HubSpot Inspire Gallery

Challenges with the old website

Before our rebuild, the Inspire Gallery relied on a system that looked simple but was difficult to manage. Agencies filled out a form that fed into a HubDB table, but from there everything slowed down: 

• Approvals could take weeks. 
• Updates meant resubmitting an entirely new entry. 
• Contributors had no way to manage their own submissions. 
• HubSpot’s team had to handle everything manually. 

It was a gallery that inspired on the outside, but behind the scenes it was inefficient. 

Building the technical foundation 

In scoping the project, we knew the Inspire Gallery needed to become self-service. The best way to give contributors control over their own entries was to use HubSpot memberships, which rely on CRM-powered pages. To make that possible, every site in the gallery had to be represented as a  record inside a custom object in the CRM. 

That decision meant transforming the old HubDB data into a brand-new custom object, while preserving all existing entries. Once complete, this gave us: 

• A structure that supports HubSpot memberships and contributor self-management. 
• Dynamic CRM-powered pages that automatically display gallery entries. 
• Associations with contacts and companies, creating a much stronger link between submissions and their owners. 

By rethinking the foundation in this way, we set the stage for a gallery that could scale, and that contributors could finally manage themselves. 

Planning the experience 

With the technical foundation in place, we turned our attention to the bigger picture: how the Inspire Gallery should work from end to end. We mapped out the complete workflow, from the way visitors would browse the gallery on the front end, to how contributors would log in and manage their submissions, through to how HubSpot’s team would oversee approvals and administration. 

This holistic view gave us the blueprint to design a seamless experience for everyone involved. 

Utilising HubSpot Memberships 

At the heart of the solution was HubSpot’s membership functionality. We created a secure dashboard where contributors could: 

• Log in or sign up with their company email. 
• View all past submissions from their company/agency. 
• Create new entries or edit and delete existing ones. 
• Track the approval status of each submission. 

The system even recognises contributors by domain, meaning a new team member can manage an entry submitted years ago. 

Designing the website

A major part of this project was the front-end transformation. The old gallery had started to feel dated, so we completely overhauled the design to align with HubSpot’s refreshed brand and to bring the user experience up to modern expectations. 

The new design is clean, functional, and built on best practices, but importantly it doesn’t let HubSpot’s branding overshadow the real stars: the websites themselves. 

Each entry is presented with space and clarity, whether through live iFrames or high-quality full-length screenshots, and the layout makes it easy for visitors to browse and explore. 

The result is a huge visual improvement on what existed before, a gallery that looks and works the way you’d expect from a leading platform, while keeping the focus firmly on the creativity of the community.