s worth exploring a website redesign to get your page speed in line.
Your website is not ranking as well as it used to
\nSearch engine rankings change almost constantly and over the last few years Google has really focused even more on quality original content, organic keyword optimization, page speed, usability and mobile friendliness. If your website is aging, you might not have a mobile optimized menu, your content library might not be very user friendly, your keyword frequency could seem a little unnatural, or your page speed might be suffering.
Finding a website framework on a platform that is simple and can still perform matters. Unfortunately when frameworks and platforms are selected, price and aesthetics are usually the first consideration and those don’t always serve your buyer or give you the best opportunity to succeed.
Related: It’s time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS
\nYou’ve been through a few different developers.
\nNot every developer is created equal. It’s the most obvious statement to make, but not many people realize how important it is to find and stick with a skilled developer. Computan.com described it best:
“Asking a new developer to work on an old developer’s code is like asking a cook to continue making a dish that the old cook has left unfinished. There’s so little time and the customer is waiting on the table. The new chef has to figure out what ingredients are in the dish, how much more time it needs in the oven, and what more needs to be added.”
It makes things a little more difficult. Not to mention the previous developer might have had different skills, different coding standards, and their documentation might be inadequate. A gifted chef can easily replicate the recipe if these things are honored, but if the developer that came before them didn’t leave behind proper documentation or didn’t uphold best practice coding standards, things can get complicated quickly.
On many occasions we’ve had projects referred to us that other developers couldn’t get to the finish line. We jokingly say that we’re the final destination for Wordpress and HubSpot projects - in the least cryptic way possible. Our clients and supporters know that we’re more than capable of taking a partially completed dish and turning into a work of art.
If you’ve been through a few different developers with your website, documentation and coding standards may be all over the place. Your framework might be a bit of a mess and it may be best to just start from scratch. It’ll help your new development partner work more efficiently and you’ll get more from your budget as a result.
It no longer reflects your brand
\nBrand transformations happen over time, especially when company leadership changes. Even just a listen to a new inspiring book can send off the executive team into crafting a new vision and mission story. As your business grows, you’ll likely shift who you’re serving, how you’re serving them and how you communicate your brand’s individual story. The website that you started with or even that saw you through the last few years of your journey may not be the website that will get you to the next level.
After you take a deep dive into who your organization is, what needs you serve for your clients and customers and how you want to organize your content and serve your customers moving forward, you may find that a website redesign is not only necessary, but will help you grow into the goals you’re trying to achieve in the next few years.
You’ve re-evaluated your customer journey
\nAs we mentioned above, the evolution of your customer base and product offerings happens over time to any successful business. Evolution in business is as critical as operations management in what our friend Simon Sinek calls The Infinite Game (read this book) of business. Every so often, good marketers know that they need to explore the buyer journey in relation to the entire lifetime of any customer and continue to service needs long after they’ve made a buying decision.
Adding client login portals, special calculators, automations, smart content and other elements to your website is the perfect way to continue to cultivate your customer relationships in a complex customer journey, but that has to be done on a framework and platform that can handle all of that. If you’ve got a WordPress website or poorly coded framework in HubSpot - you’re going to be handicapped.
Related: 5 Things to Add to your Website Budget in 2023
\n
Odds are good that you have some aggressive growth plans for 2023.
“This is the year we _______!” (fill in the blank). After Covid shutdowns, massive supply chain issues, inflation, freight costs and other rising costs, 2020-2022 have been a wild ride for most businesses. But this year is a different story. If you’re getting ready to supercharge your marketing efforts in an attempt to attain your huge goals that you’ve set for this year, you need to make sure that your website is equipped to handle that.
We hope that you’re taking the time to really unpack your existing efforts and website as compared to the goals that you have for this year. Partnering up with a skilled developer, putting your website onto a stable platform and selecting the right framework will do wonders for your 2023 website goals and help you better communicate with your chosen audience.
When it comes to HubSpot CMS, development can be particularly pricey. Thankfully, we’ve developed a more cost effective wireframe option for smaller businesses that want to transfer to HubSpot CMS. The wireframe allows you to choose from a number of extremely versatile modules and can be styled to your unique design. It’s optimized, super fast and will provide you with a great foundation towards optimizing your search rankings. We’re piloting this option for a few of our best clients right now and they’re loving the results.
Thinking of a new website in the new year? We can help with that.
It’s that time of year. Starting January 1 (and even before then) we talk about reinventing our brands, our marketing focus and our vision. We assess whether or not our website messaging is still keeping up with our brand, as well as our traffic and inbound marketing demands that we place on our website.
Around here we are huge advocates for making improvements to your existing website with the continuous improvement model. The idea behind continuous improvement is to create a sustainable monthly budget for your website development work and continue to improve your website over time, rather than doing a full overhaul every few years. However, this requires your website to actually still be functioning for your needs.
That’s what this article is all about - determining whether or not your existing website still serves you. Here are some points to help you determine whether you need a full website redesign or if you can just go ahead and adopt the continuous improvement model.
Related: HubSpot CMS Web Design - The Continuous Improvement Model
\nYour marketing team hates your website
\nWebsite usability and user experience for the people that work behind the scenes uploading content and creating landing pages is one of the most important aspects of the success of your website. Your marketers should be able to add content with ease and easily suggest improvements that make their lives easier. If your marketing team is handicapped by the functionality behind the scenes or has a mile-long list of feature requests, it’s probably time to re-do your website.
\nThe framework and platform that your website is built on is one of the most important aspects of the long term success of your website - if yours is failing your marketing team and they’re becoming increasingly frustrated with the handicaps behind the scenes, it’s time for an upgrade.
Your website is starting to run more slowly or break more often
\nIf you’re on Wordpress, you’ll definitely see this a little more than if you’re on HubSpot. Website bloat is such a huge issue with businesses that start with a simple website and add increasing functionality as they grow. Your WordPress plugins aren’t always properly maintained, they can also bog down your main theme framework and add security holes if the original developer isn’t maintaining and updating them properly.
Lack of updates for your WordPress website plugins can also cause your website to break or go down. Never underestimate how costly it is for a website to go down. Oshyn breaks down the true cost of website downtime here.
We refer back very frequently to this blog that breaks down the factors bogging down your website, and even beyond plugins for WordPress websites, there are a lot of factors like large images, legacy code and scripts that bog down your website over time. We often are asked to perform website speed performance audits to determine what factors are holding a website back from a a better score in Google Core Vitals. If your score is looking a little high, it’s worth exploring a website redesign to get your page speed in line.
Your website is not ranking as well as it used to
\nSearch engine rankings change almost constantly and over the last few years Google has really focused even more on quality original content, organic keyword optimization, page speed, usability and mobile friendliness. If your website is aging, you might not have a mobile optimized menu, your content library might not be very user friendly, your keyword frequency could seem a little unnatural, or your page speed might be suffering.
Finding a website framework on a platform that is simple and can still perform matters. Unfortunately when frameworks and platforms are selected, price and aesthetics are usually the first consideration and those don’t always serve your buyer or give you the best opportunity to succeed.
Related: It’s time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS
\nYou’ve been through a few different developers.
\nNot every developer is created equal. It’s the most obvious statement to make, but not many people realize how important it is to find and stick with a skilled developer. Computan.com described it best:
“Asking a new developer to work on an old developer’s code is like asking a cook to continue making a dish that the old cook has left unfinished. There’s so little time and the customer is waiting on the table. The new chef has to figure out what ingredients are in the dish, how much more time it needs in the oven, and what more needs to be added.”
It makes things a little more difficult. Not to mention the previous developer might have had different skills, different coding standards, and their documentation might be inadequate. A gifted chef can easily replicate the recipe if these things are honored, but if the developer that came before them didn’t leave behind proper documentation or didn’t uphold best practice coding standards, things can get complicated quickly.
On many occasions we’ve had projects referred to us that other developers couldn’t get to the finish line. We jokingly say that we’re the final destination for Wordpress and HubSpot projects - in the least cryptic way possible. Our clients and supporters know that we’re more than capable of taking a partially completed dish and turning into a work of art.
If you’ve been through a few different developers with your website, documentation and coding standards may be all over the place. Your framework might be a bit of a mess and it may be best to just start from scratch. It’ll help your new development partner work more efficiently and you’ll get more from your budget as a result.
It no longer reflects your brand
\nBrand transformations happen over time, especially when company leadership changes. Even just a listen to a new inspiring book can send off the executive team into crafting a new vision and mission story. As your business grows, you’ll likely shift who you’re serving, how you’re serving them and how you communicate your brand’s individual story. The website that you started with or even that saw you through the last few years of your journey may not be the website that will get you to the next level.
After you take a deep dive into who your organization is, what needs you serve for your clients and customers and how you want to organize your content and serve your customers moving forward, you may find that a website redesign is not only necessary, but will help you grow into the goals you’re trying to achieve in the next few years.
You’ve re-evaluated your customer journey
\nAs we mentioned above, the evolution of your customer base and product offerings happens over time to any successful business. Evolution in business is as critical as operations management in what our friend Simon Sinek calls The Infinite Game (read this book) of business. Every so often, good marketers know that they need to explore the buyer journey in relation to the entire lifetime of any customer and continue to service needs long after they’ve made a buying decision.
Adding client login portals, special calculators, automations, smart content and other elements to your website is the perfect way to continue to cultivate your customer relationships in a complex customer journey, but that has to be done on a framework and platform that can handle all of that. If you’ve got a WordPress website or poorly coded framework in HubSpot - you’re going to be handicapped.
Related: 5 Things to Add to your Website Budget in 2023
\n
Odds are good that you have some aggressive growth plans for 2023.
“This is the year we _______!” (fill in the blank). After Covid shutdowns, massive supply chain issues, inflation, freight costs and other rising costs, 2020-2022 have been a wild ride for most businesses. But this year is a different story. If you’re getting ready to supercharge your marketing efforts in an attempt to attain your huge goals that you’ve set for this year, you need to make sure that your website is equipped to handle that.
We hope that you’re taking the time to really unpack your existing efforts and website as compared to the goals that you have for this year. Partnering up with a skilled developer, putting your website onto a stable platform and selecting the right framework will do wonders for your 2023 website goals and help you better communicate with your chosen audience.
When it comes to HubSpot CMS, development can be particularly pricey. Thankfully, we’ve developed a more cost effective wireframe option for smaller businesses that want to transfer to HubSpot CMS. The wireframe allows you to choose from a number of extremely versatile modules and can be styled to your unique design. It’s optimized, super fast and will provide you with a great foundation towards optimizing your search rankings. We’re piloting this option for a few of our best clients right now and they’re loving the results.
Thinking of a new website in the new year? We can help with that.
It’s that time of year. Starting January 1 (and even before then) we talk about reinventing our brands, our marketing focus and our vision. We assess whether or not our website messaging is still keeping up with our brand, as well as our traffic and inbound marketing demands that we place on our website.
Around here we are huge advocates for making improvements to your existing website with the continuous improvement model. The idea behind continuous improvement is to create a sustainable monthly budget for your website development work and continue to improve your website over time, rather than doing a full overhaul every few years. However, this requires your website to actually still be functioning for your needs.
That’s what this article is all about - determining whether or not your existing website still serves you. Here are some points to help you determine whether you need a full website redesign or if you can just go ahead and adopt the continuous improvement model.
It’s that time of year. Starting January 1 (and even before then) we talk about reinventing our brands, our marketing focus and our vision. We assess whether or not our website messaging is still keeping up with our brand, as well as our traffic and inbound marketing demands that we place on our website.
Around here we are huge advocates for making improvements to your existing website with the continuous improvement model. The idea behind continuous improvement is to create a sustainable monthly budget for your website development work and continue to improve your website over time, rather than doing a full overhaul every few years. However, this requires your website to actually still be functioning for your needs.
That’s what this article is all about - determining whether or not your existing website still serves you. Here are some points to help you determine whether you need a full website redesign or if you can just go ahead and adopt the continuous improvement model.
It’s that time of year. Starting January 1 (and even before then) we talk about reinventing our brands, our marketing focus and our vision. We assess whether or not our website messaging is still keeping up with our brand, as well as our traffic and inbound marketing demands that we place on our website.
Around here we are huge advocates for making improvements to your existing website with the continuous improvement model. The idea behind continuous improvement is to create a sustainable monthly budget for your website development work and continue to improve your website over time, rather than doing a full overhaul every few years. However, this requires your website to actually still be functioning for your needs.
That’s what this article is all about - determining whether or not your existing website still serves you. Here are some points to help you determine whether you need a full website redesign or if you can just go ahead and adopt the continuous improvement model.
It’s that time of year. Starting January 1 (and even before then) we talk about reinventing our brands, our marketing focus and our vision. We assess whether or not our website messaging is still keeping up with our brand, as well as our traffic and inbound marketing demands that we place on our website.
Around here we are huge advocates for making improvements to your existing website with the continuous improvement model. The idea behind continuous improvement is to create a sustainable monthly budget for your website development work and continue to improve your website over time, rather than doing a full overhaul every few years. However, this requires your website to actually still be functioning for your needs.
That’s what this article is all about - determining whether or not your existing website still serves you. Here are some points to help you determine whether you need a full website redesign or if you can just go ahead and adopt the continuous improvement model.
It’s that time of year. Starting January 1 (and even before then) we talk about reinventing our brands, our marketing focus and our vision. We assess whether or not our website messaging is still keeping up with our brand, as well as our traffic and inbound marketing demands that we place on our website.
Around here we are huge advocates for making improvements to your existing website with the continuous improvement model. The idea behind continuous improvement is to create a sustainable monthly budget for your website development work and continue to improve your website over time, rather than doing a full overhaul every few years. However, this requires your website to actually still be functioning for your needs.
That’s what this article is all about - determining whether or not your existing website still serves you. Here are some points to help you determine whether you need a full website redesign or if you can just go ahead and adopt the continuous improvement model.
It’s that time of year. Starting January 1 (and even before then) we talk about reinventing our brands, our marketing focus and our vision. We assess whether or not our website messaging is still keeping up with our brand, as well as our traffic and inbound marketing demands that we place on our website.
Around here we are huge advocates for making improvements to your existing website with the continuous improvement model. The idea behind continuous improvement is to create a sustainable monthly budget for your website development work and continue to improve your website over time, rather than doing a full overhaul every few years. However, this requires your website to actually still be functioning for your needs.
That’s what this article is all about - determining whether or not your existing website still serves you. Here are some points to help you determine whether you need a full website redesign or if you can just go ahead and adopt the continuous improvement model.
Related: HubSpot CMS Web Design - The Continuous Improvement Model
\nYour marketing team hates your website
\nWebsite usability and user experience for the people that work behind the scenes uploading content and creating landing pages is one of the most important aspects of the success of your website. Your marketers should be able to add content with ease and easily suggest improvements that make their lives easier. If your marketing team is handicapped by the functionality behind the scenes or has a mile-long list of feature requests, it’s probably time to re-do your website.
\nThe framework and platform that your website is built on is one of the most important aspects of the long term success of your website - if yours is failing your marketing team and they’re becoming increasingly frustrated with the handicaps behind the scenes, it’s time for an upgrade.
Your website is starting to run more slowly or break more often
\nIf you’re on Wordpress, you’ll definitely see this a little more than if you’re on HubSpot. Website bloat is such a huge issue with businesses that start with a simple website and add increasing functionality as they grow. Your WordPress plugins aren’t always properly maintained, they can also bog down your main theme framework and add security holes if the original developer isn’t maintaining and updating them properly.
Lack of updates for your WordPress website plugins can also cause your website to break or go down. Never underestimate how costly it is for a website to go down. Oshyn breaks down the true cost of website downtime here.
We refer back very frequently to this blog that breaks down the factors bogging down your website, and even beyond plugins for WordPress websites, there are a lot of factors like large images, legacy code and scripts that bog down your website over time. We often are asked to perform website speed performance audits to determine what factors are holding a website back from a a better score in Google Core Vitals. If your score is looking a little high, it’s worth exploring a website redesign to get your page speed in line.
Your website is not ranking as well as it used to
\nSearch engine rankings change almost constantly and over the last few years Google has really focused even more on quality original content, organic keyword optimization, page speed, usability and mobile friendliness. If your website is aging, you might not have a mobile optimized menu, your content library might not be very user friendly, your keyword frequency could seem a little unnatural, or your page speed might be suffering.
Finding a website framework on a platform that is simple and can still perform matters. Unfortunately when frameworks and platforms are selected, price and aesthetics are usually the first consideration and those don’t always serve your buyer or give you the best opportunity to succeed.
Related: It’s time to leave WordPress for HubSpot CMS
\nYou’ve been through a few different developers.
\nNot every developer is created equal. It’s the most obvious statement to make, but not many people realize how important it is to find and stick with a skilled developer. Computan.com described it best:
“Asking a new developer to work on an old developer’s code is like asking a cook to continue making a dish that the old cook has left unfinished. There’s so little time and the customer is waiting on the table. The new chef has to figure out what ingredients are in the dish, how much more time it needs in the oven, and what more needs to be added.”
It makes things a little more difficult. Not to mention the previous developer might have had different skills, different coding standards, and their documentation might be inadequate. A gifted chef can easily replicate the recipe if these things are honored, but if the developer that came before them didn’t leave behind proper documentation or didn’t uphold best practice coding standards, things can get complicated quickly.
On many occasions we’ve had projects referred to us that other developers couldn’t get to the finish line. We jokingly say that we’re the final destination for Wordpress and HubSpot projects - in the least cryptic way possible. Our clients and supporters know that we’re more than capable of taking a partially completed dish and turning into a work of art.
If you’ve been through a few different developers with your website, documentation and coding standards may be all over the place. Your framework might be a bit of a mess and it may be best to just start from scratch. It’ll help your new development partner work more efficiently and you’ll get more from your budget as a result.
It no longer reflects your brand
\nBrand transformations happen over time, especially when company leadership changes. Even just a listen to a new inspiring book can send off the executive team into crafting a new vision and mission story. As your business grows, you’ll likely shift who you’re serving, how you’re serving them and how you communicate your brand’s individual story. The website that you started with or even that saw you through the last few years of your journey may not be the website that will get you to the next level.
After you take a deep dive into who your organization is, what needs you serve for your clients and customers and how you want to organize your content and serve your customers moving forward, you may find that a website redesign is not only necessary, but will help you grow into the goals you’re trying to achieve in the next few years.
You’ve re-evaluated your customer journey
\nAs we mentioned above, the evolution of your customer base and product offerings happens over time to any successful business. Evolution in business is as critical as operations management in what our friend Simon Sinek calls The Infinite Game (read this book) of business. Every so often, good marketers know that they need to explore the buyer journey in relation to the entire lifetime of any customer and continue to service needs long after they’ve made a buying decision.
Adding client login portals, special calculators, automations, smart content and other elements to your website is the perfect way to continue to cultivate your customer relationships in a complex customer journey, but that has to be done on a framework and platform that can handle all of that. If you’ve got a WordPress website or poorly coded framework in HubSpot - you’re going to be handicapped.
Related: 5 Things to Add to your Website Budget in 2023
\n
Odds are good that you have some aggressive growth plans for 2023.
