#1: The first one

It’s a newsletter from Ercule! 👋 In this issue:

• Core Web Vitals, and why you should care.
• Things to worry about with Hubspot.
• Rappers, and malware. (Well, we’re not sending malware, we just mention it.)

🐙 Core Web Vitals is kind of important

In about a month, Google is scheduled to roll out new ranking criteria: page experience signals.

Basically, Google will be measuring your page’s speed and design consistency in more specific ways. It’s a technical issue that can have a big effect on how well your content performs.

What should you do?

For starters, type your domain into this new tool, and see how you score. If things are red, notify your web dev – they’re the person who will fix it.

(Or hit reply in this email if you want to talk more about it with us).

🐟 Rapper or Malware?

Rapper or Malware is a funny, educational game and brilliant piece of interactive marketing. What starts out as a snarky premise turns into an actually informative exercise.

Kept our attention all the way through (great UX!) and by the end had us thinking that maybe there was more personality in cybersecurity than we’d thought before.

Thanks to Nick Gaudio at Infinite Ranges for passing it along.

🗿 Beware: Hubspot CMS

(This question has come up in a few client meetings. Maybe you’ve been asking it too.)

My team uses Hubspot and we’ve been considering their content management system too. What do you think?

Be careful before choosing Hubspot CMS. It uses its own proprietary language for managing things on your site, which can really complicate things in the long term.

Later on, when it comes time to upgrade your site’s design and add functionality, it will be harder and harder to do so in a standard way if you have to work through Hubspot’s idiosyncratic language.

What should you do?

Encourage your team to explore other options. Namely: a standard CMS. Something like Wordpress (or Webflow, or Jekyll) is better for most companies. We talk about this in more detail here in our blog.

Lots of options out there, just pick something that’s not innovative, interesting, or obscure – you want to innovate with your product, not your CMS.

Do you have a question? Hit reply!

🌾 Community

• Our friends at Oso (who make authorization easier for developers) just secured Series A funding!

• The Chaos Engineers at Gremlin will be hosting their second annual Failover conference on April 27.

🏰 A Note for You, Fair Beta-Reader

You made it. Excellent! Our aim is three-fold.

• Keep in touch with friends
• Figure out what’s on your mind
• Find new ways we can help

With that in mind, please do write us with any notes about this beta run. Seriously. The good and/or the bad. If you hit reply, we’ll see it and respond! ❤️