Hey @Katia, so glad to hear it, thank you for responding back!
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Hi there @ericthomas,
Without hiring a developer or learning to implement it yourself, you will need to either use one of the premade themes, or purchase a theme from the asset marketplace (coming soon). The development cost for cloning your templates and replacing flexible columns with dnd_areas should be much less expensive than a website redesign. If interested in that I would suggest either going to the company that built your existing site, or check out our list of agencies that do development. What you described with placing your header, above a dnd_area, and adding a footer - Hiring a developer to just adjust the styles that were causing it to look strange, would also likely be much less expensive than a redesign.
To your comment about other visual builders. Visual builders come at the cost of power. The more you make the visual builder powerful, the more restricted the platform tends to become. While not every company needs advanced functionality, developers can add it. If you transfer all of the power to the visual builder, you hinder the ability for the developer to add those advanced capabilities. The way we’ve approached CMS Hub is different from the other platforms. We focused on striking the balance between content creator freedom of design/creation, and the developer’s ability to do what they do best. Giving the best of both worlds. What we have now is just the start. We plan to keep expanding the abilities that content creators have, and it won’t come at the cost of developer power.
Before I joined HubSpot ~10 months ago I was a developer at an agency. My job was to make websites using whatever platform fit the customer best, almost always it meant a visual builder was necessary. I’ve built with almost all of the tools you mentioned. I know my words will seem biased, being a HubSpotter - but I truly believe CMS Hub strikes that balance better than any other platform right now. We aim to keep that balance, while adding more and more flexibility and control for both content creators and developers. Also remember, while your templates weren’t built with these features in mind, you don’t need to update CMS Hub. It’s already up-to-date and the features are there, you just need templates with those features added.
Regarding having to clone the template to HTML, we are actively thinking about ways to make it easier for companies with older existing sites to use the new features. I don’t have anything specific to announce at this time. Appreciate your patience as we continuously iterate to deliver the best experience we can.