“This is the year we _______!” (fill in the blank). After Covid shutdowns, massive supply chain issues, inflation, freight costs and other rising costs, 2020-2022 have been a wild ride for most businesses. But this year is a different story. If you’re getting ready to supercharge your marketing efforts in an attempt to attain your huge goals that you’ve set for this year, you need to make sure that your website is equipped to handle that.
We hope that you’re taking the time to really unpack your existing efforts and website as compared to the goals that you have for this year. Partnering up with a skilled developer, putting your website onto a stable platform and selecting the right framework will do wonders for your 2023 website goals and help you better communicate with your chosen audience.
When it comes to HubSpot CMS, development can be particularly pricey. Thankfully, we’ve developed a more cost effective wireframe option for smaller businesses that want to transfer to HubSpot CMS. The wireframe allows you to choose from a number of extremely versatile modules and can be styled to your unique design. It’s optimized, super fast and will provide you with a great foundation towards optimizing your search rankings. We’re piloting this option for a few of our best clients right now and they’re loving the results.
Thinking of a new website in the new year? We can help with that.
It’s that time of year. Starting January 1 (and even before then) we talk about reinventing our brands, our marketing focus and our vision. We assess whether or not our website messaging is still keeping up with our brand, as well as our traffic and inbound marketing demands that we place on our website.
Around here we are huge advocates for making improvements to your existing website with the continuous improvement model. The idea behind continuous improvement is to create a sustainable monthly budget for your website development work and continue to improve your website over time, rather than doing a full overhaul every few years. However, this requires your website to actually still be functioning for your needs.
That’s what this article is all about - determining whether or not your existing website still serves you. Here are some points to help you determine whether you need a full website redesign or if you can just go ahead and adopt the continuous improvement model.
It has been an exciting year of growth for deckerdevs. When we took the leap to make our partnership with HubSpot official, we knew that we would boost the business - but we were genuinely surprised to experience the exponential growth we’ve had this year. We’ve met new agency partners and so many HubSpot customers that we’ve helped integrate data, create custom workflows, work better with HubDB, organize resource centers and so many other cool projects along the way. We took all our projects and put them in a graph to see if we could identify some of the trends for requested projects and maybe even make some predictions for what projects we might see increased demand for in 2023.
\n\nIntegrations topped the list
\nIntegrations were the top demand in 2022 at 16% of our workload. We saw so many projects where our clients were requesting that data be moved more easily between HubSpot and their ERP software, a third party application, or social media.
Just a few examples of integrations that we completed this year:
- \n
- We helped a real estate developer integrate their property sales with contacts in HubSpot and automate the exchange of data with their ERP software to make executing contracts easier. \n
- We assisted a remodeling contractor better manage their remodeling projects and HubSpot sales contacts for improved follow-up and more efficient project management. \n
- We assisted with an integration between Stripe and HubSpot that allowed deal records to be updated when subscription payments were made \n
Most HubSpot customers pay somewhere between a few hundred to tens of thousands and some hundreds of thousands for HubSpot services and software. When you’re making such a massive investment, but still need to manually enter data between your applications, it can interfere with employee productivity and actually cause a lag in the adoption of new technology or under utilization of HubSpot. By paying to integrate your software with HubSpot, you can eliminate employee frustration, increase productivity and seamlessly move data between applications for improved analytics. This not only helps you get the most out of HubSpot, but boosts employee happiness as well.
Related: HubSpot API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nHubSpot consulting was a close second
\nFiguring out how to do things in HubSpot is as important to you as actually completing them, according to our workload. More than 15% of our projects this year were HubSpot consulting hours. From helping you organize your workflows, doing discovery on your business processes, understanding the complex integrations you’re considering, choosing the best software applications to help you execute your services on an everyday basis or simply consulting on page speed optimization - consulting was #2 on the list of most popular projects in 2022.
Our experience with HubSpot is longstanding and as a result we do many things that other development agencies won’t even consider or that many marketing agencies aren’t capable of. If you present a problem - there’s always a solution that we can come up with together. Creative development solutions are probably our favorite thing to tackle and we’re always happy to sit down with our prospects and clients and dig in to discuss potential solutions and help them understand their options prior to making a large investment.
Prospects want to understand their options, what the implications of this means and how they can find the middle ground between their wants, needs and budget - but this isn’t always something that can be discussed entirely in an initial call. Getting expertise from an experienced developer will help you avoid some of the pitfalls that can be associated with outsourcing your web development and go into your interviews a bit more educated about your needs. If we end up working with you, great! If not, you’ll be well-equipped to vet whatever developer you do use - and that’s what matters most.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot CMS developer? Your website isn’t a sub sandwich.
\nWebsite updates & website overhauls came in third
\nComing in 3rd all tied up at 13% of our workload came website updates and website overhauls. This is interesting, because we’ve been making the case for the continuous improvement model for quite some time. While there’s nothing wrong with a complete website overhaul, particularly if you’re switching over platforms or have outgrown your infrastructure, establishing a budget for continuous improvement over time will help save you money in the long term. By moving to a more flexible, scalable platform like HubSpot CMS, you can plan for the growth of your website without bogging it down with additional plugins or add-ons over time. This allows you to focus on growth and making the lives of your marketers easier by constantly looking at data and tweaking your website rather than lumping all the wishlist items into your next redesign.
A website is never finished. The moment you launch, you’ll inevitably have the pangs of regret that come with not requesting additional options. By carving out a website budget every year broken out into a monthly expense you make things much more predictable and ensure that you improve your website over time rather than growing to hate it for everything it can’t do.
Related: 5 things to add to your website budget in 2023
\nOnline learning upgrades and help with HubSpot
\n10% of our development time in 2022 was spent on online learning upgrades and help with HubSpot.
So many organizations have added online learning capabilities and learning management systems to their arsenal of online content since the pandemic. Client and customer portals with online login credentials and learning management applications help organizations execute training programs for online staff, continued education workshops, certification programs or other online learning resources.
However, not all Learning Management Systems are created equal and we encourage you to ask questions prior to purchasing an LMS template in HubSpot or elsewhere to determine if the app suits your needs. It’s likely that you’ll need a little support so be sure to engage the developer or another skilled HubSpot developer to help you customize the LMS and make it your own. We highly recommend HubLMS, a HubSpot Learning Management System built by our friends at Impulse Creative. Be prepared to invest a good amount into this for the futures that you need - and don’t forget, just like with anything else, you get what you pay for. Investing up front in a system that has the features you need and is easy for the end user to navigate will ensure your success down the road and give you much better ROI than purchasing a cheaper one without support.
Across the board - whether it is LMS development, custom workflows, architecting insight for workflows, or help with HubDB, we worked a lot this year on getting you the customized features that you need and helping you organize your HubSpot portals and meet your goals.
Resource Center updates
\nNext up? We spent 8% of our time in 2022 on resource center upgrades. ![\"knowledge](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/knowledge%20center.png\")
You spend a LOT OF TIME on content. It’s an inbound marketers main focus. You spend the most time strategizing your content, writing blogs, curating downloads, creating landing pages, pillar pages, constantly tweaking and refining your message, begging the other teams to help you create content or provide content ideas, endlessly editing videos, getting buy-in for webinars, interviewing for white papers and case studies… it’s literally limitless. There is no end to the amount of media and content resources that a marketer puts together. When you got started you likely didn’t have a fraction of the amount of content you have now.
\n
This was a top concern for our clients this year:
\"How will we organize this content and make sure that our prospects and customers can access it easily?\"
Here are some things we did to help you update your HubSpot resource centers this year:
- \n
- We spent some time rehabbing and optimizing resource centers for load speed issues \n
- We added content drop down filters to allow prospects to browse by content type \n
- We added checkbox filters to allow prospects to view certain types of content they needed with multiple filters \n
- We completely re-faced resource centers that were dated and not displaying data in the best way \n
- We added new HubSpot custom behavioral events so you can really understand user engagement and to provide for future content direction \n
Making your content more easily accessible to the people that need it is going to do amazing things for your conversion rates. We’ve had really incredible feedback from all the updates that we’ve completed this year and we can’t wait to look back on some of the conversion rate and bounce rate analytics and make ongoing tweaks.
\n
Related: 5 website optimization tools to boost conversions
\nNavigation Updates
\nThe last one we’ll cover, which occupied 6% of our time was navigation updates. We’ve spent a lot of time this year rehabbing menus that needed to be more user friendly or offer different options for featuring new content. As we mentioned above, the content arsenal is ever-increasing for many companies and organizing that content to put it in front of your audience is more important than ever.
\n\n
![\"deckerdevs-megamenus\"](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/deckerdevs-megamenus.svg\")
This is why we’re such huge proponents of the mega menu. You can use mega menus to present content in a more aesthetic way that helps your users easily find what they’re looking for, common actions that are taken or popular pieces of content without having to navigate through your entire site to locate what they need.
You can read more on why we think a mega menu should be your next website investment in our blog.
\n
\n
\n
Related: HubSpot CMS development trends - mega menus are here to stay
\n\n
So there you have it, our personal “wrapped list” for 2022. We took on so many incredible projects, met so many new people and you helped us challenge and refine our expertise even more in pushing the boundaries of what HubSpot can do for your businesses. We couldn’t have asked for a better first official year as a HubSpot Partner!
What’s on the docket for 2023? We think custom web applications, mega menu, superpowered content personalization, and really robust resource centers will top the charts - but integrations aren’t going anywhere for sure.
Where are you taking your website in 2023? Let us know in the comments.
It has been an exciting year of growth for deckerdevs. When we took the leap to make our partnership with HubSpot official, we knew that we would boost the business - but we were genuinely surprised to experience the exponential growth we’ve had this year. We’ve met new agency partners and so many HubSpot customers that we’ve helped integrate data, create custom workflows, work better with HubDB, organize resource centers and so many other cool projects along the way. We took all our projects and put them in a graph to see if we could identify some of the trends for requested projects and maybe even make some predictions for what projects we might see increased demand for in 2023.
\n","rss_body":"It has been an exciting year of growth for deckerdevs. When we took the leap to make our partnership with HubSpot official, we knew that we would boost the business - but we were genuinely surprised to experience the exponential growth we’ve had this year. We’ve met new agency partners and so many HubSpot customers that we’ve helped integrate data, create custom workflows, work better with HubDB, organize resource centers and so many other cool projects along the way. We took all our projects and put them in a graph to see if we could identify some of the trends for requested projects and maybe even make some predictions for what projects we might see increased demand for in 2023.
\n\nIntegrations topped the list
\nIntegrations were the top demand in 2022 at 16% of our workload. We saw so many projects where our clients were requesting that data be moved more easily between HubSpot and their ERP software, a third party application, or social media.
Just a few examples of integrations that we completed this year:
- \n
- We helped a real estate developer integrate their property sales with contacts in HubSpot and automate the exchange of data with their ERP software to make executing contracts easier. \n
- We assisted a remodeling contractor better manage their remodeling projects and HubSpot sales contacts for improved follow-up and more efficient project management. \n
- We assisted with an integration between Stripe and HubSpot that allowed deal records to be updated when subscription payments were made \n
Most HubSpot customers pay somewhere between a few hundred to tens of thousands and some hundreds of thousands for HubSpot services and software. When you’re making such a massive investment, but still need to manually enter data between your applications, it can interfere with employee productivity and actually cause a lag in the adoption of new technology or under utilization of HubSpot. By paying to integrate your software with HubSpot, you can eliminate employee frustration, increase productivity and seamlessly move data between applications for improved analytics. This not only helps you get the most out of HubSpot, but boosts employee happiness as well.
Related: HubSpot API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nHubSpot consulting was a close second
\nFiguring out how to do things in HubSpot is as important to you as actually completing them, according to our workload. More than 15% of our projects this year were HubSpot consulting hours. From helping you organize your workflows, doing discovery on your business processes, understanding the complex integrations you’re considering, choosing the best software applications to help you execute your services on an everyday basis or simply consulting on page speed optimization - consulting was #2 on the list of most popular projects in 2022.
Our experience with HubSpot is longstanding and as a result we do many things that other development agencies won’t even consider or that many marketing agencies aren’t capable of. If you present a problem - there’s always a solution that we can come up with together. Creative development solutions are probably our favorite thing to tackle and we’re always happy to sit down with our prospects and clients and dig in to discuss potential solutions and help them understand their options prior to making a large investment.
Prospects want to understand their options, what the implications of this means and how they can find the middle ground between their wants, needs and budget - but this isn’t always something that can be discussed entirely in an initial call. Getting expertise from an experienced developer will help you avoid some of the pitfalls that can be associated with outsourcing your web development and go into your interviews a bit more educated about your needs. If we end up working with you, great! If not, you’ll be well-equipped to vet whatever developer you do use - and that’s what matters most.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot CMS developer? Your website isn’t a sub sandwich.
\nWebsite updates & website overhauls came in third
\nComing in 3rd all tied up at 13% of our workload came website updates and website overhauls. This is interesting, because we’ve been making the case for the continuous improvement model for quite some time. While there’s nothing wrong with a complete website overhaul, particularly if you’re switching over platforms or have outgrown your infrastructure, establishing a budget for continuous improvement over time will help save you money in the long term. By moving to a more flexible, scalable platform like HubSpot CMS, you can plan for the growth of your website without bogging it down with additional plugins or add-ons over time. This allows you to focus on growth and making the lives of your marketers easier by constantly looking at data and tweaking your website rather than lumping all the wishlist items into your next redesign.
A website is never finished. The moment you launch, you’ll inevitably have the pangs of regret that come with not requesting additional options. By carving out a website budget every year broken out into a monthly expense you make things much more predictable and ensure that you improve your website over time rather than growing to hate it for everything it can’t do.
Related: 5 things to add to your website budget in 2023
\nOnline learning upgrades and help with HubSpot
\n10% of our development time in 2022 was spent on online learning upgrades and help with HubSpot.
So many organizations have added online learning capabilities and learning management systems to their arsenal of online content since the pandemic. Client and customer portals with online login credentials and learning management applications help organizations execute training programs for online staff, continued education workshops, certification programs or other online learning resources.
However, not all Learning Management Systems are created equal and we encourage you to ask questions prior to purchasing an LMS template in HubSpot or elsewhere to determine if the app suits your needs. It’s likely that you’ll need a little support so be sure to engage the developer or another skilled HubSpot developer to help you customize the LMS and make it your own. We highly recommend HubLMS, a HubSpot Learning Management System built by our friends at Impulse Creative. Be prepared to invest a good amount into this for the futures that you need - and don’t forget, just like with anything else, you get what you pay for. Investing up front in a system that has the features you need and is easy for the end user to navigate will ensure your success down the road and give you much better ROI than purchasing a cheaper one without support.
Across the board - whether it is LMS development, custom workflows, architecting insight for workflows, or help with HubDB, we worked a lot this year on getting you the customized features that you need and helping you organize your HubSpot portals and meet your goals.
Resource Center updates
\nNext up? We spent 8% of our time in 2022 on resource center upgrades. You spend a LOT OF TIME on content. It’s an inbound marketers main focus. You spend the most time strategizing your content, writing blogs, curating downloads, creating landing pages, pillar pages, constantly tweaking and refining your message, begging the other teams to help you create content or provide content ideas, endlessly editing videos, getting buy-in for webinars, interviewing for white papers and case studies… it’s literally limitless. There is no end to the amount of media and content resources that a marketer puts together. When you got started you likely didn’t have a fraction of the amount of content you have now.
\n
This was a top concern for our clients this year:
\"How will we organize this content and make sure that our prospects and customers can access it easily?\"
Here are some things we did to help you update your HubSpot resource centers this year:
- \n
- We spent some time rehabbing and optimizing resource centers for load speed issues \n
- We added content drop down filters to allow prospects to browse by content type \n
- We added checkbox filters to allow prospects to view certain types of content they needed with multiple filters \n
- We completely re-faced resource centers that were dated and not displaying data in the best way \n
- We added new HubSpot custom behavioral events so you can really understand user engagement and to provide for future content direction \n
Making your content more easily accessible to the people that need it is going to do amazing things for your conversion rates. We’ve had really incredible feedback from all the updates that we’ve completed this year and we can’t wait to look back on some of the conversion rate and bounce rate analytics and make ongoing tweaks.
\n
Related: 5 website optimization tools to boost conversions
\nNavigation Updates
\nThe last one we’ll cover, which occupied 6% of our time was navigation updates. We’ve spent a lot of time this year rehabbing menus that needed to be more user friendly or offer different options for featuring new content. As we mentioned above, the content arsenal is ever-increasing for many companies and organizing that content to put it in front of your audience is more important than ever.
\n\n
This is why we’re such huge proponents of the mega menu. You can use mega menus to present content in a more aesthetic way that helps your users easily find what they’re looking for, common actions that are taken or popular pieces of content without having to navigate through your entire site to locate what they need.
You can read more on why we think a mega menu should be your next website investment in our blog.
\n
\n
\n
Related: HubSpot CMS development trends - mega menus are here to stay
\n\n
So there you have it, our personal “wrapped list” for 2022. We took on so many incredible projects, met so many new people and you helped us challenge and refine our expertise even more in pushing the boundaries of what HubSpot can do for your businesses. We couldn’t have asked for a better first official year as a HubSpot Partner!
What’s on the docket for 2023? We think custom web applications, mega menu, superpowered content personalization, and really robust resource centers will top the charts - but integrations aren’t going anywhere for sure.
Where are you taking your website in 2023? Let us know in the comments.
It has been an exciting year of growth for deckerdevs. When we took the leap to make our partnership with HubSpot official, we knew that we would boost the business - but we were genuinely surprised to experience the exponential growth we’ve had this year. We’ve met new agency partners and so many HubSpot customers that we’ve helped integrate data, create custom workflows, work better with HubDB, organize resource centers and so many other cool projects along the way. We took all our projects and put them in a graph to see if we could identify some of the trends for requested projects and maybe even make some predictions for what projects we might see increased demand for in 2023.
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We’ve met new agency partners and so many HubSpot customers that we’ve helped integrate data, create custom workflows, work better with HubDB, organize resource centers and so many other cool projects along the way. We took all our projects and put them in a graph to see if we could identify some of the trends for requested projects and maybe even make some predictions for what projects we might see increased demand for in 2023.
\n\nIntegrations topped the list
\nIntegrations were the top demand in 2022 at 16% of our workload. We saw so many projects where our clients were requesting that data be moved more easily between HubSpot and their ERP software, a third party application, or social media.
Just a few examples of integrations that we completed this year:
- \n
- We helped a real estate developer integrate their property sales with contacts in HubSpot and automate the exchange of data with their ERP software to make executing contracts easier. \n
- We assisted a remodeling contractor better manage their remodeling projects and HubSpot sales contacts for improved follow-up and more efficient project management. \n
- We assisted with an integration between Stripe and HubSpot that allowed deal records to be updated when subscription payments were made \n
Most HubSpot customers pay somewhere between a few hundred to tens of thousands and some hundreds of thousands for HubSpot services and software. When you’re making such a massive investment, but still need to manually enter data between your applications, it can interfere with employee productivity and actually cause a lag in the adoption of new technology or under utilization of HubSpot. By paying to integrate your software with HubSpot, you can eliminate employee frustration, increase productivity and seamlessly move data between applications for improved analytics. This not only helps you get the most out of HubSpot, but boosts employee happiness as well.
