How easy is it to use HubSpot CMS?

HubSpot CMS system is a very different content management system from other content management systems. Its main purpose in life is to allow the creation and editing of website pages quickly and easily. And that doesn’t mean by designers and developers.

HubSpot has had a CMS in one form or another in the 10 years it’s been up and running. The early editions of their editors left a lot to be desired. As a seasoned developer even I found it an absolute nightmare to try an piece together landing pages, lord only knows how I’d have gotten on trying to put a whole website in there. If you search in general about the HubSpot CMS, you often get a collection of screen shots from the old system, so you get a chance to see how clunky and unfriendly the whole thing was.

HubSpot were well aware of the limitations of their system so embarked on creating a new system called HubSpot CMS. Content management systems are a tricky beast, often they need to be capable of doing so many different jobs, they end up not being very good at any of them. The great thing with HubSpot was they had a very straightforward brief: Create a content management system that could be used for marketing. Simple!

It is true though, there’s lots of bits of ancillary functions that you get in content management systems that just cloud what’s actually important when it comes to marketing online. Don’t get me wrong, HubSpot CMS is packed with features, it just tends to do away with so much of the periphery you get in other systems, allowing you to get on with the making the site great, and a great success.

WordPress has a raft of plugins and templates available so you can lift right off the shelf a site and get going, but again, it’s not focused and concerned with ensuring you’re doing your online marketing right. Its not guiding your hand and picking out what’s important with your website pages, so invariably, unless you’re a SEO guru, its more than likely your pages will fall short somewhere.

HubSpot CMS now has a library of templates you can add your logo to and get building your pages. More likely you’ll need a web agency like ourselves who are experts in producing custom templates and UX for sites to ensure you’re building the right look and feel for the site, as well as creating user journeys that people will actually want to follow. The great power comes from the flexibility of the templates that are produced under the HubSpot CMS system.

The out of the box responsive framework in HubSpot uses a 12 column system, you can add as many rows and modules in that as you like. The modules that come with the HubSpot are pretty much what you’d expect. You get a text editor module, with a similar interface to Word or perhaps any WYSIWYG editor you’ve used on the web. You’ve also got an image module, which does a great job of encouraging to include that key alt tag, which not only helps with the usability of the site, it can also help with SEO. Then you’ve got a call to action module, because there’s no point someone being on the page if they’re not actually going to engage with you right? This allows you to track and measure the effectiveness of your messaging, and they’re so simple to set up and drop in, you can just sit back, test, measure and refine. Analysis has never been so straightforward.

There’s plenty of other modules and the option to create global modules so you can re-use frequently used modules on multiple pages. Beyond the standard modules, we often create custom modules for clients that take the sites functionality to a new level. What’s really great about these is they still use the standard HubSpot editing system, so their use is completely standard and second nature to using the rest of the HubSpot editing system, so there’s nothing new to learn.

The key thing to remember is that the HubSpot CMS system was build by marketing people for marketing people. It’ll give you a never before experienced freedom when it comes to creating your pages, and still be there holding your hand ensuring you’ve included all your SEO elements in the right places and that your content length is correct. It will make your life easier, it will make your online marketing better. If you’d like to get started on transitioning your site to the HubSpot CMS system, why not speak to one of the UKs leading HubSpot partners by contacting us here.