What does HubSpot website development involve?

Development starts once a design exists. Your designer hands over layouts for each page type, and a developer turns them into templates, custom modules and live pages on HubSpot’s CMS. Much of the work sits where a visitor never looks, in how pages share sections and how your editors change content after launch.

What HubSpot website development covers

Website development is the engineering half of a site project. It takes a finished design and produces pages your team can publish and edit. We split the work into these pieces:

• Page templates: the layouts each type of page uses, built from the design.
• Custom modules: the sections a design repeats, built once and reused across pages.
• Landing pages: campaign pages your marketing team publishes on its own schedule.
• Portals: membership and partner areas where a known visitor logs in.
• Content entry: moving copy and images into the new pages, with an owner named in the scope.

The list stops at design. We do custom development on HubSpot’s CMS and do no design work. The visual direction comes from your team or from a designer you hire.

Each piece of the build depends on decisions made before it. A module needs to know which content varies between pages. A template needs to know which modules it holds. A portal needs to know who logs in and what each person sees. We collect those answers during scoping, and every engagement starts with a written scope and transparent pricing.

How development differs from design

Design decides what the site looks like and how a visitor moves through it. Development decides how that design gets built and maintained. The two jobs produce different outputs, and a site project needs an owner for each.

Question	Design	Development
What it produces	Layouts, styles, page flows	Templates, modules, live pages
Who owns it	Your designer or in-house team	The developer
When it happens	First	After design approval
What it settles	How the site looks	How the site works and gets edited
What it hands on	Approved designs	A site your team can edit

A design that skips the editing question leaves the developer guessing. Suppose your designer draws several versions of a feature section, each with small differences in spacing and image size. The developer can build a separate module for every version. The developer can also build a single module with settings your editors switch. The second route keeps the site easier to maintain, and it depends on someone deciding which differences matter.

We raise those questions during scoping.

What gets built, from pages to portals

A HubSpot site project can include any mix of the builds below. Many site projects run beside CRM work, and our services overview lists the integrations, custom builds and other solutions that often sit alongside a site build.

Websites

A website build covers every page type in the design. The page list sets the size of the job. Pages that share a template take less build time than pages with layouts of their own, because the template work happens once. For a rebuild, start from the current site’s page list and mark each page to keep, merge or retire.

Landing pages

Landing pages serve campaigns, and campaigns change often. Landing pages can draw on the same modules as the main site. Your marketing team can then publish a new page from existing sections. A developer steps in when a campaign needs a section the library lacks.

Membership and partner portals

We build membership portals and partner portals on HubSpot. A portal adds access rules that a public website lacks. The scope for a portal lists each audience, the content each audience may see and the data that decides access. A partner portal might hold sales material for partners, while a membership portal might hold resources for members. Access rules depend on accurate contact data, so the people behind each login need clean records before launch.

What a relaunch looks like in practice

We relaunched RedBeam’s full website in 3 weeks, with 20+ custom pages and 60+ custom modules. The RedBeam case study covers the project in detail.

The module count in that relaunch sits well above the page count. That pattern follows from building for editors, since each page draws on a shared library of sections. RedBeam’s timeline came from RedBeam’s scope. Your page count, module count and content readiness set your own timeline.

Most projects kick off within days of signing. One HubSpot expert stays with your project from discovery through training. That person runs discovery, builds the strategy, implements the build and trains your team. We present options and pricing for any out-of-scope work an audit uncovers. We do none of that work until you approve it.

What to have ready before development starts

Development moves at the pace of its inputs. These items keep a build from stalling:

• Approved designs for every page type, including mobile layouts.
• A page list that marks which pages share a template.
• Final copy and images, or a named owner for each.
• A list of editors and the changes each one makes.
• For a portal, each audience and the content it may see.
• HubSpot licenses for the site, bought directly from HubSpot.

We sell no HubSpot licenses. Your site’s hubs, tiers and features come from our recommendation, and HubSpot sells them to you, as our pricing page explains. New clients start with a 10-hour minimum, billed at $225 an hour.

This approach depends on a finished design. When the design keeps changing during the build, each revision reopens templates and modules already built, and the schedule slips until the design settles.

Start with the page list. Mark each page with its template, its editor and the person who owns its copy, and the development scope follows from that list.