Related: HubSpot API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nHubSpot consulting was a close second
\nFiguring out how to do things in HubSpot is as important to you as actually completing them, according to our workload. More than 15% of our projects this year were HubSpot consulting hours. From helping you organize your workflows, doing discovery on your business processes, understanding the complex integrations you’re considering, choosing the best software applications to help you execute your services on an everyday basis or simply consulting on page speed optimization - consulting was #2 on the list of most popular projects in 2022.
Our experience with HubSpot is longstanding and as a result we do many things that other development agencies won’t even consider or that many marketing agencies aren’t capable of. If you present a problem - there’s always a solution that we can come up with together. Creative development solutions are probably our favorite thing to tackle and we’re always happy to sit down with our prospects and clients and dig in to discuss potential solutions and help them understand their options prior to making a large investment.
Prospects want to understand their options, what the implications of this means and how they can find the middle ground between their wants, needs and budget - but this isn’t always something that can be discussed entirely in an initial call. Getting expertise from an experienced developer will help you avoid some of the pitfalls that can be associated with outsourcing your web development and go into your interviews a bit more educated about your needs. If we end up working with you, great! If not, you’ll be well-equipped to vet whatever developer you do use - and that’s what matters most.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot CMS developer? Your website isn’t a sub sandwich.
\nWebsite updates & website overhauls came in third
\nComing in 3rd all tied up at 13% of our workload came website updates and website overhauls. This is interesting, because we’ve been making the case for the continuous improvement model for quite some time. While there’s nothing wrong with a complete website overhaul, particularly if you’re switching over platforms or have outgrown your infrastructure, establishing a budget for continuous improvement over time will help save you money in the long term. By moving to a more flexible, scalable platform like HubSpot CMS, you can plan for the growth of your website without bogging it down with additional plugins or add-ons over time. This allows you to focus on growth and making the lives of your marketers easier by constantly looking at data and tweaking your website rather than lumping all the wishlist items into your next redesign.
A website is never finished. The moment you launch, you’ll inevitably have the pangs of regret that come with not requesting additional options. By carving out a website budget every year broken out into a monthly expense you make things much more predictable and ensure that you improve your website over time rather than growing to hate it for everything it can’t do.
Related: 5 things to add to your website budget in 2023
\nOnline learning upgrades and help with HubSpot
\n10% of our development time in 2022 was spent on online learning upgrades and help with HubSpot.
So many organizations have added online learning capabilities and learning management systems to their arsenal of online content since the pandemic. Client and customer portals with online login credentials and learning management applications help organizations execute training programs for online staff, continued education workshops, certification programs or other online learning resources.
However, not all Learning Management Systems are created equal and we encourage you to ask questions prior to purchasing an LMS template in HubSpot or elsewhere to determine if the app suits your needs. It’s likely that you’ll need a little support so be sure to engage the developer or another skilled HubSpot developer to help you customize the LMS and make it your own. We highly recommend HubLMS, a HubSpot Learning Management System built by our friends at Impulse Creative. Be prepared to invest a good amount into this for the futures that you need - and don’t forget, just like with anything else, you get what you pay for. Investing up front in a system that has the features you need and is easy for the end user to navigate will ensure your success down the road and give you much better ROI than purchasing a cheaper one without support.
Across the board - whether it is LMS development, custom workflows, architecting insight for workflows, or help with HubDB, we worked a lot this year on getting you the customized features that you need and helping you organize your HubSpot portals and meet your goals.
Resource Center updates
\nNext up? We spent 8% of our time in 2022 on resource center upgrades. You spend a LOT OF TIME on content. It’s an inbound marketers main focus. You spend the most time strategizing your content, writing blogs, curating downloads, creating landing pages, pillar pages, constantly tweaking and refining your message, begging the other teams to help you create content or provide content ideas, endlessly editing videos, getting buy-in for webinars, interviewing for white papers and case studies… it’s literally limitless. There is no end to the amount of media and content resources that a marketer puts together. When you got started you likely didn’t have a fraction of the amount of content you have now.
\n
This was a top concern for our clients this year:
\"How will we organize this content and make sure that our prospects and customers can access it easily?\"
Here are some things we did to help you update your HubSpot resource centers this year:
- \n
- We spent some time rehabbing and optimizing resource centers for load speed issues \n
- We added content drop down filters to allow prospects to browse by content type \n
- We added checkbox filters to allow prospects to view certain types of content they needed with multiple filters \n
- We completely re-faced resource centers that were dated and not displaying data in the best way \n
- We added new HubSpot custom behavioral events so you can really understand user engagement and to provide for future content direction \n
Making your content more easily accessible to the people that need it is going to do amazing things for your conversion rates. We’ve had really incredible feedback from all the updates that we’ve completed this year and we can’t wait to look back on some of the conversion rate and bounce rate analytics and make ongoing tweaks.
\n
Related: 5 website optimization tools to boost conversions
\nNavigation Updates
\nThe last one we’ll cover, which occupied 6% of our time was navigation updates. We’ve spent a lot of time this year rehabbing menus that needed to be more user friendly or offer different options for featuring new content. As we mentioned above, the content arsenal is ever-increasing for many companies and organizing that content to put it in front of your audience is more important than ever.
\n\n
This is why we’re such huge proponents of the mega menu. You can use mega menus to present content in a more aesthetic way that helps your users easily find what they’re looking for, common actions that are taken or popular pieces of content without having to navigate through your entire site to locate what they need.
You can read more on why we think a mega menu should be your next website investment in our blog.
\n
\n
\n
Related: HubSpot CMS development trends - mega menus are here to stay
\n\n
So there you have it, our personal “wrapped list” for 2022. We took on so many incredible projects, met so many new people and you helped us challenge and refine our expertise even more in pushing the boundaries of what HubSpot can do for your businesses. We couldn’t have asked for a better first official year as a HubSpot Partner!
What’s on the docket for 2023? We think custom web applications, mega menu, superpowered content personalization, and really robust resource centers will top the charts - but integrations aren’t going anywhere for sure.
Where are you taking your website in 2023? Let us know in the comments.
It has been an exciting year of growth for deckerdevs. When we took the leap to make our partnership with HubSpot official, we knew that we would boost the business - but we were genuinely surprised to experience the exponential growth we’ve had this year. We’ve met new agency partners and so many HubSpot customers that we’ve helped integrate data, create custom workflows, work better with HubDB, organize resource centers and so many other cool projects along the way. We took all our projects and put them in a graph to see if we could identify some of the trends for requested projects and maybe even make some predictions for what projects we might see increased demand for in 2023.
\n\nIntegrations topped the list
\nIntegrations were the top demand in 2022 at 16% of our workload. We saw so many projects where our clients were requesting that data be moved more easily between HubSpot and their ERP software, a third party application, or social media.
Just a few examples of integrations that we completed this year:
- \n
- We helped a real estate developer integrate their property sales with contacts in HubSpot and automate the exchange of data with their ERP software to make executing contracts easier. \n
- We assisted a remodeling contractor better manage their remodeling projects and HubSpot sales contacts for improved follow-up and more efficient project management. \n
- We assisted with an integration between Stripe and HubSpot that allowed deal records to be updated when subscription payments were made \n
Most HubSpot customers pay somewhere between a few hundred to tens of thousands and some hundreds of thousands for HubSpot services and software. When you’re making such a massive investment, but still need to manually enter data between your applications, it can interfere with employee productivity and actually cause a lag in the adoption of new technology or under utilization of HubSpot. By paying to integrate your software with HubSpot, you can eliminate employee frustration, increase productivity and seamlessly move data between applications for improved analytics. This not only helps you get the most out of HubSpot, but boosts employee happiness as well.
Related: HubSpot API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nHubSpot consulting was a close second
\nFiguring out how to do things in HubSpot is as important to you as actually completing them, according to our workload. More than 15% of our projects this year were HubSpot consulting hours. From helping you organize your workflows, doing discovery on your business processes, understanding the complex integrations you’re considering, choosing the best software applications to help you execute your services on an everyday basis or simply consulting on page speed optimization - consulting was #2 on the list of most popular projects in 2022.
Our experience with HubSpot is longstanding and as a result we do many things that other development agencies won’t even consider or that many marketing agencies aren’t capable of. If you present a problem - there’s always a solution that we can come up with together. Creative development solutions are probably our favorite thing to tackle and we’re always happy to sit down with our prospects and clients and dig in to discuss potential solutions and help them understand their options prior to making a large investment.
Prospects want to understand their options, what the implications of this means and how they can find the middle ground between their wants, needs and budget - but this isn’t always something that can be discussed entirely in an initial call. Getting expertise from an experienced developer will help you avoid some of the pitfalls that can be associated with outsourcing your web development and go into your interviews a bit more educated about your needs. If we end up working with you, great! If not, you’ll be well-equipped to vet whatever developer you do use - and that’s what matters most.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot CMS developer? Your website isn’t a sub sandwich.
\nWebsite updates & website overhauls came in third
\nComing in 3rd all tied up at 13% of our workload came website updates and website overhauls. This is interesting, because we’ve been making the case for the continuous improvement model for quite some time. While there’s nothing wrong with a complete website overhaul, particularly if you’re switching over platforms or have outgrown your infrastructure, establishing a budget for continuous improvement over time will help save you money in the long term. By moving to a more flexible, scalable platform like HubSpot CMS, you can plan for the growth of your website without bogging it down with additional plugins or add-ons over time. This allows you to focus on growth and making the lives of your marketers easier by constantly looking at data and tweaking your website rather than lumping all the wishlist items into your next redesign.
A website is never finished. The moment you launch, you’ll inevitably have the pangs of regret that come with not requesting additional options. By carving out a website budget every year broken out into a monthly expense you make things much more predictable and ensure that you improve your website over time rather than growing to hate it for everything it can’t do.
Related: 5 things to add to your website budget in 2023
\nOnline learning upgrades and help with HubSpot
\n10% of our development time in 2022 was spent on online learning upgrades and help with HubSpot.
So many organizations have added online learning capabilities and learning management systems to their arsenal of online content since the pandemic. Client and customer portals with online login credentials and learning management applications help organizations execute training programs for online staff, continued education workshops, certification programs or other online learning resources.
However, not all Learning Management Systems are created equal and we encourage you to ask questions prior to purchasing an LMS template in HubSpot or elsewhere to determine if the app suits your needs. It’s likely that you’ll need a little support so be sure to engage the developer or another skilled HubSpot developer to help you customize the LMS and make it your own. We highly recommend HubLMS, a HubSpot Learning Management System built by our friends at Impulse Creative. Be prepared to invest a good amount into this for the futures that you need - and don’t forget, just like with anything else, you get what you pay for. Investing up front in a system that has the features you need and is easy for the end user to navigate will ensure your success down the road and give you much better ROI than purchasing a cheaper one without support.
Across the board - whether it is LMS development, custom workflows, architecting insight for workflows, or help with HubDB, we worked a lot this year on getting you the customized features that you need and helping you organize your HubSpot portals and meet your goals.
Resource Center updates
\nNext up? We spent 8% of our time in 2022 on resource center upgrades. You spend a LOT OF TIME on content. It’s an inbound marketers main focus. You spend the most time strategizing your content, writing blogs, curating downloads, creating landing pages, pillar pages, constantly tweaking and refining your message, begging the other teams to help you create content or provide content ideas, endlessly editing videos, getting buy-in for webinars, interviewing for white papers and case studies… it’s literally limitless. There is no end to the amount of media and content resources that a marketer puts together. When you got started you likely didn’t have a fraction of the amount of content you have now.
\n
This was a top concern for our clients this year:
\"How will we organize this content and make sure that our prospects and customers can access it easily?\"
Here are some things we did to help you update your HubSpot resource centers this year:
- \n
- We spent some time rehabbing and optimizing resource centers for load speed issues \n
- We added content drop down filters to allow prospects to browse by content type \n
- We added checkbox filters to allow prospects to view certain types of content they needed with multiple filters \n
- We completely re-faced resource centers that were dated and not displaying data in the best way \n
- We added new HubSpot custom behavioral events so you can really understand user engagement and to provide for future content direction \n
Making your content more easily accessible to the people that need it is going to do amazing things for your conversion rates. We’ve had really incredible feedback from all the updates that we’ve completed this year and we can’t wait to look back on some of the conversion rate and bounce rate analytics and make ongoing tweaks.
\n
Related: 5 website optimization tools to boost conversions
\nNavigation Updates
\nThe last one we’ll cover, which occupied 6% of our time was navigation updates. We’ve spent a lot of time this year rehabbing menus that needed to be more user friendly or offer different options for featuring new content. As we mentioned above, the content arsenal is ever-increasing for many companies and organizing that content to put it in front of your audience is more important than ever.
\n\n
This is why we’re such huge proponents of the mega menu. You can use mega menus to present content in a more aesthetic way that helps your users easily find what they’re looking for, common actions that are taken or popular pieces of content without having to navigate through your entire site to locate what they need.
You can read more on why we think a mega menu should be your next website investment in our blog.
\n
\n
\n
Related: HubSpot CMS development trends - mega menus are here to stay
\n\n
So there you have it, our personal “wrapped list” for 2022. We took on so many incredible projects, met so many new people and you helped us challenge and refine our expertise even more in pushing the boundaries of what HubSpot can do for your businesses. We couldn’t have asked for a better first official year as a HubSpot Partner!
What’s on the docket for 2023? We think custom web applications, mega menu, superpowered content personalization, and really robust resource centers will top the charts - but integrations aren’t going anywhere for sure.
Where are you taking your website in 2023? Let us know in the comments.
It has been an exciting year of growth for deckerdevs. When we took the leap to make our partnership with HubSpot official, we knew that we would boost the business - but we were genuinely surprised to experience the exponential growth we’ve had this year. We’ve met new agency partners and so many HubSpot customers that we’ve helped integrate data, create custom workflows, work better with HubDB, organize resource centers and so many other cool projects along the way. We took all our projects and put them in a graph to see if we could identify some of the trends for requested projects and maybe even make some predictions for what projects we might see increased demand for in 2023.
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","postListSummaryFeaturedImage":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/deckerdevs-hubspot%20web%20development%20trends.png","postRssContent":"It has been an exciting year of growth for deckerdevs. When we took the leap to make our partnership with HubSpot official, we knew that we would boost the business - but we were genuinely surprised to experience the exponential growth we’ve had this year. We’ve met new agency partners and so many HubSpot customers that we’ve helped integrate data, create custom workflows, work better with HubDB, organize resource centers and so many other cool projects along the way. We took all our projects and put them in a graph to see if we could identify some of the trends for requested projects and maybe even make some predictions for what projects we might see increased demand for in 2023.
","postRssSummaryFeaturedImage":"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/deckerdevs-hubspot%20web%20development%20trends.png","postSummary":"It has been an exciting year of growth for deckerdevs. When we took the leap to make our partnership with HubSpot official, we knew that we would boost the business - but we were genuinely surprised to experience the exponential growth we’ve had this year. We’ve met new agency partners and so many HubSpot customers that we’ve helped integrate data, create custom workflows, work better with HubDB, organize resource centers and so many other cool projects along the way. We took all our projects and put them in a graph to see if we could identify some of the trends for requested projects and maybe even make some predictions for what projects we might see increased demand for in 2023.
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","postTemplate":"deckerdevs-theme/templates/blog-content.html","previewImageSrc":null,"previewKey":"ioVTFyVP","previousPostFeaturedImage":"https://lolalambchops.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/New-Year-New-You-Meme.jpeg","previousPostFeaturedImageAltText":"new website new year","previousPostName":"New Year, New Website? 6 Signs it’s Time for a Website Redesign","previousPostSlug":"blogs/new-year-new-website-6-surefire-signs-its-time-for-a-website-redesign","processingStatus":"PUBLISHED","propertyForDynamicPageCanonicalUrl":null,"propertyForDynamicPageFeaturedImage":null,"propertyForDynamicPageMetaDescription":null,"propertyForDynamicPageSlug":null,"propertyForDynamicPageTitle":null,"publicAccessRules":[],"publicAccessRulesEnabled":false,"publishDate":1671744152000,"publishDateLocalTime":1671744152000,"publishDateLocalized":{"date":1671744152000,"format":"medium","language":null},"publishImmediately":true,"publishTimezoneOffset":null,"publishedAt":1722380253527,"publishedByEmail":null,"publishedById":61310730,"publishedByName":null,"publishedUrl":"https://deckerdevs.com/blogs/2022-wrap-up-hubspot-web-development-trends-2023-predictions","resolvedDomain":"deckerdevs.com","resolvedLanguage":null,"rssBody":"It has been an exciting year of growth for deckerdevs. When we took the leap to make our partnership with HubSpot official, we knew that we would boost the business - but we were genuinely surprised to experience the exponential growth we’ve had this year. We’ve met new agency partners and so many HubSpot customers that we’ve helped integrate data, create custom workflows, work better with HubDB, organize resource centers and so many other cool projects along the way. We took all our projects and put them in a graph to see if we could identify some of the trends for requested projects and maybe even make some predictions for what projects we might see increased demand for in 2023.
\n\nIntegrations topped the list
\nIntegrations were the top demand in 2022 at 16% of our workload. We saw so many projects where our clients were requesting that data be moved more easily between HubSpot and their ERP software, a third party application, or social media.
Just a few examples of integrations that we completed this year:
- \n
- We helped a real estate developer integrate their property sales with contacts in HubSpot and automate the exchange of data with their ERP software to make executing contracts easier. \n
- We assisted a remodeling contractor better manage their remodeling projects and HubSpot sales contacts for improved follow-up and more efficient project management. \n
- We assisted with an integration between Stripe and HubSpot that allowed deal records to be updated when subscription payments were made \n
Most HubSpot customers pay somewhere between a few hundred to tens of thousands and some hundreds of thousands for HubSpot services and software. When you’re making such a massive investment, but still need to manually enter data between your applications, it can interfere with employee productivity and actually cause a lag in the adoption of new technology or under utilization of HubSpot. By paying to integrate your software with HubSpot, you can eliminate employee frustration, increase productivity and seamlessly move data between applications for improved analytics. This not only helps you get the most out of HubSpot, but boosts employee happiness as well.
Related: HubSpot API Integrations Improve Organizational Health
\nHubSpot consulting was a close second
\nFiguring out how to do things in HubSpot is as important to you as actually completing them, according to our workload. More than 15% of our projects this year were HubSpot consulting hours. From helping you organize your workflows, doing discovery on your business processes, understanding the complex integrations you’re considering, choosing the best software applications to help you execute your services on an everyday basis or simply consulting on page speed optimization - consulting was #2 on the list of most popular projects in 2022.
Our experience with HubSpot is longstanding and as a result we do many things that other development agencies won’t even consider or that many marketing agencies aren’t capable of. If you present a problem - there’s always a solution that we can come up with together. Creative development solutions are probably our favorite thing to tackle and we’re always happy to sit down with our prospects and clients and dig in to discuss potential solutions and help them understand their options prior to making a large investment.
Prospects want to understand their options, what the implications of this means and how they can find the middle ground between their wants, needs and budget - but this isn’t always something that can be discussed entirely in an initial call. Getting expertise from an experienced developer will help you avoid some of the pitfalls that can be associated with outsourcing your web development and go into your interviews a bit more educated about your needs. If we end up working with you, great! If not, you’ll be well-equipped to vet whatever developer you do use - and that’s what matters most.
