Hubspace is able to provide an outstanding website service for a remarkably low price primarily by standardising our layouts and removing choice from the design process. "Removing choice?" you ask. "Surely, choice is a good thing?". Our experience tells us otherwise, particularly if you have a limited budget - like £595.
It's often tempting with a website project to want to start with a blank slate and "be creative". Designers want to create something stunning that they can point to proudly and say "I did that!". Clients are seduced by great-looking visuals and ambitious technical wizardry - the sexy stuff. Everyone becomes focused on looking good and loses focus on serving the end user well. Added to this, designers often aren't forthright about stuff they know is a bad idea for fear of offending.
In reality, unless the client has very deep pockets, this approach is often a recipe for dissatisfaction on all sides. With too much choice, every step involves multiple complex decisions. Everyone has an opinion and the process takes up lots of unnecessary time, often tending towards the "lowest common denominator". The client slowly gets dissatisfied because the project isn't meeting the expectations she imagined for it. She asks for changes which seem trivial to her but are very time-consuming for the designer. The designer finds that the project begins to take up far more time than he's being paid for, and because the client has the final say, he doesn't even get to create a design he's proud of. As often as not, she ends up with a site that she considers to be below par for the fortune she paid for it, and he ends up feeling that his work was undervalued and underpaid.
Happily, there's a simpler way...
If you take a look at our designs, we hope you'll agree that each site looks good and distinct. If you look more closely, however, you'll notice that they all follow a similar layout and navigation structure.
We follow best practice guidelines to standardise as much as possible, leaving us free to maximise what matters - ease of navigation, interactivity, community features, search engine optimisation, connectedness to your social networks, and making it super-easy for you to modify content.
With Hubspace you can clearly see what you're going to get for your £600. And more often than not, it's just what you need.