What are the possible things I should do?
Hi @franz_jingco,
Welcome to the HubSpot Community!
Could be a bit more specific, which features or areas of HubSpot are you referring to? It’s a big platform with marketing, sales, service, data, design, revenue features. The answer to your question depends a lot on the area.
As a general answer, I haven’t come across employers who want so see a portfolio rather than the HubSpot skills. It would be unusual to have a portfolio of reports and workflows, for example.
If you’re referring to HubSpot’s design tools and CMS, then it’s a different story of course and it very much makes sense to design your own website based on the HubSpot CMS.
Similarly, if you want to prove your HubSpot developer expertise, create your own app, custom cards etc so you can easily document and showcase them.
Best regards
Good day, @karstenkoehler!
Thank you for responding, I appreciate you for helping me. I am referring to HubSpot’s design tools and CMS, since I am well enhanced in graphic design as well to improve and showcase a deeper level of aiming to become a digital marketing.
I wanted to switch field from graphic designer to digital marketing since I am an undergrad student up taking the Bachelor of Science in Business Administration Major in Marketing Management. Digital marketing will help me aligned properly with the program courage that I am taking.
Again, thank you for sharing your knowledge!
@franz_jingco in that case, I’d recommend this free certification course: https://academy.hubspot.com/courses/cms-for-marketers
After completing this course, I’d recommend setting up your own HubSpot account and creating pages or a website with HubSpot’s design tools.
You might also find this helpful: How to create a portfolio - #3 by Anton
@karstenkoehler thank you helping, I’ll keep this in mind
Hey @franz_jingco,
welcome to the community!
As @karstenkoehler mentioned, the academy course is the way to start to get a great baseline of the Content Hub/CMS.
A few more insights from a designer and developer:
It all comes down to you and your expectations. As in every CMS, you got tons of options which you should think of first.
A few questions you should answer for yourself:
- How much time do I want to invest into the portfolio?
- Should the portfolio itself be a work to show or just a “shell” for the actual work?
- Do I want to touch code?
Depending on your decisions, here a few options:
Option A (the easiest and fastest):
Applies if you don’t want to dive into code at all or just do some basic coding.
Go to the marketplace and search for a fitting theme. Download/Install it, create a child-theme and start building your portfolio. If you want to modify something like CSS, you can overwrite it in the child.css.
Option B (easy and somewhat fast):
Applies if you want to dive a little bit into coding but have a great start without thinking about to many aspects.
Similar to Option A, but additionally with module customization in a child-theme.
Modules (building blocks) are the core of every page.
HubSpot got a few (around 40) so-called default modules which are the same for every HubSpot portal. These default modules are very basic modules like form, headline, button…
Every theme got its own so-called theme modules.
These theme modules were developed by the theme manufacturer and are available only in this specific theme.
Depending on the chosen theme, modules may vary.
It is also important to know that theme modules may not be compatible between themes.
In general it’s like this: The functionality of a module is technically limitless. From something simple like a headline to a complex multi-column grid layout with filtering options - everything is possible.
In order to modify a default or theme module, you need to clone it. The cloning location doesn’t really matter, but I recommend to keep them organized.
Cloned default modules in something like a dedicated folder, theme modules in the child-theme.
Option C (a bit advanced):
This option is great if you want to dive into custom development, don’t want to rely on somebody else’s work, looking for a (small) technical challenge or want to dive a little bit into HubSpot development.
If one of these options apply, you can create a custom theme from the boilerplate starting point. This gives you a decent folder structure and the most mandatory files. Everything else is up to you.
Option D (very advanced; tailoring to the last pixel):
Recommended if you are a developer or want to have full control over every little aspect of the theme/page.
If you’re a perfectionist and/or want to have full control over everything, you can create a custom theme completely from scratch. Every function, every module, every template - everything will be in your hands. This makes a lot of fun if you want to learn the most about Hubspot CMS development, but has an extrem high ramp up time compared to something like Option A or Option B.
One thing I’d recommend: Grab the layout.css from the boilerplate for this one as it’s somewhat required.
A few tips (not just HubSpot specific):
- Regardless of the chosen option, try thinking ahead and plan stuff.
For instace - if you’re designing a website in Figma, you create components. Those components can be a button, an icon list, a hero …
The equivalent for such elements are modules in HubSpot.
Therefore:
Think about it when designing.
A button has an URL and at least a label (text). Transferred to a Hubspot module it would be the same - a URL field and a text (not rich-text) element.
If you have something like a primary, secondary and tertiary button, these are styles which can be “stored” in a CSS class. To easily switch between them (change variant in Figma terms), you can add a choice field to the module and put the class name as the value into it. Then, you just paste the choice field into the classes of the module. - Something that helps me every day is the Atomic Design Approach. Super helpful when designing and coding anything
- If you want to dive deeper into Hubspot development, I can highly recommend to checkout this DeveloperHUG session/recording on youtube from a few years ago.
Hope this helps
Best,
Anton
p.s: if you’d like to have some more info about something specific, let me know
@Anton I appreciate this information you’ve given. I feel grateful and thankful for joining this community, it gives me a lot of information that will help me in this journey. I’ll keep you both in touch, thank you
Best regards
sure thing!
Happy to help