Related: Why an experienced HubSpot CMS developer? Your website isn’t a sub sandwich.
\nWebsite updates & website overhauls came in third
\nComing in 3rd all tied up at 13% of our workload came website updates and website overhauls. This is interesting, because we’ve been making the case for the continuous improvement model for quite some time. While there’s nothing wrong with a complete website overhaul, particularly if you’re switching over platforms or have outgrown your infrastructure, establishing a budget for continuous improvement over time will help save you money in the long term. By moving to a more flexible, scalable platform like HubSpot CMS, you can plan for the growth of your website without bogging it down with additional plugins or add-ons over time. This allows you to focus on growth and making the lives of your marketers easier by constantly looking at data and tweaking your website rather than lumping all the wishlist items into your next redesign.
A website is never finished. The moment you launch, you’ll inevitably have the pangs of regret that come with not requesting additional options. By carving out a website budget every year broken out into a monthly expense you make things much more predictable and ensure that you improve your website over time rather than growing to hate it for everything it can’t do.
Related: 5 things to add to your website budget in 2023
\nOnline learning upgrades and help with HubSpot
\n10% of our development time in 2022 was spent on online learning upgrades and help with HubSpot.
So many organizations have added online learning capabilities and learning management systems to their arsenal of online content since the pandemic. Client and customer portals with online login credentials and learning management applications help organizations execute training programs for online staff, continued education workshops, certification programs or other online learning resources.
However, not all Learning Management Systems are created equal and we encourage you to ask questions prior to purchasing an LMS template in HubSpot or elsewhere to determine if the app suits your needs. It’s likely that you’ll need a little support so be sure to engage the developer or another skilled HubSpot developer to help you customize the LMS and make it your own. We highly recommend HubLMS, a HubSpot Learning Management System built by our friends at Impulse Creative. Be prepared to invest a good amount into this for the futures that you need - and don’t forget, just like with anything else, you get what you pay for. Investing up front in a system that has the features you need and is easy for the end user to navigate will ensure your success down the road and give you much better ROI than purchasing a cheaper one without support.
Across the board - whether it is LMS development, custom workflows, architecting insight for workflows, or help with HubDB, we worked a lot this year on getting you the customized features that you need and helping you organize your HubSpot portals and meet your goals.
Resource Center updates
\nNext up? We spent 8% of our time in 2022 on resource center upgrades. You spend a LOT OF TIME on content. It’s an inbound marketers main focus. You spend the most time strategizing your content, writing blogs, curating downloads, creating landing pages, pillar pages, constantly tweaking and refining your message, begging the other teams to help you create content or provide content ideas, endlessly editing videos, getting buy-in for webinars, interviewing for white papers and case studies… it’s literally limitless. There is no end to the amount of media and content resources that a marketer puts together. When you got started you likely didn’t have a fraction of the amount of content you have now.
\n
This was a top concern for our clients this year:
\"How will we organize this content and make sure that our prospects and customers can access it easily?\"
Here are some things we did to help you update your HubSpot resource centers this year:
- \n
- We spent some time rehabbing and optimizing resource centers for load speed issues \n
- We added content drop down filters to allow prospects to browse by content type \n
- We added checkbox filters to allow prospects to view certain types of content they needed with multiple filters \n
- We completely re-faced resource centers that were dated and not displaying data in the best way \n
- We added new HubSpot custom behavioral events so you can really understand user engagement and to provide for future content direction \n
Making your content more easily accessible to the people that need it is going to do amazing things for your conversion rates. We’ve had really incredible feedback from all the updates that we’ve completed this year and we can’t wait to look back on some of the conversion rate and bounce rate analytics and make ongoing tweaks.
\n
Related: 5 website optimization tools to boost conversions
\nNavigation Updates
\nThe last one we’ll cover, which occupied 6% of our time was navigation updates. We’ve spent a lot of time this year rehabbing menus that needed to be more user friendly or offer different options for featuring new content. As we mentioned above, the content arsenal is ever-increasing for many companies and organizing that content to put it in front of your audience is more important than ever.
\n\n
This is why we’re such huge proponents of the mega menu. You can use mega menus to present content in a more aesthetic way that helps your users easily find what they’re looking for, common actions that are taken or popular pieces of content without having to navigate through your entire site to locate what they need.
You can read more on why we think a mega menu should be your next website investment in our blog.
\n
\n
\n
Related: HubSpot CMS development trends - mega menus are here to stay
\n\n
So there you have it, our personal “wrapped list” for 2022. We took on so many incredible projects, met so many new people and you helped us challenge and refine our expertise even more in pushing the boundaries of what HubSpot can do for your businesses. We couldn’t have asked for a better first official year as a HubSpot Partner!
What’s on the docket for 2023? We think custom web applications, mega menu, superpowered content personalization, and really robust resource centers will top the charts - but integrations aren’t going anywhere for sure.
Where are you taking your website in 2023? Let us know in the comments.
It has been an exciting year of growth for deckerdevs. When we took the leap to make our partnership with HubSpot official, we knew that we would boost the business - but we were genuinely surprised to experience the exponential growth we’ve had this year. We’ve met new agency partners and so many HubSpot customers that we’ve helped integrate data, create custom workflows, work better with HubDB, organize resource centers and so many other cool projects along the way. We took all our projects and put them in a graph to see if we could identify some of the trends for requested projects and maybe even make some predictions for what projects we might see increased demand for in 2023.
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Things to Add to Your Website Budget in 2023","id":95634708372,"includeDefaultCustomCss":null,"isCaptchaRequired":true,"isCrawlableByBots":false,"isDraft":false,"isInstanceLayoutPage":false,"isInstantEmailEnabled":false,"isPublished":true,"isSocialPublishingEnabled":false,"keywords":[],"label":"5 Things to Add to Your Website Budget in 2023","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":"5 Things to Add to Your Website Budget in 2023","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":"The end of the year is upon us and while you may already have created your website budget, it’s not too late to do some moving around. We talk to a lot of prospects every single day that have very little to no budget for website improvements on a monthly or annual basis. Yet these same businesses commonly report their website as their single best source of leads for their sales team. Imagine that. It’s a little like being a race car driver for 20 years only to roll up to the biggest race of your life in a minivan. We hate to be the ones to say it, but… ::whisper:: I don’t think it’s gonna get you to the finish line, friend.
We are persistently hammering home the idea that having a fast-loading, flexible website that optimizes conversion and puts the right information in front of your audience, but we’re having the same conversations over and over again.
Budgets are budgets and while we haven’t mastered the development of the money manufacturing machine (we’re still working on a robot for the shower that delivers you pizza because priorities), we do know that most businesses understand the simple concept of ROI. And most marketers understand that their website is a critical and ongoing way to get more of it.
In fact, 36% of survey respondents put their top marketing channel as their website/blog in the HubSpot 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Report. It was the second biggest marketing channel behind social media.
All we want for Christmas is for you to get real with yourself on how critical investing in an ongoing strategy surrounding your website is (well, besides shower pizza, of course). That said - let’s break down 5 things we want you to consider adding to your website budget for 2023.
- \n
- adopt continuous improvement \n
- optimize page speed \n
- switch to a sustainable website platform \n
- organize your content better \n
- add more back-end features and more flexible modules
Adopting continuous improvement
\nIf you’re already ahead of the game and have a set budget for certain website projects for 2023, we’re pretty proud of you, because most businesses don’t even set aside the budget to redesign their website. Rather than spending tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars on redesigning your website every few years, create a smaller, more manageable budget that allows you to continuously add new modules and features on your website. By adopting the idea of continuous improvement over time, you can do all of the following:
\n- \n
- allocate a predictable monthly budget \n
- work reliably with a skilled developer \n
- improve your website on an ongoing basis to optimize for conversions \n
- add back end functionality inside your website interface to help your marketing team upload and create content more effectively. \n
- creating workflow automations to free up your task time \n
- generate reports to help you better understand data trends over time \n
- refine navigation or resource center filters to better organize your content. \n
According to HubSpot’s 2022 Web Traffic & Analytics Report (we found it interesting that more website analytics data didn’t make the cut of the State of Inbound Report) 58% of website analysts indicated that sales, leads and conversion rates were the most important metrics in assessing website performance - and yet, few companies create a strategy and budget item to strategically improve their website to optimize these things. While website content, optimization efforts, compelling images and CTAs go a long way to improve conversions — small changes to how filters work, the location of a simple button, the functionality of a website’s navigation and so much more directly influence conversion rates.
Related: HubSpot CMS Development - The Continuous Improvement Model
\nOptimizing page speed
\n![\"deckerdevs-fast](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/deckerdevs-fast%20website.svg\")
Recently a website project came to us that was launched and completed by another developer, but the resource center took more than 10 seconds to load, which annihilated conversion rates and sent their bounce rates for their most important content through the roof. The resource center was using an external cloud server that needed to be accessed on every page load rather than a native HubSpot database. We changed the configuration and assisted in media resizing and BOOM - overnight they experienced a significant load speed change. Now rather than seconds, the resource center takes only milliseconds to load, which most marketers understand is absolutely critical when it comes to conversion rates.
It’s so easy to finish up a website and just lean on what you have. “If it ain’t broke,” am I right? But sometimes what we consider to be working is actually seriously handicapping us. That minivan at the race you’re trying to win *works*, right? But it’s not exactly going to break any track records for speed.
If your website, resource center or blog is taking more than a couple seconds to load, you should invest in updates and optimization to help bring that number down, because it will do incredible things for your conversion rates.
Related: Page Speed Optimization - 5 Factors Bogging Down Your Website
\nSwitching to a sustainable platform
\n![\"deckerdevs-wordpress](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/deckerdevs-wordpress%20to%20hubspot%20migration-1.svg\")
Adopting a mindset of continuous website improvement and growth driven design is only as easy as your website platform and the framework you’ve built it from. Adding on features and functionality in Wordpress may mean having to piecemeal plugins and result in a bloated website that runs more slowly. If you’re taking a more long term approach to your website, you’ll want to build on a framework that allows for these types of improvements.
We primarily work in HubSpot and have found it not only super flexible for adding new modules, but secure and fast. It’s easy to add and remove functionality and while we do recommend that you consult your developer prior to purchasing a theme, there are a lot of great options that are well-vetted by HubSpot in the theme marketplace. Custom builds allow for more flexibility, notably so, again, contacting a skilled developer before you make an investment in HubSpot CMS is pretty critical.
Related: Signs You’ve Outgrown Wordpress CMS
\nBetter content organization
\nWe’re a little obsessed with navigation and we personally believe your navigation structure will make or break your conversion rate and other important website statistics like time on site and pages viewed. We’re also huge fans of proactive planning, which is why we’ve dedicated so much time to geeking out on mega menus. We believe that your mega menu should be well-conceived and strategized and not just a way to inundate your audience with everything on your website. By organizing strategically according to the buyer’s journey, your highest converting website content and putting most frequently viewed pages front and center, you’ll do so much for the user experience on your site. Rather than your most valuable content being buried in your landing pages, why not place some directly in your menu?
Your goal as a business should be to make your website easy to navigate while also providing your prospects with the critical information that they’re looking for. Organizing your pillar pages, menu navigation and website in a way that flows properly and coincides with the buyers’ journey will set you and your website prospects up for success.
Back end features and flexible modules.
\nThere’s nothing worse than a website that you’re constantly having to piecemeal and hack to accomplish the simple goals that you have when it comes to adding content. It’s a frustration we hear come from prospect after prospect, “The interface is just kinda cumbersome” or “We just want to do this one small thing, but the feature isn’t there.” The age of not having full control over your website is over - particularly if you make a move over to HubSpot CMS.
HubSpot CMS might be a decent investment, but it’s a really great way to ensure long term scalability in your website. Take a look at what they have to say about their content management system. Considering our founder built one of the very first websites on HubSpot CMS, we can definitely attest to how it has grown and improved over the years. HubSpot is a platform committed to scalable solutions and the flexibility and power for marketers when partnered with the right developer is amazing.
Every year you probably create big goals surrounding your website, lead generation, conversions and sales. Every year you probably encounter huge obstacles with your website. Make this the year that you truly allocate and plan proactively to make sure your website services your needs and can grow with your goals in the long term. Let’s get to the end of next year and look back proud at what we’ve accomplished.
Cheers to a new approach to your website *and* sales growth when we put our budget in the right places.
What are your website goals in 2023? Let us know in the comments.
The end of the year is upon us and while you may already have created your website budget, it’s not too late to do some moving around. We talk to a lot of prospects every single day that have very little to no budget for website improvements on a monthly or annual basis. Yet these same businesses commonly report their website as their single best source of leads for their sales team. Imagine that. It’s a little like being a race car driver for 20 years only to roll up to the biggest race of your life in a minivan. We hate to be the ones to say it, but… ::whisper:: I don’t think it’s gonna get you to the finish line, friend.
We are persistently hammering home the idea that having a fast-loading, flexible website that optimizes conversion and puts the right information in front of your audience, but we’re having the same conversations over and over again.
Budgets are budgets and while we haven’t mastered the development of the money manufacturing machine (we’re still working on a robot for the shower that delivers you pizza because priorities), we do know that most businesses understand the simple concept of ROI. And most marketers understand that their website is a critical and ongoing way to get more of it.
In fact, 36% of survey respondents put their top marketing channel as their website/blog in the HubSpot 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Report. It was the second biggest marketing channel behind social media.
All we want for Christmas is for you to get real with yourself on how critical investing in an ongoing strategy surrounding your website is (well, besides shower pizza, of course). That said - let’s break down 5 things we want you to consider adding to your website budget for 2023.
The end of the year is upon us and while you may already have created your website budget, it’s not too late to do some moving around. We talk to a lot of prospects every single day that have very little to no budget for website improvements on a monthly or annual basis. Yet these same businesses commonly report their website as their single best source of leads for their sales team. Imagine that. It’s a little like being a race car driver for 20 years only to roll up to the biggest race of your life in a minivan. We hate to be the ones to say it, but… ::whisper:: I don’t think it’s gonna get you to the finish line, friend.
We are persistently hammering home the idea that having a fast-loading, flexible website that optimizes conversion and puts the right information in front of your audience, but we’re having the same conversations over and over again.
Budgets are budgets and while we haven’t mastered the development of the money manufacturing machine (we’re still working on a robot for the shower that delivers you pizza because priorities), we do know that most businesses understand the simple concept of ROI. And most marketers understand that their website is a critical and ongoing way to get more of it.
In fact, 36% of survey respondents put their top marketing channel as their website/blog in the HubSpot 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Report. It was the second biggest marketing channel behind social media.
All we want for Christmas is for you to get real with yourself on how critical investing in an ongoing strategy surrounding your website is (well, besides shower pizza, of course). That said - let’s break down 5 things we want you to consider adding to your website budget for 2023.
- \n
- adopt continuous improvement \n
- optimize page speed \n
- switch to a sustainable website platform \n
- organize your content better \n
- add more back-end features and more flexible modules
Adopting continuous improvement
\nIf you’re already ahead of the game and have a set budget for certain website projects for 2023, we’re pretty proud of you, because most businesses don’t even set aside the budget to redesign their website. Rather than spending tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars on redesigning your website every few years, create a smaller, more manageable budget that allows you to continuously add new modules and features on your website. By adopting the idea of continuous improvement over time, you can do all of the following:
\n- \n
- allocate a predictable monthly budget \n
- work reliably with a skilled developer \n
- improve your website on an ongoing basis to optimize for conversions \n
- add back end functionality inside your website interface to help your marketing team upload and create content more effectively. \n
- creating workflow automations to free up your task time \n
- generate reports to help you better understand data trends over time \n
- refine navigation or resource center filters to better organize your content. \n
According to HubSpot’s 2022 Web Traffic & Analytics Report (we found it interesting that more website analytics data didn’t make the cut of the State of Inbound Report) 58% of website analysts indicated that sales, leads and conversion rates were the most important metrics in assessing website performance - and yet, few companies create a strategy and budget item to strategically improve their website to optimize these things. While website content, optimization efforts, compelling images and CTAs go a long way to improve conversions — small changes to how filters work, the location of a simple button, the functionality of a website’s navigation and so much more directly influence conversion rates.
Related: HubSpot CMS Development - The Continuous Improvement Model
\nOptimizing page speed
\nRecently a website project came to us that was launched and completed by another developer, but the resource center took more than 10 seconds to load, which annihilated conversion rates and sent their bounce rates for their most important content through the roof. The resource center was using an external cloud server that needed to be accessed on every page load rather than a native HubSpot database. We changed the configuration and assisted in media resizing and BOOM - overnight they experienced a significant load speed change. Now rather than seconds, the resource center takes only milliseconds to load, which most marketers understand is absolutely critical when it comes to conversion rates.
It’s so easy to finish up a website and just lean on what you have. “If it ain’t broke,” am I right? But sometimes what we consider to be working is actually seriously handicapping us. That minivan at the race you’re trying to win *works*, right? But it’s not exactly going to break any track records for speed.
If your website, resource center or blog is taking more than a couple seconds to load, you should invest in updates and optimization to help bring that number down, because it will do incredible things for your conversion rates.
Related: Page Speed Optimization - 5 Factors Bogging Down Your Website
\nSwitching to a sustainable platform
\nAdopting a mindset of continuous website improvement and growth driven design is only as easy as your website platform and the framework you’ve built it from. Adding on features and functionality in Wordpress may mean having to piecemeal plugins and result in a bloated website that runs more slowly. If you’re taking a more long term approach to your website, you’ll want to build on a framework that allows for these types of improvements.
We primarily work in HubSpot and have found it not only super flexible for adding new modules, but secure and fast. It’s easy to add and remove functionality and while we do recommend that you consult your developer prior to purchasing a theme, there are a lot of great options that are well-vetted by HubSpot in the theme marketplace. Custom builds allow for more flexibility, notably so, again, contacting a skilled developer before you make an investment in HubSpot CMS is pretty critical.
Related: Signs You’ve Outgrown Wordpress CMS
\nBetter content organization
\nWe’re a little obsessed with navigation and we personally believe your navigation structure will make or break your conversion rate and other important website statistics like time on site and pages viewed. We’re also huge fans of proactive planning, which is why we’ve dedicated so much time to geeking out on mega menus. We believe that your mega menu should be well-conceived and strategized and not just a way to inundate your audience with everything on your website. By organizing strategically according to the buyer’s journey, your highest converting website content and putting most frequently viewed pages front and center, you’ll do so much for the user experience on your site. Rather than your most valuable content being buried in your landing pages, why not place some directly in your menu?
Your goal as a business should be to make your website easy to navigate while also providing your prospects with the critical information that they’re looking for. Organizing your pillar pages, menu navigation and website in a way that flows properly and coincides with the buyers’ journey will set you and your website prospects up for success.
Back end features and flexible modules.
\nThere’s nothing worse than a website that you’re constantly having to piecemeal and hack to accomplish the simple goals that you have when it comes to adding content. It’s a frustration we hear come from prospect after prospect, “The interface is just kinda cumbersome” or “We just want to do this one small thing, but the feature isn’t there.” The age of not having full control over your website is over - particularly if you make a move over to HubSpot CMS.
