My name is Patrick Eng and I’m a member of the Onboarding Team at HubSpot. Your website is one of your biggest assets and with your CMS Hub plan, you can easily set up, customize, and manage all your pages while also leveraging the power of the HubSpot CRM. And with CMS Enterprise being released earlier this year, the ability to create custom objects, and even create dynamic content through HubDB or serverless functions, we want to ensure you have all of the answers to be set up for success using CMS Hub. We’ll be available to answer questions from November 16 - November 20, so please feel free to ask us anything. Need some suggestions for what to ask? Here are some example questions:
Is it worth setting up a blog? What’s the difference between a blog post, a landing page, and a website page? How many domains can I have? How can I optimize my pages for SEO? How can I best use the Content Staging tool? How do I use HubDB? How do I customize a Theme? We have members of the HubSpot product, developer, support, and success team here to answer any questions you might have. Luke Summerfield (@Lukesummerfield) - CMS Hub Go-To-Market Lead, Product Katie Tade (@katie) - Product Manager Will Spiro (@wspiro) - Product Manager Snaedís Valsdóttir (@snaedis) - Associate Product Manager Jon McLaren (@jmclaren) - Senior CMS Developer Advocate A.J. LaPorte (@AJLaPorte) - Senior CMS Developer Advocate Ashley Kim - Customer Success Manager Joe Roche (@joerr) - Customer Success Manager Madelyn Simmons - Customer Success Manager Allison Nichols (@anichols) - Principal Onboarding Specialist Jermaine Charvy (@jcharvy) - Principal Onboarding Specialist Ian McKeown - Principal Onboarding Specialist Justin (@jtit) - Senior Customer Onboarding Specialist Patrick Eng (@PatrickEng) - Customer Onboarding Specialist Cooper McDonald (@cmcdonald) - Senior Customer Support Specialist Ernestina Spinu (@eSpinu) - Senior Customer Support Specialist Cathal Hopper (@CathalHopper) - Customer Support Specialist Feel free to drop in your questions below. We’ll start answering questions on November 16th and until 3 PM EST on November 20th. Look forward to hearing from you soon!
The Facebook Messenger integration only connects your Facebook messages to your HubSpot account. Our Instagram integration itself is purely for scheduling and publishing posts from the HubSpot Social tool. To respond to incoming Instagram messages you will need to log into the native app. There is an existing Idea thread that I would recommend upvoting and commenting on.
Hi! I'm still fairly new to hubspot CMS and got my certificate yesterday, but one thing i've wonder is if there's plans or a way to enabled intellisense to the design manager? Would be a nice thing to have for faster coding and readability(when I created a custom module it felt like the 3 different codeblock stacked on eachother made things harder than it has to be).
And secondly will there or is there a way to use shortcommands for coding? For example when using an IDE i usually make use of Alt+up/down arrowkey to move the marked lines if i made a mistake in the structure or or want to move a tag to a lower or higher level.
At the moment, we have no immediate plans to bring an intellisense-type experience to the Design Manager. However, we have been investing in the local development experience, allowing developers to bring their own tools and technologies to the CMS development experience. If you have not checked out the CMS CLI, it allows you to use whatever IDE/text editor you prefer, with whatever extensions you prefer. This tutorial takes you through getting up and running with the CLI in a few easy steps.
We recently released the HubSpot VS Code Extension for Visual Studio Code, which has code snippet completion, syntax highlighting, and more, to make the local development experience smooth and efficient. Using the CLI and this extension might bring that intellisense-type experience you are looking for! It is possible we bring features like this to the Design Manager at some point, but this is not currently planned.
From an SEO perspective this blog post explains fairly well some good practices around creating an information architecture.
From a development standpoint there are 3 primary ways to build these product listing and individual product pages, and the path you take depends on the individual business's needs.
Use normal web site pages with drag and drop areas
This is ideal for scenarios where a company has only a few products or services. It gives them a ton of flexibility to build the pages to suit their needs. However when you start having dozens of products this becomes more difficult to manage.
Use HubDB to create dynamic pages (CMS Hub Pro and Enterprise)
This enables you to create a massive amount of pages by updating one HubDB table - which is like editing a spreadsheet. This is especially useful in scenarios where products and services have similar types of data associated with them. Think things like:
Price
colors
size
features
With HubDB you can display all of that information in consistent ways across all of the product pages making the user experience more consistent and easy to understand.
Use custom objects (Requires an enterprise product)
Custom objects are a really powerful and unique way to go. To the developer using custom objects will feel very similar to working with HubDB. The advantage of custom objects though is that you can associate the data with your other CRM objects, to generate useful business insights.
We are currently using HS and integrate with BigCommerce which is not always the smoothest thing. What capabilities exist within CMS to not only manage our website but encompass our ecommerce needs? Can it do everything or would I still need a separate ecommerce solution. If it is a separate app, then what plaforms integrate with Hubspot?
HubSpot does not have an out of the box ecommerce component to our system. That being said, Piesync from HubSpot does have many connections to ecommerce solutions that can help connect the different systems together. In addition to PieSync, you could also leverage either the native Shopify integration or the eCommerce Bridge. Depending on your product library and technical resources, you could build something on the HubSpot CMS that mimics an eCommerce platform but it would require heavy technical resources. Working with either a custom integration or a 3rd party like PieSync can remove a lot of that technical heavy lifting.
@PatrickEng when I take a step back and look at the larger trend that HubSpot has been doing with their products the past couple years—opening up their products to smaller businesses with lower price points—will there ever be a "Starter" CMS option offered?
Signed by a web developer that would love to not have to manage PHP servers any longer. 😊
Hi Stefen - thanks for breaking the ice with the first question of today's CMS Hub AMA! 😀
I don't think you're alone in wanting a lighter-weight CMS Starter product. 🙂 Not everyone is ready or a good fit for our Professional-level product line - I can see the value in having a lighter-weight CMS that makes it easier for customers to get started.
It's a topic we've been thinking about internally, however, we don't have anything officially planned. That said, I'd be curious to learn more about what you'd like to see in a CMS Starter and where it could help solve challenges. If you're up for a chat, please send me an email (Luke -at- HubSpot (dot) com).
P.S. I also don't think you're alone in not wanting to manage PHP anymore. 😉