Customer Story

How It Begin

The tipping point came after LivTech hired a contractor to rebuild a website for $20,000. Not only was the project four months overdue, but the contractor built it in a way where LivTech couldn’t use any of the work to rebuild the more than 10 sites it needed.

Before that moment, however, LivTech faced a problem with its various websites: They all used different web hosting platforms. “We use HubSpot for our sales, CRM, and marketing automation platform,” says Derek Jones, senior vice president at LivTech. “However, we had websites on four different platforms, like WordPress and Webflow. It was very expensive for us to maintain different platforms for web hosting, and our marketers did not feel comfortable working inside of so many systems without a web developer on staff. We ended up eating away at our marketing and media budget by making simple changes to landing pages.”

For a while, LivTech tried to make it work, juggling the different hosting platforms and individually updating older websites. But when Derek learned that Hubspot’s website offering could support hosting multiple brands within Hubspot, he knew LivTech had to take action.

“The website was being built on WordPress and was built in a way that even with a new site, we could see before we even launched it, it was not built to be managed by a marketer that does not have coding experience,” Derek says. “We also found a security vulnerability ourselves prior to launching the site from one of the various plugins that were used. The vendor was not able to find the exact location of the security vulnerability, so we had spent $20,000 building and getting ready to deploy a website that we couldn’t launch.”

So Derek went to Google and typed “HubSpot CMS vs. Webflow,” and he came across a HubBase article that broke down the pros and cons of each platform. The content piqued his interest.

Expertise in HubSpot

Before bringing on HubBase, LivTech reached out to its HubSpot partner, a full-service company that handled its SEO and SEM. “We asked them, ‘Can you quickly rebuild this website?’” Derek says. “We thought, ‘Well, every website is a compilation of about 15 or 20 modules, right?’ We just knew there had to be a better way to do it, especially since we have more than 15 brands. Our full-service agency partner just didn’t get it and said ‘no’ — they were interested in charging more than $20,000 for each new website. HubBase said, ‘Yes, that’s actually how HubBase was built. Once you create the initial set of modules, we can make them available for all your other websites.’”

HubBase’s expertise in HubSpot first became apparent to Derek when he came across its blog post about HubSpot CMS vs. Webflow. When he dug deeper and saw that HubBase prioritized building safe and secure websites in HubSpot and that pentesting was a part of its process, he reached out. And after hearing that it could help LivTech rebuild its websites entirely on HubSpot, he was sold, especially when HubBase said it could deliver results in three weeks.

“HubBase really understood how we could use HubSpot to build websites,” he adds. “And now, we’ve almost launched all the websites inside of HubSpot using HubBase. They were just like, ‘This is how HubSpot was designed to build and scale websites.’ They knew this was a scalable process that would then allow me to share design and website best practices with my team, and if we see a good page that we like, we can ask them to build it. I can press a button, and then we have those modules available to all our other brands or landing pages.”

A Collaborative Process

One of Derek’s favorite parts of working with HubBase is how much it involved them in the process. From the very beginning, HubBase asked LivTech to provide examples of how it wanted the site to look and function.

"They had a process in which they said, ‘Hey, go out and find the websites that you like; create a list, and then tell us what you like about them. Tell us the specific parts,’” he says. “That was one of the really cool parts of the process. We got on a call several times with our team. This helped us create a list of the modules we wanted, and it also allowed us to think ahead and create nice, modern-looking websites that represented our brand really well and that we could be proud of. I really enjoyed that part of the process because I was able to involve my team."

Throughout the entire project, HubBase remained communicative and welcomed feedback. Derek appreciated that his team could receive an answer within the same day, as well as the tools HubBase used to keep the project on track. Trello.com and Slack minimized the number of calls he had to make, but the two platforms also kept the project consistently moving forward.

“We would just collaborate in these tools. We’d ask questions or give examples,” he says. “You’re going to find bugs as part of website development, and we could easily say, ‘Hey, we need to change here. Or let them know when we like a specific element.’”