HubSpot CMS might be a decent investment, but it’s a really great way to ensure long term scalability in your website. Take a look at what they have to say about their content management system. Considering our founder built one of the very first websites on HubSpot CMS, we can definitely attest to how it has grown and improved over the years. HubSpot is a platform committed to scalable solutions and the flexibility and power for marketers when partnered with the right developer is amazing.
Every year you probably create big goals surrounding your website, lead generation, conversions and sales. Every year you probably encounter huge obstacles with your website. Make this the year that you truly allocate and plan proactively to make sure your website services your needs and can grow with your goals in the long term. Let’s get to the end of next year and look back proud at what we’ve accomplished.
Cheers to a new approach to your website *and* sales growth when we put our budget in the right places.
What are your website goals in 2023? Let us know in the comments.
The end of the year is upon us and while you may already have created your website budget, it’s not too late to do some moving around. We talk to a lot of prospects every single day that have very little to no budget for website improvements on a monthly or annual basis. Yet these same businesses commonly report their website as their single best source of leads for their sales team. Imagine that. It’s a little like being a race car driver for 20 years only to roll up to the biggest race of your life in a minivan. We hate to be the ones to say it, but… ::whisper:: I don’t think it’s gonna get you to the finish line, friend.
We are persistently hammering home the idea that having a fast-loading, flexible website that optimizes conversion and puts the right information in front of your audience, but we’re having the same conversations over and over again.
Budgets are budgets and while we haven’t mastered the development of the money manufacturing machine (we’re still working on a robot for the shower that delivers you pizza because priorities), we do know that most businesses understand the simple concept of ROI. And most marketers understand that their website is a critical and ongoing way to get more of it.
In fact, 36% of survey respondents put their top marketing channel as their website/blog in the HubSpot 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Report. It was the second biggest marketing channel behind social media.
All we want for Christmas is for you to get real with yourself on how critical investing in an ongoing strategy surrounding your website is (well, besides shower pizza, of course). That said - let’s break down 5 things we want you to consider adding to your website budget for 2023.
The end of the year is upon us and while you may already have created your website budget, it’s not too late to do some moving around. We talk to a lot of prospects every single day that have very little to no budget for website improvements on a monthly or annual basis. Yet these same businesses commonly report their website as their single best source of leads for their sales team. Imagine that. It’s a little like being a race car driver for 20 years only to roll up to the biggest race of your life in a minivan. We hate to be the ones to say it, but… ::whisper:: I don’t think it’s gonna get you to the finish line, friend.
We are persistently hammering home the idea that having a fast-loading, flexible website that optimizes conversion and puts the right information in front of your audience, but we’re having the same conversations over and over again.
Budgets are budgets and while we haven’t mastered the development of the money manufacturing machine (we’re still working on a robot for the shower that delivers you pizza because priorities), we do know that most businesses understand the simple concept of ROI. And most marketers understand that their website is a critical and ongoing way to get more of it.
In fact, 36% of survey respondents put their top marketing channel as their website/blog in the HubSpot 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Report. It was the second biggest marketing channel behind social media.
All we want for Christmas is for you to get real with yourself on how critical investing in an ongoing strategy surrounding your website is (well, besides shower pizza, of course). That said - let’s break down 5 things we want you to consider adding to your website budget for 2023.
- \n
- adopt continuous improvement \n
- optimize page speed \n
- switch to a sustainable website platform \n
- organize your content better \n
- add more back-end features and more flexible modules
Adopting continuous improvement
\nIf you’re already ahead of the game and have a set budget for certain website projects for 2023, we’re pretty proud of you, because most businesses don’t even set aside the budget to redesign their website. Rather than spending tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars on redesigning your website every few years, create a smaller, more manageable budget that allows you to continuously add new modules and features on your website. By adopting the idea of continuous improvement over time, you can do all of the following:
\n- \n
- allocate a predictable monthly budget \n
- work reliably with a skilled developer \n
- improve your website on an ongoing basis to optimize for conversions \n
- add back end functionality inside your website interface to help your marketing team upload and create content more effectively. \n
- creating workflow automations to free up your task time \n
- generate reports to help you better understand data trends over time \n
- refine navigation or resource center filters to better organize your content. \n
According to HubSpot’s 2022 Web Traffic & Analytics Report (we found it interesting that more website analytics data didn’t make the cut of the State of Inbound Report) 58% of website analysts indicated that sales, leads and conversion rates were the most important metrics in assessing website performance - and yet, few companies create a strategy and budget item to strategically improve their website to optimize these things. While website content, optimization efforts, compelling images and CTAs go a long way to improve conversions — small changes to how filters work, the location of a simple button, the functionality of a website’s navigation and so much more directly influence conversion rates.
Related: HubSpot CMS Development - The Continuous Improvement Model
\nOptimizing page speed
\nRecently a website project came to us that was launched and completed by another developer, but the resource center took more than 10 seconds to load, which annihilated conversion rates and sent their bounce rates for their most important content through the roof. The resource center was using an external cloud server that needed to be accessed on every page load rather than a native HubSpot database. We changed the configuration and assisted in media resizing and BOOM - overnight they experienced a significant load speed change. Now rather than seconds, the resource center takes only milliseconds to load, which most marketers understand is absolutely critical when it comes to conversion rates.
It’s so easy to finish up a website and just lean on what you have. “If it ain’t broke,” am I right? But sometimes what we consider to be working is actually seriously handicapping us. That minivan at the race you’re trying to win *works*, right? But it’s not exactly going to break any track records for speed.
If your website, resource center or blog is taking more than a couple seconds to load, you should invest in updates and optimization to help bring that number down, because it will do incredible things for your conversion rates.
Related: Page Speed Optimization - 5 Factors Bogging Down Your Website
\nSwitching to a sustainable platform
\nAdopting a mindset of continuous website improvement and growth driven design is only as easy as your website platform and the framework you’ve built it from. Adding on features and functionality in Wordpress may mean having to piecemeal plugins and result in a bloated website that runs more slowly. If you’re taking a more long term approach to your website, you’ll want to build on a framework that allows for these types of improvements.
We primarily work in HubSpot and have found it not only super flexible for adding new modules, but secure and fast. It’s easy to add and remove functionality and while we do recommend that you consult your developer prior to purchasing a theme, there are a lot of great options that are well-vetted by HubSpot in the theme marketplace. Custom builds allow for more flexibility, notably so, again, contacting a skilled developer before you make an investment in HubSpot CMS is pretty critical.
Related: Signs You’ve Outgrown Wordpress CMS
\nBetter content organization
\nWe’re a little obsessed with navigation and we personally believe your navigation structure will make or break your conversion rate and other important website statistics like time on site and pages viewed. We’re also huge fans of proactive planning, which is why we’ve dedicated so much time to geeking out on mega menus. We believe that your mega menu should be well-conceived and strategized and not just a way to inundate your audience with everything on your website. By organizing strategically according to the buyer’s journey, your highest converting website content and putting most frequently viewed pages front and center, you’ll do so much for the user experience on your site. Rather than your most valuable content being buried in your landing pages, why not place some directly in your menu?
Your goal as a business should be to make your website easy to navigate while also providing your prospects with the critical information that they’re looking for. Organizing your pillar pages, menu navigation and website in a way that flows properly and coincides with the buyers’ journey will set you and your website prospects up for success.
Back end features and flexible modules.
\nThere’s nothing worse than a website that you’re constantly having to piecemeal and hack to accomplish the simple goals that you have when it comes to adding content. It’s a frustration we hear come from prospect after prospect, “The interface is just kinda cumbersome” or “We just want to do this one small thing, but the feature isn’t there.” The age of not having full control over your website is over - particularly if you make a move over to HubSpot CMS.
HubSpot CMS might be a decent investment, but it’s a really great way to ensure long term scalability in your website. Take a look at what they have to say about their content management system. Considering our founder built one of the very first websites on HubSpot CMS, we can definitely attest to how it has grown and improved over the years. HubSpot is a platform committed to scalable solutions and the flexibility and power for marketers when partnered with the right developer is amazing.
Every year you probably create big goals surrounding your website, lead generation, conversions and sales. Every year you probably encounter huge obstacles with your website. Make this the year that you truly allocate and plan proactively to make sure your website services your needs and can grow with your goals in the long term. Let’s get to the end of next year and look back proud at what we’ve accomplished.
Cheers to a new approach to your website *and* sales growth when we put our budget in the right places.
What are your website goals in 2023? Let us know in the comments.
The end of the year is upon us and while you may already have created your website budget, it’s not too late to do some moving around. We talk to a lot of prospects every single day that have very little to no budget for website improvements on a monthly or annual basis. Yet these same businesses commonly report their website as their single best source of leads for their sales team. Imagine that. It’s a little like being a race car driver for 20 years only to roll up to the biggest race of your life in a minivan. We hate to be the ones to say it, but… ::whisper:: I don’t think it’s gonna get you to the finish line, friend.
We are persistently hammering home the idea that having a fast-loading, flexible website that optimizes conversion and puts the right information in front of your audience, but we’re having the same conversations over and over again.
Budgets are budgets and while we haven’t mastered the development of the money manufacturing machine (we’re still working on a robot for the shower that delivers you pizza because priorities), we do know that most businesses understand the simple concept of ROI. And most marketers understand that their website is a critical and ongoing way to get more of it.
In fact, 36% of survey respondents put their top marketing channel as their website/blog in the HubSpot 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Report. It was the second biggest marketing channel behind social media.
All we want for Christmas is for you to get real with yourself on how critical investing in an ongoing strategy surrounding your website is (well, besides shower pizza, of course). That said - let’s break down 5 things we want you to consider adding to your website budget for 2023.
- \n
- adopt continuous improvement \n
- optimize page speed \n
- switch to a sustainable website platform \n
- organize your content better \n
- add more back-end features and more flexible modules
Adopting continuous improvement
\nIf you’re already ahead of the game and have a set budget for certain website projects for 2023, we’re pretty proud of you, because most businesses don’t even set aside the budget to redesign their website. Rather than spending tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars on redesigning your website every few years, create a smaller, more manageable budget that allows you to continuously add new modules and features on your website. By adopting the idea of continuous improvement over time, you can do all of the following:
\n- \n
- allocate a predictable monthly budget \n
- work reliably with a skilled developer \n
- improve your website on an ongoing basis to optimize for conversions \n
- add back end functionality inside your website interface to help your marketing team upload and create content more effectively. \n
- creating workflow automations to free up your task time \n
- generate reports to help you better understand data trends over time \n
- refine navigation or resource center filters to better organize your content. \n
According to HubSpot’s 2022 Web Traffic & Analytics Report (we found it interesting that more website analytics data didn’t make the cut of the State of Inbound Report) 58% of website analysts indicated that sales, leads and conversion rates were the most important metrics in assessing website performance - and yet, few companies create a strategy and budget item to strategically improve their website to optimize these things. While website content, optimization efforts, compelling images and CTAs go a long way to improve conversions — small changes to how filters work, the location of a simple button, the functionality of a website’s navigation and so much more directly influence conversion rates.
Related: HubSpot CMS Development - The Continuous Improvement Model
\nOptimizing page speed
\nRecently a website project came to us that was launched and completed by another developer, but the resource center took more than 10 seconds to load, which annihilated conversion rates and sent their bounce rates for their most important content through the roof. The resource center was using an external cloud server that needed to be accessed on every page load rather than a native HubSpot database. We changed the configuration and assisted in media resizing and BOOM - overnight they experienced a significant load speed change. Now rather than seconds, the resource center takes only milliseconds to load, which most marketers understand is absolutely critical when it comes to conversion rates.
It’s so easy to finish up a website and just lean on what you have. “If it ain’t broke,” am I right? But sometimes what we consider to be working is actually seriously handicapping us. That minivan at the race you’re trying to win *works*, right? But it’s not exactly going to break any track records for speed.
If your website, resource center or blog is taking more than a couple seconds to load, you should invest in updates and optimization to help bring that number down, because it will do incredible things for your conversion rates.
Related: Page Speed Optimization - 5 Factors Bogging Down Your Website
\nSwitching to a sustainable platform
\nAdopting a mindset of continuous website improvement and growth driven design is only as easy as your website platform and the framework you’ve built it from. Adding on features and functionality in Wordpress may mean having to piecemeal plugins and result in a bloated website that runs more slowly. If you’re taking a more long term approach to your website, you’ll want to build on a framework that allows for these types of improvements.
We primarily work in HubSpot and have found it not only super flexible for adding new modules, but secure and fast. It’s easy to add and remove functionality and while we do recommend that you consult your developer prior to purchasing a theme, there are a lot of great options that are well-vetted by HubSpot in the theme marketplace. Custom builds allow for more flexibility, notably so, again, contacting a skilled developer before you make an investment in HubSpot CMS is pretty critical.
Related: Signs You’ve Outgrown Wordpress CMS
\nBetter content organization
\nWe’re a little obsessed with navigation and we personally believe your navigation structure will make or break your conversion rate and other important website statistics like time on site and pages viewed. We’re also huge fans of proactive planning, which is why we’ve dedicated so much time to geeking out on mega menus. We believe that your mega menu should be well-conceived and strategized and not just a way to inundate your audience with everything on your website. By organizing strategically according to the buyer’s journey, your highest converting website content and putting most frequently viewed pages front and center, you’ll do so much for the user experience on your site. Rather than your most valuable content being buried in your landing pages, why not place some directly in your menu?
Your goal as a business should be to make your website easy to navigate while also providing your prospects with the critical information that they’re looking for. Organizing your pillar pages, menu navigation and website in a way that flows properly and coincides with the buyers’ journey will set you and your website prospects up for success.
Back end features and flexible modules.
\nThere’s nothing worse than a website that you’re constantly having to piecemeal and hack to accomplish the simple goals that you have when it comes to adding content. It’s a frustration we hear come from prospect after prospect, “The interface is just kinda cumbersome” or “We just want to do this one small thing, but the feature isn’t there.” The age of not having full control over your website is over - particularly if you make a move over to HubSpot CMS.
HubSpot CMS might be a decent investment, but it’s a really great way to ensure long term scalability in your website. Take a look at what they have to say about their content management system. Considering our founder built one of the very first websites on HubSpot CMS, we can definitely attest to how it has grown and improved over the years. HubSpot is a platform committed to scalable solutions and the flexibility and power for marketers when partnered with the right developer is amazing.
Every year you probably create big goals surrounding your website, lead generation, conversions and sales. Every year you probably encounter huge obstacles with your website. Make this the year that you truly allocate and plan proactively to make sure your website services your needs and can grow with your goals in the long term. Let’s get to the end of next year and look back proud at what we’ve accomplished.
Cheers to a new approach to your website *and* sales growth when we put our budget in the right places.
What are your website goals in 2023? Let us know in the comments.
The end of the year is upon us and while you may already have created your website budget, it’s not too late to do some moving around. We talk to a lot of prospects every single day that have very little to no budget for website improvements on a monthly or annual basis. Yet these same businesses commonly report their website as their single best source of leads for their sales team. Imagine that. It’s a little like being a race car driver for 20 years only to roll up to the biggest race of your life in a minivan. We hate to be the ones to say it, but… ::whisper:: I don’t think it’s gonna get you to the finish line, friend.
We are persistently hammering home the idea that having a fast-loading, flexible website that optimizes conversion and puts the right information in front of your audience, but we’re having the same conversations over and over again.
Budgets are budgets and while we haven’t mastered the development of the money manufacturing machine (we’re still working on a robot for the shower that delivers you pizza because priorities), we do know that most businesses understand the simple concept of ROI. And most marketers understand that their website is a critical and ongoing way to get more of it.
In fact, 36% of survey respondents put their top marketing channel as their website/blog in the HubSpot 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Report. It was the second biggest marketing channel behind social media.
All we want for Christmas is for you to get real with yourself on how critical investing in an ongoing strategy surrounding your website is (well, besides shower pizza, of course). That said - let’s break down 5 things we want you to consider adding to your website budget for 2023.
The end of the year is upon us and while you may already have created your website budget, it’s not too late to do some moving around. We talk to a lot of prospects every single day that have very little to no budget for website improvements on a monthly or annual basis. Yet these same businesses commonly report their website as their single best source of leads for their sales team. Imagine that. It’s a little like being a race car driver for 20 years only to roll up to the biggest race of your life in a minivan. We hate to be the ones to say it, but… ::whisper:: I don’t think it’s gonna get you to the finish line, friend.
We are persistently hammering home the idea that having a fast-loading, flexible website that optimizes conversion and puts the right information in front of your audience, but we’re having the same conversations over and over again.
Budgets are budgets and while we haven’t mastered the development of the money manufacturing machine (we’re still working on a robot for the shower that delivers you pizza because priorities), we do know that most businesses understand the simple concept of ROI. And most marketers understand that their website is a critical and ongoing way to get more of it.
In fact, 36% of survey respondents put their top marketing channel as their website/blog in the HubSpot 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Report. It was the second biggest marketing channel behind social media.
All we want for Christmas is for you to get real with yourself on how critical investing in an ongoing strategy surrounding your website is (well, besides shower pizza, of course). That said - let’s break down 5 things we want you to consider adding to your website budget for 2023.
The end of the year is upon us and while you may already have created your website budget, it’s not too late to do some moving around. We talk to a lot of prospects every single day that have very little to no budget for website improvements on a monthly or annual basis. Yet these same businesses commonly report their website as their single best source of leads for their sales team. Imagine that. It’s a little like being a race car driver for 20 years only to roll up to the biggest race of your life in a minivan. We hate to be the ones to say it, but… ::whisper:: I don’t think it’s gonna get you to the finish line, friend.
We are persistently hammering home the idea that having a fast-loading, flexible website that optimizes conversion and puts the right information in front of your audience, but we’re having the same conversations over and over again.
Budgets are budgets and while we haven’t mastered the development of the money manufacturing machine (we’re still working on a robot for the shower that delivers you pizza because priorities), we do know that most businesses understand the simple concept of ROI. And most marketers understand that their website is a critical and ongoing way to get more of it.
In fact, 36% of survey respondents put their top marketing channel as their website/blog in the HubSpot 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Report. It was the second biggest marketing channel behind social media.
All we want for Christmas is for you to get real with yourself on how critical investing in an ongoing strategy surrounding your website is (well, besides shower pizza, of course). That said - let’s break down 5 things we want you to consider adding to your website budget for 2023.
The end of the year is upon us and while you may already have created your website budget, it’s not too late to do some moving around. We talk to a lot of prospects every single day that have very little to no budget for website improvements on a monthly or annual basis. Yet these same businesses commonly report their website as their single best source of leads for their sales team. Imagine that. It’s a little like being a race car driver for 20 years only to roll up to the biggest race of your life in a minivan. We hate to be the ones to say it, but… ::whisper:: I don’t think it’s gonna get you to the finish line, friend.
We are persistently hammering home the idea that having a fast-loading, flexible website that optimizes conversion and puts the right information in front of your audience, but we’re having the same conversations over and over again.
Budgets are budgets and while we haven’t mastered the development of the money manufacturing machine (we’re still working on a robot for the shower that delivers you pizza because priorities), we do know that most businesses understand the simple concept of ROI. And most marketers understand that their website is a critical and ongoing way to get more of it.
In fact, 36% of survey respondents put their top marketing channel as their website/blog in the HubSpot 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Report. It was the second biggest marketing channel behind social media.
All we want for Christmas is for you to get real with yourself on how critical investing in an ongoing strategy surrounding your website is (well, besides shower pizza, of course). That said - let’s break down 5 things we want you to consider adding to your website budget for 2023.
The end of the year is upon us and while you may already have created your website budget, it’s not too late to do some moving around. We talk to a lot of prospects every single day that have very little to no budget for website improvements on a monthly or annual basis. Yet these same businesses commonly report their website as their single best source of leads for their sales team. Imagine that. It’s a little like being a race car driver for 20 years only to roll up to the biggest race of your life in a minivan. We hate to be the ones to say it, but… ::whisper:: I don’t think it’s gonna get you to the finish line, friend.
We are persistently hammering home the idea that having a fast-loading, flexible website that optimizes conversion and puts the right information in front of your audience, but we’re having the same conversations over and over again.
Budgets are budgets and while we haven’t mastered the development of the money manufacturing machine (we’re still working on a robot for the shower that delivers you pizza because priorities), we do know that most businesses understand the simple concept of ROI. And most marketers understand that their website is a critical and ongoing way to get more of it.
In fact, 36% of survey respondents put their top marketing channel as their website/blog in the HubSpot 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Report. It was the second biggest marketing channel behind social media.
All we want for Christmas is for you to get real with yourself on how critical investing in an ongoing strategy surrounding your website is (well, besides shower pizza, of course). That said - let’s break down 5 things we want you to consider adding to your website budget for 2023.
The end of the year is upon us and while you may already have created your website budget, it’s not too late to do some moving around. We talk to a lot of prospects every single day that have very little to no budget for website improvements on a monthly or annual basis. Yet these same businesses commonly report their website as their single best source of leads for their sales team. Imagine that. It’s a little like being a race car driver for 20 years only to roll up to the biggest race of your life in a minivan. We hate to be the ones to say it, but… ::whisper:: I don’t think it’s gonna get you to the finish line, friend.
We are persistently hammering home the idea that having a fast-loading, flexible website that optimizes conversion and puts the right information in front of your audience, but we’re having the same conversations over and over again.
Budgets are budgets and while we haven’t mastered the development of the money manufacturing machine (we’re still working on a robot for the shower that delivers you pizza because priorities), we do know that most businesses understand the simple concept of ROI. And most marketers understand that their website is a critical and ongoing way to get more of it.
In fact, 36% of survey respondents put their top marketing channel as their website/blog in the HubSpot 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Report. It was the second biggest marketing channel behind social media.
All we want for Christmas is for you to get real with yourself on how critical investing in an ongoing strategy surrounding your website is (well, besides shower pizza, of course). That said - let’s break down 5 things we want you to consider adding to your website budget for 2023.
- \n
- adopt continuous improvement \n
- optimize page speed \n
- switch to a sustainable website platform \n
- organize your content better \n
- add more back-end features and more flexible modules
Adopting continuous improvement
\nIf you’re already ahead of the game and have a set budget for certain website projects for 2023, we’re pretty proud of you, because most businesses don’t even set aside the budget to redesign their website. Rather than spending tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars on redesigning your website every few years, create a smaller, more manageable budget that allows you to continuously add new modules and features on your website. By adopting the idea of continuous improvement over time, you can do all of the following:
\n- \n
- allocate a predictable monthly budget \n
- work reliably with a skilled developer \n
- improve your website on an ongoing basis to optimize for conversions \n
- add back end functionality inside your website interface to help your marketing team upload and create content more effectively. \n
- creating workflow automations to free up your task time \n
- generate reports to help you better understand data trends over time \n
- refine navigation or resource center filters to better organize your content. \n
According to HubSpot’s 2022 Web Traffic & Analytics Report (we found it interesting that more website analytics data didn’t make the cut of the State of Inbound Report) 58% of website analysts indicated that sales, leads and conversion rates were the most important metrics in assessing website performance - and yet, few companies create a strategy and budget item to strategically improve their website to optimize these things. While website content, optimization efforts, compelling images and CTAs go a long way to improve conversions — small changes to how filters work, the location of a simple button, the functionality of a website’s navigation and so much more directly influence conversion rates.
Related: HubSpot CMS Development - The Continuous Improvement Model
\nOptimizing page speed
\nRecently a website project came to us that was launched and completed by another developer, but the resource center took more than 10 seconds to load, which annihilated conversion rates and sent their bounce rates for their most important content through the roof. The resource center was using an external cloud server that needed to be accessed on every page load rather than a native HubSpot database. We changed the configuration and assisted in media resizing and BOOM - overnight they experienced a significant load speed change. Now rather than seconds, the resource center takes only milliseconds to load, which most marketers understand is absolutely critical when it comes to conversion rates.
It’s so easy to finish up a website and just lean on what you have. “If it ain’t broke,” am I right? But sometimes what we consider to be working is actually seriously handicapping us. That minivan at the race you’re trying to win *works*, right? But it’s not exactly going to break any track records for speed.
If your website, resource center or blog is taking more than a couple seconds to load, you should invest in updates and optimization to help bring that number down, because it will do incredible things for your conversion rates.
Related: Page Speed Optimization - 5 Factors Bogging Down Your Website
\nSwitching to a sustainable platform
\nAdopting a mindset of continuous website improvement and growth driven design is only as easy as your website platform and the framework you’ve built it from. Adding on features and functionality in Wordpress may mean having to piecemeal plugins and result in a bloated website that runs more slowly. If you’re taking a more long term approach to your website, you’ll want to build on a framework that allows for these types of improvements.
We primarily work in HubSpot and have found it not only super flexible for adding new modules, but secure and fast. It’s easy to add and remove functionality and while we do recommend that you consult your developer prior to purchasing a theme, there are a lot of great options that are well-vetted by HubSpot in the theme marketplace. Custom builds allow for more flexibility, notably so, again, contacting a skilled developer before you make an investment in HubSpot CMS is pretty critical.
Related: Signs You’ve Outgrown Wordpress CMS
\nBetter content organization
\nWe’re a little obsessed with navigation and we personally believe your navigation structure will make or break your conversion rate and other important website statistics like time on site and pages viewed. We’re also huge fans of proactive planning, which is why we’ve dedicated so much time to geeking out on mega menus. We believe that your mega menu should be well-conceived and strategized and not just a way to inundate your audience with everything on your website. By organizing strategically according to the buyer’s journey, your highest converting website content and putting most frequently viewed pages front and center, you’ll do so much for the user experience on your site. Rather than your most valuable content being buried in your landing pages, why not place some directly in your menu?
Your goal as a business should be to make your website easy to navigate while also providing your prospects with the critical information that they’re looking for. Organizing your pillar pages, menu navigation and website in a way that flows properly and coincides with the buyers’ journey will set you and your website prospects up for success.
Back end features and flexible modules.
\nThere’s nothing worse than a website that you’re constantly having to piecemeal and hack to accomplish the simple goals that you have when it comes to adding content. It’s a frustration we hear come from prospect after prospect, “The interface is just kinda cumbersome” or “We just want to do this one small thing, but the feature isn’t there.” The age of not having full control over your website is over - particularly if you make a move over to HubSpot CMS.
HubSpot CMS might be a decent investment, but it’s a really great way to ensure long term scalability in your website. Take a look at what they have to say about their content management system. Considering our founder built one of the very first websites on HubSpot CMS, we can definitely attest to how it has grown and improved over the years. HubSpot is a platform committed to scalable solutions and the flexibility and power for marketers when partnered with the right developer is amazing.
Every year you probably create big goals surrounding your website, lead generation, conversions and sales. Every year you probably encounter huge obstacles with your website. Make this the year that you truly allocate and plan proactively to make sure your website services your needs and can grow with your goals in the long term. Let’s get to the end of next year and look back proud at what we’ve accomplished.
Cheers to a new approach to your website *and* sales growth when we put our budget in the right places.
What are your website goals in 2023? Let us know in the comments.
The end of the year is upon us and while you may already have created your website budget, it’s not too late to do some moving around. We talk to a lot of prospects every single day that have very little to no budget for website improvements on a monthly or annual basis. Yet these same businesses commonly report their website as their single best source of leads for their sales team. Imagine that. It’s a little like being a race car driver for 20 years only to roll up to the biggest race of your life in a minivan. We hate to be the ones to say it, but… ::whisper:: I don’t think it’s gonna get you to the finish line, friend.
We are persistently hammering home the idea that having a fast-loading, flexible website that optimizes conversion and puts the right information in front of your audience, but we’re having the same conversations over and over again.
Budgets are budgets and while we haven’t mastered the development of the money manufacturing machine (we’re still working on a robot for the shower that delivers you pizza because priorities), we do know that most businesses understand the simple concept of ROI. And most marketers understand that their website is a critical and ongoing way to get more of it.
In fact, 36% of survey respondents put their top marketing channel as their website/blog in the HubSpot 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Report. It was the second biggest marketing channel behind social media.
All we want for Christmas is for you to get real with yourself on how critical investing in an ongoing strategy surrounding your website is (well, besides shower pizza, of course). That said - let’s break down 5 things we want you to consider adding to your website budget for 2023.
Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
\n\n![\"Dwight](\"https://www.officetally.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/card-would-an-idiot-do-that.jpg\")
It’s important to note that not every experience in Upwork or other web developer freelancing websites is a positive experience. In fact, more often than not, using Upwork developers can be a pretty big risk. We recently took on a project that came from an Upwork developer we lost a prospect to for budget reasons. The prospect resurfaced in the next few months, indicating that they’d selected an Upwork developer and the developer had gotten in over their head, oversold their services and wasn’t able to complete the Wordpress project as promised. Now they were out the majority of the initial budget and we have to work inside code that wasn’t ours, written by an inexperienced developer.
\n
RELATED: So, your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n\n
We don’t have egos when it comes to clients that choose other developers, but as a small business ourselves, it’s so unfortunate to watch the client pay two developers and then ultimately end up with an inferior project because they don’t have the capital to start from scratch. Hiring Upwork web developers is more of a gamble than people realize - and can seem a little like playing roulette.
\n\n
RELATED: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\nYou’ve lost the middle man.
\n\n
While you might be saving a load by managing the project yourself, odds are pretty good you haven’t managed a lot of website projects in the past. By saving money on the middle man, you can’t forget that you’re also losing the middle man.
You’re losing project oversight, the accountability of someone else to bother you about content, images, and timelines. You’ll often get stuck doing quality assurance testing yourself and may end up with an untested website that is full of errors and bugs as a result.
You hire experts not just to avoid doing the work yourself, but because you have your own business to run or job to do. Taking on the management of an entire website when you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
The odds aren’t in your favor.
\n\n
It’s very possible that you’ll find an incredible developer with the appropriate amount of experience in your industry that can manage a project and craft a vision and rabbit hole into the user experience as effectively as they can write code - but this is not the standard. When it comes to finding developers on Upwork and other web development outsourcing on websites, finding a developer that balances all of these skills that codes with attention to detail without bugs and with the user in mind - it’s not an easy task.
We’ve done a few different write ups on questions to ask when you’re interviewing web developers:
Part 1: Interview questions to ask your web developer
Part 2
Part 3
The interview questions above will prepare you well for your interview process with prospective developers for outsourcing.
\n
You have no idea what you’re getting.
\n\n
The freelance world can get a little wild. In theory you know what you’re paying for - websites like Upwork and Fiverr have review mechanisms, so at minimum you know that they’ve been successful before. We’ve also discussed the importance of requesting referrals and actually contacting those referrals.
Ultimately a developer can list that they have skills in different languages, different CMS platforms and their SEO expertise, but you won’t know exactly how much you’re missing out on until you delve deeply into the project. No one expects a new website project to go perfectly, but the more skilled and experienced your developer is, the smoother the process will go.
\n
RELATED: HubSpot CMS Developer Utopia - What to expect when developing a website
\n\n
Rather than going straight to Upwork or Fiverr to hire a freelance web developer, consider asking for referrals from trusted friends. If you’re a HubSpot user, you can usually ask your HubSpot rep for assistance with this. There is a robust network of professionals that account managers refer out when HubSpot users need assistance with redevelopment of their website.
Alternatively, if you’re looking to redesign a website hosted on Wordpress you can search on LinkedIn for prospective Wordpress developers as well.
Don’t end up like some of the prospects that come back to us to help bail them out of a sticky situation. While it might seem impossible to get a quality developer with a smaller website budget, it’s very possible if you’re willing to be patient. By establishing a larger budget that can be broken down over time and extending your timeline for launch, you can sustainably overhaul your website or execute your development project without sacrificing quality.
Just because you’re a smaller mid-sized business doesn’t mean that you can’t access the same resources without a little additional creativity. Vet your developer carefully and be prepared to pay a little extra so you can be situated as well as possible when your new website or project launches.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
","rss_summary":"Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
\n","rss_body":"Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
\n\n
It’s important to note that not every experience in Upwork or other web developer freelancing websites is a positive experience. In fact, more often than not, using Upwork developers can be a pretty big risk. We recently took on a project that came from an Upwork developer we lost a prospect to for budget reasons. The prospect resurfaced in the next few months, indicating that they’d selected an Upwork developer and the developer had gotten in over their head, oversold their services and wasn’t able to complete the Wordpress project as promised. Now they were out the majority of the initial budget and we have to work inside code that wasn’t ours, written by an inexperienced developer.
\n
RELATED: So, your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n\n
We don’t have egos when it comes to clients that choose other developers, but as a small business ourselves, it’s so unfortunate to watch the client pay two developers and then ultimately end up with an inferior project because they don’t have the capital to start from scratch. Hiring Upwork web developers is more of a gamble than people realize - and can seem a little like playing roulette.
\n\n
RELATED: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\nYou’ve lost the middle man.
\n\n
While you might be saving a load by managing the project yourself, odds are pretty good you haven’t managed a lot of website projects in the past. By saving money on the middle man, you can’t forget that you’re also losing the middle man.
You’re losing project oversight, the accountability of someone else to bother you about content, images, and timelines. You’ll often get stuck doing quality assurance testing yourself and may end up with an untested website that is full of errors and bugs as a result.
You hire experts not just to avoid doing the work yourself, but because you have your own business to run or job to do. Taking on the management of an entire website when you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
The odds aren’t in your favor.
\n\n
It’s very possible that you’ll find an incredible developer with the appropriate amount of experience in your industry that can manage a project and craft a vision and rabbit hole into the user experience as effectively as they can write code - but this is not the standard. When it comes to finding developers on Upwork and other web development outsourcing on websites, finding a developer that balances all of these skills that codes with attention to detail without bugs and with the user in mind - it’s not an easy task.
We’ve done a few different write ups on questions to ask when you’re interviewing web developers:
Part 1: Interview questions to ask your web developer
Part 2
Part 3
The interview questions above will prepare you well for your interview process with prospective developers for outsourcing.
\n
You have no idea what you’re getting.
\n\n
The freelance world can get a little wild. In theory you know what you’re paying for - websites like Upwork and Fiverr have review mechanisms, so at minimum you know that they’ve been successful before. We’ve also discussed the importance of requesting referrals and actually contacting those referrals.
Ultimately a developer can list that they have skills in different languages, different CMS platforms and their SEO expertise, but you won’t know exactly how much you’re missing out on until you delve deeply into the project. No one expects a new website project to go perfectly, but the more skilled and experienced your developer is, the smoother the process will go.
\n
RELATED: HubSpot CMS Developer Utopia - What to expect when developing a website
\n\n
Rather than going straight to Upwork or Fiverr to hire a freelance web developer, consider asking for referrals from trusted friends. If you’re a HubSpot user, you can usually ask your HubSpot rep for assistance with this. There is a robust network of professionals that account managers refer out when HubSpot users need assistance with redevelopment of their website.
Alternatively, if you’re looking to redesign a website hosted on Wordpress you can search on LinkedIn for prospective Wordpress developers as well.
Don’t end up like some of the prospects that come back to us to help bail them out of a sticky situation. While it might seem impossible to get a quality developer with a smaller website budget, it’s very possible if you’re willing to be patient. By establishing a larger budget that can be broken down over time and extending your timeline for launch, you can sustainably overhaul your website or execute your development project without sacrificing quality.
Just because you’re a smaller mid-sized business doesn’t mean that you can’t access the same resources without a little additional creativity. Vet your developer carefully and be prepared to pay a little extra so you can be situated as well as possible when your new website or project launches.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
","tag_ids":[62770442823,89815248915,91093105561],"topic_ids":[62770442823,89815248915,91093105561],"post_summary":"Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
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In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
\n\n
It’s important to note that not every experience in Upwork or other web developer freelancing websites is a positive experience. In fact, more often than not, using Upwork developers can be a pretty big risk. We recently took on a project that came from an Upwork developer we lost a prospect to for budget reasons. The prospect resurfaced in the next few months, indicating that they’d selected an Upwork developer and the developer had gotten in over their head, oversold their services and wasn’t able to complete the Wordpress project as promised. Now they were out the majority of the initial budget and we have to work inside code that wasn’t ours, written by an inexperienced developer.
\n
RELATED: So, your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n\n
We don’t have egos when it comes to clients that choose other developers, but as a small business ourselves, it’s so unfortunate to watch the client pay two developers and then ultimately end up with an inferior project because they don’t have the capital to start from scratch. Hiring Upwork web developers is more of a gamble than people realize - and can seem a little like playing roulette.
\n\n
RELATED: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\nYou’ve lost the middle man.
\n\n
While you might be saving a load by managing the project yourself, odds are pretty good you haven’t managed a lot of website projects in the past. By saving money on the middle man, you can’t forget that you’re also losing the middle man.
You’re losing project oversight, the accountability of someone else to bother you about content, images, and timelines. You’ll often get stuck doing quality assurance testing yourself and may end up with an untested website that is full of errors and bugs as a result.
You hire experts not just to avoid doing the work yourself, but because you have your own business to run or job to do. Taking on the management of an entire website when you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
The odds aren’t in your favor.
\n\n
It’s very possible that you’ll find an incredible developer with the appropriate amount of experience in your industry that can manage a project and craft a vision and rabbit hole into the user experience as effectively as they can write code - but this is not the standard. When it comes to finding developers on Upwork and other web development outsourcing on websites, finding a developer that balances all of these skills that codes with attention to detail without bugs and with the user in mind - it’s not an easy task.
We’ve done a few different write ups on questions to ask when you’re interviewing web developers:
Part 1: Interview questions to ask your web developer
Part 2
Part 3
The interview questions above will prepare you well for your interview process with prospective developers for outsourcing.
\n
You have no idea what you’re getting.
\n\n
The freelance world can get a little wild. In theory you know what you’re paying for - websites like Upwork and Fiverr have review mechanisms, so at minimum you know that they’ve been successful before. We’ve also discussed the importance of requesting referrals and actually contacting those referrals.
Ultimately a developer can list that they have skills in different languages, different CMS platforms and their SEO expertise, but you won’t know exactly how much you’re missing out on until you delve deeply into the project. No one expects a new website project to go perfectly, but the more skilled and experienced your developer is, the smoother the process will go.
\n
RELATED: HubSpot CMS Developer Utopia - What to expect when developing a website
\n\n
Rather than going straight to Upwork or Fiverr to hire a freelance web developer, consider asking for referrals from trusted friends. If you’re a HubSpot user, you can usually ask your HubSpot rep for assistance with this. There is a robust network of professionals that account managers refer out when HubSpot users need assistance with redevelopment of their website.
Alternatively, if you’re looking to redesign a website hosted on Wordpress you can search on LinkedIn for prospective Wordpress developers as well.
Don’t end up like some of the prospects that come back to us to help bail them out of a sticky situation. While it might seem impossible to get a quality developer with a smaller website budget, it’s very possible if you’re willing to be patient. By establishing a larger budget that can be broken down over time and extending your timeline for launch, you can sustainably overhaul your website or execute your development project without sacrificing quality.
Just because you’re a smaller mid-sized business doesn’t mean that you can’t access the same resources without a little additional creativity. Vet your developer carefully and be prepared to pay a little extra so you can be situated as well as possible when your new website or project launches.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
","postBodyRss":"Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
\n\n
It’s important to note that not every experience in Upwork or other web developer freelancing websites is a positive experience. In fact, more often than not, using Upwork developers can be a pretty big risk. We recently took on a project that came from an Upwork developer we lost a prospect to for budget reasons. The prospect resurfaced in the next few months, indicating that they’d selected an Upwork developer and the developer had gotten in over their head, oversold their services and wasn’t able to complete the Wordpress project as promised. Now they were out the majority of the initial budget and we have to work inside code that wasn’t ours, written by an inexperienced developer.
\n
RELATED: So, your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n\n
We don’t have egos when it comes to clients that choose other developers, but as a small business ourselves, it’s so unfortunate to watch the client pay two developers and then ultimately end up with an inferior project because they don’t have the capital to start from scratch. Hiring Upwork web developers is more of a gamble than people realize - and can seem a little like playing roulette.
\n\n
RELATED: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\nYou’ve lost the middle man.
\n\n
While you might be saving a load by managing the project yourself, odds are pretty good you haven’t managed a lot of website projects in the past. By saving money on the middle man, you can’t forget that you’re also losing the middle man.
You’re losing project oversight, the accountability of someone else to bother you about content, images, and timelines. You’ll often get stuck doing quality assurance testing yourself and may end up with an untested website that is full of errors and bugs as a result.
You hire experts not just to avoid doing the work yourself, but because you have your own business to run or job to do. Taking on the management of an entire website when you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
The odds aren’t in your favor.
\n\n
It’s very possible that you’ll find an incredible developer with the appropriate amount of experience in your industry that can manage a project and craft a vision and rabbit hole into the user experience as effectively as they can write code - but this is not the standard. When it comes to finding developers on Upwork and other web development outsourcing on websites, finding a developer that balances all of these skills that codes with attention to detail without bugs and with the user in mind - it’s not an easy task.
We’ve done a few different write ups on questions to ask when you’re interviewing web developers:
Part 1: Interview questions to ask your web developer
Part 2
Part 3
The interview questions above will prepare you well for your interview process with prospective developers for outsourcing.
\n
You have no idea what you’re getting.
\n\n
The freelance world can get a little wild. In theory you know what you’re paying for - websites like Upwork and Fiverr have review mechanisms, so at minimum you know that they’ve been successful before. We’ve also discussed the importance of requesting referrals and actually contacting those referrals.
Ultimately a developer can list that they have skills in different languages, different CMS platforms and their SEO expertise, but you won’t know exactly how much you’re missing out on until you delve deeply into the project. No one expects a new website project to go perfectly, but the more skilled and experienced your developer is, the smoother the process will go.
\n
RELATED: HubSpot CMS Developer Utopia - What to expect when developing a website
\n\n
Rather than going straight to Upwork or Fiverr to hire a freelance web developer, consider asking for referrals from trusted friends. If you’re a HubSpot user, you can usually ask your HubSpot rep for assistance with this. There is a robust network of professionals that account managers refer out when HubSpot users need assistance with redevelopment of their website.
Alternatively, if you’re looking to redesign a website hosted on Wordpress you can search on LinkedIn for prospective Wordpress developers as well.
Don’t end up like some of the prospects that come back to us to help bail them out of a sticky situation. While it might seem impossible to get a quality developer with a smaller website budget, it’s very possible if you’re willing to be patient. By establishing a larger budget that can be broken down over time and extending your timeline for launch, you can sustainably overhaul your website or execute your development project without sacrificing quality.
Just because you’re a smaller mid-sized business doesn’t mean that you can’t access the same resources without a little additional creativity. Vet your developer carefully and be prepared to pay a little extra so you can be situated as well as possible when your new website or project launches.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
","postEmailContent":"Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
","postFeaturedImageIfEnabled":"https://www.officetally.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/card-would-an-idiot-do-that.jpg","postListContent":"Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
","postListSummaryFeaturedImage":"https://www.officetally.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/card-would-an-idiot-do-that.jpg","postRssContent":"Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
","postRssSummaryFeaturedImage":"https://www.officetally.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/card-would-an-idiot-do-that.jpg","postSummary":"Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are a great way for small businesses to reach freelancers and cut out the middle man when it comes to hiring for certain types of work that they need completed. In theory, these websites help eliminate the additional costs associated with hiring an agency, since you don’t have the labor markup or overhead that typically comes along with engaging an agency. As a tradeoff, you have to do project management and additional leg work corresponding with the freelancer yourself, but most businesses are happy to do that to make up for budget they may not have.
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\n\n
It’s important to note that not every experience in Upwork or other web developer freelancing websites is a positive experience. In fact, more often than not, using Upwork developers can be a pretty big risk. We recently took on a project that came from an Upwork developer we lost a prospect to for budget reasons. The prospect resurfaced in the next few months, indicating that they’d selected an Upwork developer and the developer had gotten in over their head, oversold their services and wasn’t able to complete the Wordpress project as promised. Now they were out the majority of the initial budget and we have to work inside code that wasn’t ours, written by an inexperienced developer.
\n
RELATED: So, your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n\n
We don’t have egos when it comes to clients that choose other developers, but as a small business ourselves, it’s so unfortunate to watch the client pay two developers and then ultimately end up with an inferior project because they don’t have the capital to start from scratch. Hiring Upwork web developers is more of a gamble than people realize - and can seem a little like playing roulette.
\n\n
RELATED: The Problem with Cheap Outsourced Web Development
\nYou’ve lost the middle man.
\n\n
While you might be saving a load by managing the project yourself, odds are pretty good you haven’t managed a lot of website projects in the past. By saving money on the middle man, you can’t forget that you’re also losing the middle man.
You’re losing project oversight, the accountability of someone else to bother you about content, images, and timelines. You’ll often get stuck doing quality assurance testing yourself and may end up with an untested website that is full of errors and bugs as a result.
You hire experts not just to avoid doing the work yourself, but because you have your own business to run or job to do. Taking on the management of an entire website when you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
The odds aren’t in your favor.
\n\n
It’s very possible that you’ll find an incredible developer with the appropriate amount of experience in your industry that can manage a project and craft a vision and rabbit hole into the user experience as effectively as they can write code - but this is not the standard. When it comes to finding developers on Upwork and other web development outsourcing on websites, finding a developer that balances all of these skills that codes with attention to detail without bugs and with the user in mind - it’s not an easy task.
We’ve done a few different write ups on questions to ask when you’re interviewing web developers:
Part 1: Interview questions to ask your web developer
Part 2
Part 3
The interview questions above will prepare you well for your interview process with prospective developers for outsourcing.
\n
You have no idea what you’re getting.
\n\n
The freelance world can get a little wild. In theory you know what you’re paying for - websites like Upwork and Fiverr have review mechanisms, so at minimum you know that they’ve been successful before. We’ve also discussed the importance of requesting referrals and actually contacting those referrals.
Ultimately a developer can list that they have skills in different languages, different CMS platforms and their SEO expertise, but you won’t know exactly how much you’re missing out on until you delve deeply into the project. No one expects a new website project to go perfectly, but the more skilled and experienced your developer is, the smoother the process will go.
\n
RELATED: HubSpot CMS Developer Utopia - What to expect when developing a website
\n\n
Rather than going straight to Upwork or Fiverr to hire a freelance web developer, consider asking for referrals from trusted friends. If you’re a HubSpot user, you can usually ask your HubSpot rep for assistance with this. There is a robust network of professionals that account managers refer out when HubSpot users need assistance with redevelopment of their website.
Alternatively, if you’re looking to redesign a website hosted on Wordpress you can search on LinkedIn for prospective Wordpress developers as well.
Don’t end up like some of the prospects that come back to us to help bail them out of a sticky situation. While it might seem impossible to get a quality developer with a smaller website budget, it’s very possible if you’re willing to be patient. By establishing a larger budget that can be broken down over time and extending your timeline for launch, you can sustainably overhaul your website or execute your development project without sacrificing quality.
Just because you’re a smaller mid-sized business doesn’t mean that you can’t access the same resources without a little additional creativity. Vet your developer carefully and be prepared to pay a little extra so you can be situated as well as possible when your new website or project launches.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
INTERVIEW YOUR DEVELOPER.
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Web Development Budget Restrictions are Holding You Back","id":89814232487,"includeDefaultCustomCss":null,"isCaptchaRequired":true,"isCrawlableByBots":false,"isDraft":false,"isInstanceLayoutPage":false,"isInstantEmailEnabled":false,"isPublished":true,"isSocialPublishingEnabled":false,"keywords":[],"label":"Your Web Development Budget Restrictions are Holding You Back","language":"en","lastEditSessionId":null,"lastEditUpdateId":null,"layoutSections":{},"legacyBlogTabid":null,"legacyId":null,"legacyPostGuid":null,"linkRelCanonicalUrl":null,"listTemplate":"","liveDomain":"deckerdevs.com","mab":false,"mabExperimentId":null,"mabMaster":false,"mabVariant":false,"meta":{"html_title":"Your Web Development Budget Restrictions are Holding You Back","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":"In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
![\"no](\"https://6534445.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6534445/BLOG%20Images/no%20limit.webp\")
Here are a few ways that your web development budget restrictions can potentially hold you back:
Under-budgeting your website is a growth handicap.
\n
Not having the budget you need for the goals you have for your website is probably the biggest problem we run into when we receive new proposal requests. Before you start the process of vetting developers and requesting proposals, you’ll want to identify what your goals are by asking some important questions:
What are your expectations for your website performance from a lead generation perspective?
Are you a small business that just desires a simple, informative website or do you want your website to be a lead generation machine?
Is your website a hub of information?
Does it need to operate as its own location and generate revenue with a retail store presence?
These are incredibly important questions that will help you determine the best platform and host for your website. Choosing a platform and infrastructure that can grow with your needs over time is the best route. Starting with a “low budget” website and then having to switch platforms or code from scratch because you hired an inexperienced developer will just end up costing you more in the long run.
One of the things that drives us crazy is clients approaching us with a tiny budget and big dreams. Do we wish you could have everything you want for the price you’ve imagined? Of course. But we live in the real world where an equitable energetic exchange is required to get the things that you want and need. We don’t mean to sound insensitive, but it’s just the harsh reality. Quality comes at a price. Do yourself and your organization a favor by not tossing out random numbers before you’ve clearly communicated your wants, needs and goals to a skilled web developer. Talking through your list with a developer will help you balance your business’ budget with the realities of your needs as a business owner and marketer.
Once you have a better idea of your total investment to achieve your goals, you can break that down into the appropriate timeline to help bridge the gap between your budget and the website that you want without compromising features or the integrity of the framework that you’re building from.
RELATED: The problem with cheap outsourced web development
\nHiring low budget talent yields low budget results.
\n
A website that takes forever to load due to poorly written code.
A website that is ranking poorly because the developer didn’t populate meta descriptions or other SEO data.
A website whose media library is too big, because the developer failed to resize images.
A website with no capabilities to easy generate content or conversion opportunities.
Did you know that a bounce rate increases by 123% if page loading time takes more than 1 second?
If your website is taking a long time to load, you’re missing opportunity.
Every millisecond matters. An increased bounce rate means less website conversions, which means less sales.
Hiring an inexperienced web developer can literally cost you tens to hundreds of thousands over the lifetime of that website - and you’re going to let a few thousand dollars keep you from the prospect of exponential sales growth?
That’s a lot of power in the hands of your developer and for that reason you should hire an expert.
Some web developers are order takers, but we’ve written about it before: your website isn’t a sub sandwich. You need a web developer that can proactively plan your website with your goals in mind, that understands the complex needs of businesses and the marketers that serve them. Websites go beyond aesthetics and gifted developers understand that the bones and the intricacies of clean code, a kick ass user experience and a back end that marketers love is the secret recipe to meeting your website goals.
Lack of experience can cost you employee productivity.
\n
Just because they didn’t abandon the project and might have taken your website to launch, doesn’t mean your developer served you well. Far too often in the development process, businesses and marketing agencies look at the aesthetics of the front end, but none of the back end user interface.
RELATED: So your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n
Their outsourced developer or freelancer partner will launch the site and make the interface impossible to use for the marketer. The content is all too often not easily modified, or requires some level of coding knowledge to update.
A website should not just be easy for a user to navigate that is considering your products and services, but it also needs to be easy to update. So often we encounter prospects that need better access to their websites or need us to edit or modify things that they cannot access that should have easily been granted to the marketers before the website launched. Lack of access and a poor back end experience lead to frustrated, disengaged marketers.
Why is this a problem?
According to VentureBeat.com, not only are 91% of employees already frustrated with workplace technology but, “a staggering 71% of leaders acknowledge that employees will consider looking for a new job if their current employer does not provide access to the tools, technology or information they need to do their jobs well.” Every new piece of software or technology that you introduce for your marketing team to use should be simpler, user-friendly and efficient. And the top complaint? 51% of the top complaints were related to slow speeds. Frustrated marketers are less efficient. Happy marketers are more productive. Not investing in the right developer can be very costly.
By working with a talented developer, they can proactively discuss what back-end options you’d like to see during the design phase so that once your website is launched you have more flexibility to test different options, change colors, add filters or change content in a truly customizable way. This gives your marketing team flexibility and allows you to create the experience they’re looking for by partnering with a developer that knows how to do that.
RELATED: Developer Utopia - What to expect when you hire an experienced HubSpot Developer
\nBudget efficiency matters.
\n
We want to finish with this one, because we cannot express enough how important it is for you to understand that estimated hours from two different developers are not an apples to apples comparison. What one developer estimates as taking an hour might not include extensive browser and device testing or adding the types of features that marketers like to see in the back end. Effectively you’ve paid for an aesthetic product, but not received one that is also functional for both your customers and prospects and the team that is creating content within it.
The same idea applies to per-hour rates. A developer charging less per hour likely has less experience than a seasoned developer that can code more cleanly with less bugs and still provide you with better functionality that you didn’t even realize you needed.
Losing prospects to budget restrictions is tough for any web development agency, but what’s tougher is when they come back and have to spend even more starting from scratch, or worse, have run out of money and are forced to work with a mess that was left behind by an inexperienced web developer.
Balancing budget in a small business can be difficult, but investing into a powerful, functional website that serves your needs in the long term is incredibly important. There are many ways that websites can be phased over time to accommodate small business budgets and still allow you to hire talented developers.
When you choose your web developer based on experience rather than budget, you set yourself up for success and build the foundation of a powerful website that your customers, employees and executive team will thank you for later.
Don’t know the right questions to ask when you’re vetting developers for your next website project in HubSpot or Wordpress? Check out our blog offering insight on questions to ask when interviewing website developers.
","rss_summary":"
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
Here are a few ways that your web development budget restrictions can potentially hold you back:
Under-budgeting your website is a growth handicap.
\n
Not having the budget you need for the goals you have for your website is probably the biggest problem we run into when we receive new proposal requests. Before you start the process of vetting developers and requesting proposals, you’ll want to identify what your goals are by asking some important questions:
What are your expectations for your website performance from a lead generation perspective?
Are you a small business that just desires a simple, informative website or do you want your website to be a lead generation machine?
Is your website a hub of information?
Does it need to operate as its own location and generate revenue with a retail store presence?
These are incredibly important questions that will help you determine the best platform and host for your website. Choosing a platform and infrastructure that can grow with your needs over time is the best route. Starting with a “low budget” website and then having to switch platforms or code from scratch because you hired an inexperienced developer will just end up costing you more in the long run.
One of the things that drives us crazy is clients approaching us with a tiny budget and big dreams. Do we wish you could have everything you want for the price you’ve imagined? Of course. But we live in the real world where an equitable energetic exchange is required to get the things that you want and need. We don’t mean to sound insensitive, but it’s just the harsh reality. Quality comes at a price. Do yourself and your organization a favor by not tossing out random numbers before you’ve clearly communicated your wants, needs and goals to a skilled web developer. Talking through your list with a developer will help you balance your business’ budget with the realities of your needs as a business owner and marketer.
Once you have a better idea of your total investment to achieve your goals, you can break that down into the appropriate timeline to help bridge the gap between your budget and the website that you want without compromising features or the integrity of the framework that you’re building from.
RELATED: The problem with cheap outsourced web development
\nHiring low budget talent yields low budget results.
\n
A website that takes forever to load due to poorly written code.
A website that is ranking poorly because the developer didn’t populate meta descriptions or other SEO data.
A website whose media library is too big, because the developer failed to resize images.
A website with no capabilities to easy generate content or conversion opportunities.
Did you know that a bounce rate increases by 123% if page loading time takes more than 1 second?
If your website is taking a long time to load, you’re missing opportunity.
Every millisecond matters. An increased bounce rate means less website conversions, which means less sales.
Hiring an inexperienced web developer can literally cost you tens to hundreds of thousands over the lifetime of that website - and you’re going to let a few thousand dollars keep you from the prospect of exponential sales growth?
That’s a lot of power in the hands of your developer and for that reason you should hire an expert.
Some web developers are order takers, but we’ve written about it before: your website isn’t a sub sandwich. You need a web developer that can proactively plan your website with your goals in mind, that understands the complex needs of businesses and the marketers that serve them. Websites go beyond aesthetics and gifted developers understand that the bones and the intricacies of clean code, a kick ass user experience and a back end that marketers love is the secret recipe to meeting your website goals.
Lack of experience can cost you employee productivity.
\n
Just because they didn’t abandon the project and might have taken your website to launch, doesn’t mean your developer served you well. Far too often in the development process, businesses and marketing agencies look at the aesthetics of the front end, but none of the back end user interface.
RELATED: So your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n
Their outsourced developer or freelancer partner will launch the site and make the interface impossible to use for the marketer. The content is all too often not easily modified, or requires some level of coding knowledge to update.
A website should not just be easy for a user to navigate that is considering your products and services, but it also needs to be easy to update. So often we encounter prospects that need better access to their websites or need us to edit or modify things that they cannot access that should have easily been granted to the marketers before the website launched. Lack of access and a poor back end experience lead to frustrated, disengaged marketers.
Why is this a problem?
According to VentureBeat.com, not only are 91% of employees already frustrated with workplace technology but, “a staggering 71% of leaders acknowledge that employees will consider looking for a new job if their current employer does not provide access to the tools, technology or information they need to do their jobs well.” Every new piece of software or technology that you introduce for your marketing team to use should be simpler, user-friendly and efficient. And the top complaint? 51% of the top complaints were related to slow speeds. Frustrated marketers are less efficient. Happy marketers are more productive. Not investing in the right developer can be very costly.
By working with a talented developer, they can proactively discuss what back-end options you’d like to see during the design phase so that once your website is launched you have more flexibility to test different options, change colors, add filters or change content in a truly customizable way. This gives your marketing team flexibility and allows you to create the experience they’re looking for by partnering with a developer that knows how to do that.
RELATED: Developer Utopia - What to expect when you hire an experienced HubSpot Developer
\nBudget efficiency matters.
\n
We want to finish with this one, because we cannot express enough how important it is for you to understand that estimated hours from two different developers are not an apples to apples comparison. What one developer estimates as taking an hour might not include extensive browser and device testing or adding the types of features that marketers like to see in the back end. Effectively you’ve paid for an aesthetic product, but not received one that is also functional for both your customers and prospects and the team that is creating content within it.
The same idea applies to per-hour rates. A developer charging less per hour likely has less experience than a seasoned developer that can code more cleanly with less bugs and still provide you with better functionality that you didn’t even realize you needed.
Losing prospects to budget restrictions is tough for any web development agency, but what’s tougher is when they come back and have to spend even more starting from scratch, or worse, have run out of money and are forced to work with a mess that was left behind by an inexperienced web developer.
Balancing budget in a small business can be difficult, but investing into a powerful, functional website that serves your needs in the long term is incredibly important. There are many ways that websites can be phased over time to accommodate small business budgets and still allow you to hire talented developers.
When you choose your web developer based on experience rather than budget, you set yourself up for success and build the foundation of a powerful website that your customers, employees and executive team will thank you for later.
Don’t know the right questions to ask when you’re vetting developers for your next website project in HubSpot or Wordpress? Check out our blog offering insight on questions to ask when interviewing website developers.
","tag_ids":[62770442823,82133680259,89815248915],"topic_ids":[62770442823,82133680259,89815248915],"post_summary":"
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
Here are a few ways that your web development budget restrictions can potentially hold you back:
Under-budgeting your website is a growth handicap.
\n
Not having the budget you need for the goals you have for your website is probably the biggest problem we run into when we receive new proposal requests. Before you start the process of vetting developers and requesting proposals, you’ll want to identify what your goals are by asking some important questions:
What are your expectations for your website performance from a lead generation perspective?
Are you a small business that just desires a simple, informative website or do you want your website to be a lead generation machine?
Is your website a hub of information?
Does it need to operate as its own location and generate revenue with a retail store presence?
These are incredibly important questions that will help you determine the best platform and host for your website. Choosing a platform and infrastructure that can grow with your needs over time is the best route. Starting with a “low budget” website and then having to switch platforms or code from scratch because you hired an inexperienced developer will just end up costing you more in the long run.
One of the things that drives us crazy is clients approaching us with a tiny budget and big dreams. Do we wish you could have everything you want for the price you’ve imagined? Of course. But we live in the real world where an equitable energetic exchange is required to get the things that you want and need. We don’t mean to sound insensitive, but it’s just the harsh reality. Quality comes at a price. Do yourself and your organization a favor by not tossing out random numbers before you’ve clearly communicated your wants, needs and goals to a skilled web developer. Talking through your list with a developer will help you balance your business’ budget with the realities of your needs as a business owner and marketer.
Once you have a better idea of your total investment to achieve your goals, you can break that down into the appropriate timeline to help bridge the gap between your budget and the website that you want without compromising features or the integrity of the framework that you’re building from.
RELATED: The problem with cheap outsourced web development
\nHiring low budget talent yields low budget results.
\n
A website that takes forever to load due to poorly written code.
A website that is ranking poorly because the developer didn’t populate meta descriptions or other SEO data.
A website whose media library is too big, because the developer failed to resize images.
A website with no capabilities to easy generate content or conversion opportunities.
Did you know that a bounce rate increases by 123% if page loading time takes more than 1 second?
If your website is taking a long time to load, you’re missing opportunity.
Every millisecond matters. An increased bounce rate means less website conversions, which means less sales.
Hiring an inexperienced web developer can literally cost you tens to hundreds of thousands over the lifetime of that website - and you’re going to let a few thousand dollars keep you from the prospect of exponential sales growth?
That’s a lot of power in the hands of your developer and for that reason you should hire an expert.
Some web developers are order takers, but we’ve written about it before: your website isn’t a sub sandwich. You need a web developer that can proactively plan your website with your goals in mind, that understands the complex needs of businesses and the marketers that serve them. Websites go beyond aesthetics and gifted developers understand that the bones and the intricacies of clean code, a kick ass user experience and a back end that marketers love is the secret recipe to meeting your website goals.
Lack of experience can cost you employee productivity.
\n
Just because they didn’t abandon the project and might have taken your website to launch, doesn’t mean your developer served you well. Far too often in the development process, businesses and marketing agencies look at the aesthetics of the front end, but none of the back end user interface.
RELATED: So your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n
Their outsourced developer or freelancer partner will launch the site and make the interface impossible to use for the marketer. The content is all too often not easily modified, or requires some level of coding knowledge to update.
A website should not just be easy for a user to navigate that is considering your products and services, but it also needs to be easy to update. So often we encounter prospects that need better access to their websites or need us to edit or modify things that they cannot access that should have easily been granted to the marketers before the website launched. Lack of access and a poor back end experience lead to frustrated, disengaged marketers.
Why is this a problem?
According to VentureBeat.com, not only are 91% of employees already frustrated with workplace technology but, “a staggering 71% of leaders acknowledge that employees will consider looking for a new job if their current employer does not provide access to the tools, technology or information they need to do their jobs well.” Every new piece of software or technology that you introduce for your marketing team to use should be simpler, user-friendly and efficient. And the top complaint? 51% of the top complaints were related to slow speeds. Frustrated marketers are less efficient. Happy marketers are more productive. Not investing in the right developer can be very costly.
By working with a talented developer, they can proactively discuss what back-end options you’d like to see during the design phase so that once your website is launched you have more flexibility to test different options, change colors, add filters or change content in a truly customizable way. This gives your marketing team flexibility and allows you to create the experience they’re looking for by partnering with a developer that knows how to do that.
RELATED: Developer Utopia - What to expect when you hire an experienced HubSpot Developer
\nBudget efficiency matters.
\n
We want to finish with this one, because we cannot express enough how important it is for you to understand that estimated hours from two different developers are not an apples to apples comparison. What one developer estimates as taking an hour might not include extensive browser and device testing or adding the types of features that marketers like to see in the back end. Effectively you’ve paid for an aesthetic product, but not received one that is also functional for both your customers and prospects and the team that is creating content within it.
The same idea applies to per-hour rates. A developer charging less per hour likely has less experience than a seasoned developer that can code more cleanly with less bugs and still provide you with better functionality that you didn’t even realize you needed.
Losing prospects to budget restrictions is tough for any web development agency, but what’s tougher is when they come back and have to spend even more starting from scratch, or worse, have run out of money and are forced to work with a mess that was left behind by an inexperienced web developer.
Balancing budget in a small business can be difficult, but investing into a powerful, functional website that serves your needs in the long term is incredibly important. There are many ways that websites can be phased over time to accommodate small business budgets and still allow you to hire talented developers.
When you choose your web developer based on experience rather than budget, you set yourself up for success and build the foundation of a powerful website that your customers, employees and executive team will thank you for later.
Don’t know the right questions to ask when you’re vetting developers for your next website project in HubSpot or Wordpress? Check out our blog offering insight on questions to ask when interviewing website developers.
","postBodyRss":"
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
Here are a few ways that your web development budget restrictions can potentially hold you back:
Under-budgeting your website is a growth handicap.
\n
Not having the budget you need for the goals you have for your website is probably the biggest problem we run into when we receive new proposal requests. Before you start the process of vetting developers and requesting proposals, you’ll want to identify what your goals are by asking some important questions:
What are your expectations for your website performance from a lead generation perspective?
Are you a small business that just desires a simple, informative website or do you want your website to be a lead generation machine?
Is your website a hub of information?
Does it need to operate as its own location and generate revenue with a retail store presence?
These are incredibly important questions that will help you determine the best platform and host for your website. Choosing a platform and infrastructure that can grow with your needs over time is the best route. Starting with a “low budget” website and then having to switch platforms or code from scratch because you hired an inexperienced developer will just end up costing you more in the long run.
One of the things that drives us crazy is clients approaching us with a tiny budget and big dreams. Do we wish you could have everything you want for the price you’ve imagined? Of course. But we live in the real world where an equitable energetic exchange is required to get the things that you want and need. We don’t mean to sound insensitive, but it’s just the harsh reality. Quality comes at a price. Do yourself and your organization a favor by not tossing out random numbers before you’ve clearly communicated your wants, needs and goals to a skilled web developer. Talking through your list with a developer will help you balance your business’ budget with the realities of your needs as a business owner and marketer.
Once you have a better idea of your total investment to achieve your goals, you can break that down into the appropriate timeline to help bridge the gap between your budget and the website that you want without compromising features or the integrity of the framework that you’re building from.
RELATED: The problem with cheap outsourced web development
\nHiring low budget talent yields low budget results.
\n
A website that takes forever to load due to poorly written code.
A website that is ranking poorly because the developer didn’t populate meta descriptions or other SEO data.
A website whose media library is too big, because the developer failed to resize images.
A website with no capabilities to easy generate content or conversion opportunities.
Did you know that a bounce rate increases by 123% if page loading time takes more than 1 second?
If your website is taking a long time to load, you’re missing opportunity.
Every millisecond matters. An increased bounce rate means less website conversions, which means less sales.
Hiring an inexperienced web developer can literally cost you tens to hundreds of thousands over the lifetime of that website - and you’re going to let a few thousand dollars keep you from the prospect of exponential sales growth?
That’s a lot of power in the hands of your developer and for that reason you should hire an expert.
Some web developers are order takers, but we’ve written about it before: your website isn’t a sub sandwich. You need a web developer that can proactively plan your website with your goals in mind, that understands the complex needs of businesses and the marketers that serve them. Websites go beyond aesthetics and gifted developers understand that the bones and the intricacies of clean code, a kick ass user experience and a back end that marketers love is the secret recipe to meeting your website goals.
Lack of experience can cost you employee productivity.
\n
Just because they didn’t abandon the project and might have taken your website to launch, doesn’t mean your developer served you well. Far too often in the development process, businesses and marketing agencies look at the aesthetics of the front end, but none of the back end user interface.
RELATED: So your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n
Their outsourced developer or freelancer partner will launch the site and make the interface impossible to use for the marketer. The content is all too often not easily modified, or requires some level of coding knowledge to update.
A website should not just be easy for a user to navigate that is considering your products and services, but it also needs to be easy to update. So often we encounter prospects that need better access to their websites or need us to edit or modify things that they cannot access that should have easily been granted to the marketers before the website launched. Lack of access and a poor back end experience lead to frustrated, disengaged marketers.
Why is this a problem?
According to VentureBeat.com, not only are 91% of employees already frustrated with workplace technology but, “a staggering 71% of leaders acknowledge that employees will consider looking for a new job if their current employer does not provide access to the tools, technology or information they need to do their jobs well.” Every new piece of software or technology that you introduce for your marketing team to use should be simpler, user-friendly and efficient. And the top complaint? 51% of the top complaints were related to slow speeds. Frustrated marketers are less efficient. Happy marketers are more productive. Not investing in the right developer can be very costly.
By working with a talented developer, they can proactively discuss what back-end options you’d like to see during the design phase so that once your website is launched you have more flexibility to test different options, change colors, add filters or change content in a truly customizable way. This gives your marketing team flexibility and allows you to create the experience they’re looking for by partnering with a developer that knows how to do that.
RELATED: Developer Utopia - What to expect when you hire an experienced HubSpot Developer
\nBudget efficiency matters.
\n
We want to finish with this one, because we cannot express enough how important it is for you to understand that estimated hours from two different developers are not an apples to apples comparison. What one developer estimates as taking an hour might not include extensive browser and device testing or adding the types of features that marketers like to see in the back end. Effectively you’ve paid for an aesthetic product, but not received one that is also functional for both your customers and prospects and the team that is creating content within it.
The same idea applies to per-hour rates. A developer charging less per hour likely has less experience than a seasoned developer that can code more cleanly with less bugs and still provide you with better functionality that you didn’t even realize you needed.
Losing prospects to budget restrictions is tough for any web development agency, but what’s tougher is when they come back and have to spend even more starting from scratch, or worse, have run out of money and are forced to work with a mess that was left behind by an inexperienced web developer.
Balancing budget in a small business can be difficult, but investing into a powerful, functional website that serves your needs in the long term is incredibly important. There are many ways that websites can be phased over time to accommodate small business budgets and still allow you to hire talented developers.
When you choose your web developer based on experience rather than budget, you set yourself up for success and build the foundation of a powerful website that your customers, employees and executive team will thank you for later.
Don’t know the right questions to ask when you’re vetting developers for your next website project in HubSpot or Wordpress? Check out our blog offering insight on questions to ask when interviewing website developers.
","postEmailContent":"
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.
Here are a few ways that your web development budget restrictions can potentially hold you back:
Under-budgeting your website is a growth handicap.
\n
Not having the budget you need for the goals you have for your website is probably the biggest problem we run into when we receive new proposal requests. Before you start the process of vetting developers and requesting proposals, you’ll want to identify what your goals are by asking some important questions:
What are your expectations for your website performance from a lead generation perspective?
Are you a small business that just desires a simple, informative website or do you want your website to be a lead generation machine?
Is your website a hub of information?
Does it need to operate as its own location and generate revenue with a retail store presence?
These are incredibly important questions that will help you determine the best platform and host for your website. Choosing a platform and infrastructure that can grow with your needs over time is the best route. Starting with a “low budget” website and then having to switch platforms or code from scratch because you hired an inexperienced developer will just end up costing you more in the long run.
One of the things that drives us crazy is clients approaching us with a tiny budget and big dreams. Do we wish you could have everything you want for the price you’ve imagined? Of course. But we live in the real world where an equitable energetic exchange is required to get the things that you want and need. We don’t mean to sound insensitive, but it’s just the harsh reality. Quality comes at a price. Do yourself and your organization a favor by not tossing out random numbers before you’ve clearly communicated your wants, needs and goals to a skilled web developer. Talking through your list with a developer will help you balance your business’ budget with the realities of your needs as a business owner and marketer.
Once you have a better idea of your total investment to achieve your goals, you can break that down into the appropriate timeline to help bridge the gap between your budget and the website that you want without compromising features or the integrity of the framework that you’re building from.
RELATED: The problem with cheap outsourced web development
\nHiring low budget talent yields low budget results.
\n
A website that takes forever to load due to poorly written code.
A website that is ranking poorly because the developer didn’t populate meta descriptions or other SEO data.
A website whose media library is too big, because the developer failed to resize images.
A website with no capabilities to easy generate content or conversion opportunities.
Did you know that a bounce rate increases by 123% if page loading time takes more than 1 second?
If your website is taking a long time to load, you’re missing opportunity.
Every millisecond matters. An increased bounce rate means less website conversions, which means less sales.
Hiring an inexperienced web developer can literally cost you tens to hundreds of thousands over the lifetime of that website - and you’re going to let a few thousand dollars keep you from the prospect of exponential sales growth?
That’s a lot of power in the hands of your developer and for that reason you should hire an expert.
Some web developers are order takers, but we’ve written about it before: your website isn’t a sub sandwich. You need a web developer that can proactively plan your website with your goals in mind, that understands the complex needs of businesses and the marketers that serve them. Websites go beyond aesthetics and gifted developers understand that the bones and the intricacies of clean code, a kick ass user experience and a back end that marketers love is the secret recipe to meeting your website goals.
Lack of experience can cost you employee productivity.
\n
Just because they didn’t abandon the project and might have taken your website to launch, doesn’t mean your developer served you well. Far too often in the development process, businesses and marketing agencies look at the aesthetics of the front end, but none of the back end user interface.
RELATED: So your developer ghosted you, now what?
\n
Their outsourced developer or freelancer partner will launch the site and make the interface impossible to use for the marketer. The content is all too often not easily modified, or requires some level of coding knowledge to update.
A website should not just be easy for a user to navigate that is considering your products and services, but it also needs to be easy to update. So often we encounter prospects that need better access to their websites or need us to edit or modify things that they cannot access that should have easily been granted to the marketers before the website launched. Lack of access and a poor back end experience lead to frustrated, disengaged marketers.
Why is this a problem?
According to VentureBeat.com, not only are 91% of employees already frustrated with workplace technology but, “a staggering 71% of leaders acknowledge that employees will consider looking for a new job if their current employer does not provide access to the tools, technology or information they need to do their jobs well.” Every new piece of software or technology that you introduce for your marketing team to use should be simpler, user-friendly and efficient. And the top complaint? 51% of the top complaints were related to slow speeds. Frustrated marketers are less efficient. Happy marketers are more productive. Not investing in the right developer can be very costly.
By working with a talented developer, they can proactively discuss what back-end options you’d like to see during the design phase so that once your website is launched you have more flexibility to test different options, change colors, add filters or change content in a truly customizable way. This gives your marketing team flexibility and allows you to create the experience they’re looking for by partnering with a developer that knows how to do that.
RELATED: Developer Utopia - What to expect when you hire an experienced HubSpot Developer
\nBudget efficiency matters.
\n
We want to finish with this one, because we cannot express enough how important it is for you to understand that estimated hours from two different developers are not an apples to apples comparison. What one developer estimates as taking an hour might not include extensive browser and device testing or adding the types of features that marketers like to see in the back end. Effectively you’ve paid for an aesthetic product, but not received one that is also functional for both your customers and prospects and the team that is creating content within it.
The same idea applies to per-hour rates. A developer charging less per hour likely has less experience than a seasoned developer that can code more cleanly with less bugs and still provide you with better functionality that you didn’t even realize you needed.
Losing prospects to budget restrictions is tough for any web development agency, but what’s tougher is when they come back and have to spend even more starting from scratch, or worse, have run out of money and are forced to work with a mess that was left behind by an inexperienced web developer.
Balancing budget in a small business can be difficult, but investing into a powerful, functional website that serves your needs in the long term is incredibly important. There are many ways that websites can be phased over time to accommodate small business budgets and still allow you to hire talented developers.
When you choose your web developer based on experience rather than budget, you set yourself up for success and build the foundation of a powerful website that your customers, employees and executive team will thank you for later.
Don’t know the right questions to ask when you’re vetting developers for your next website project in HubSpot or Wordpress? Check out our blog offering insight on questions to ask when interviewing website developers.
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In the world of construction, building a strong foundation ensures the strength of your structure. David Allan Coe said, “It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it’s the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”
The same is true for the framework of your website. It’s not enough to pick a solid platform like HubSpot, you need to have a skilled developer that knows their way around those platforms to build your website for performance, security and conversions. All too often, we see companies held back by their web development budget when it comes to redesigning their website. We’ve had countless meetings with prospects that decide to take a less expensive route to develop their website, thinking that they’re comparing apples to apples in the proposal process only to find they’ve been severely oversold.
Allocating the appropriate amount to your web development budget without being taken advantage of is critical. Your website budget should be proportionate to your expectations for performance, lead goals and expectations for features and turnaround. Every website and business is totally different, so there’s really no wrong answer here - it’s just a matter of aligning your expectations with the budget that you have and choosing the right partner to get you there.