Pre-built theme or bespoke Hubspot website?

[abbiehughes]

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to hear peoples opinions on using an existing theme (we are considering CLEAN Pro) vs getting a custom built Hubspot site. 

We are considering working with an agency that strongly advises against themes.

If anyone has experience in both themes and bespoke Hubspot sites then I'd really appreciate your honest feedback. 

[Stephanie-OG · Accepted solution]

Hi @abbiehughes 👋

I've built many custom themes, have worked editing pre-built marketplace themes and have even built my own marketplace themes (shameless plug-in for the two free ones I launched this week: Inkd and Foodie). 

I think it really depends on what you're looking for. If you already have designs and you want to force a pre-built theme to match them exactly, it might not have the right components to do so and would either not look the same or require a lot of custom development. Personally, as a developer, I'm not a fan of that and encourage building a custom theme instead since it's usually done to cut down costs but theme + custom development might end up costing similar anyway. Maybe that's what your agency is recommending too. 

On the other hand, if you're more flexible you can always download the theme and customize it as needed. Every theme on the marketplace is reviewed by HubSpot and should have: 

• Editable theme fields. These are options to edit the theme across the board. A good theme will have at least as many as the HubSpot boilerplate if not more.  HubSpot's boilerplate has: colours, fonts, spacing, text, buttons, forms, tables, website header and footer. 
• Drag-and-drop. You have sections in which you can set the background colour/image/gradient and then drag in modules as needed, horizontally and vertically. You can also edit the spacing and alignment. 
• Global content. These are your headers and footers and, unless the theme has gone through great lengths to be incredibly flexible, likely to be one of the least flexible parts of the theme, so make sure you pay attention to what's possible. Personally I, like the boilerplate, code part of the header to be a bit more static so that I can create the mobile version and then have drag-and-drop above and below. The footer is 100% drag-and-drop.
• Custom modules. This is the biggest differentiator since you can do pretty much anything with these. What custom modules are included? What fields can be customized? How are they styled? How much can you tweak that styling? If you're buying a theme, make sure the custom modules included will allow you to build everything you need. Some standard ones are: blog posts, cards, accordions/FAQs, sliders, testimonials... etc.
• Templates: while you can build your own layouts with modules in the drag-and-drop editor, it's handy if there are already pre-built templates. These should be fairly flexible though, so you can always edit and rearrange them. If you like the overall theme design and modules but want to rearrange the template layouts, that shouldn't be a problem. 
• Sections: these might not exist on older themes since they're pushing them more now, but they're prebuilt sections so that you can quickly add a specific layout to your page. 

For either a marketplace theme or a custom theme, you'll also want to make sure they're speedy and accessible. For the marketplace ones, you can run Google Lighthouse on the demo site.  

And, if you're going with a custom-built theme, make sure your developer knows HubSpot. I've seen too many themes built on HubSpot where the developer clearly wasn't familiar with how it works and they're often clunky and/or hard to edit. If your theme is built right, it should be lightweight and pretty easy for you to go in and edit it in the future. 

How much you can edit it really depends though. Maybe you don't want your team to make crazy edits to the website so you only have a few text fields. Or maybe you want tons of flexibility and have a ton of fields to edit every last detail text, that's really up to you and your developer. 

That's everything that comes to mind anyway!

---

Stephanie O'Gay Garcia

Freelance HubSpot CMS Developer

Website | Contact

[Anton · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jaycee_Lewis, 

Like almost every developer I've worked with prebuild themes and created custom themes.

TL;DR: depends on your requirements. As a developer who creates mostly custom themes for almost every client it's clear what I would suggest 😃

But why do I think so?

From my experience it's like this:

prebuild themes are great if you

• want to get up and running without investing a lot of time
• don't rely on a "strict" corporate design
• page speed doesn't need to be "A+++"
• if you don't want to/can't invest a lot of money

custom themes are great if:

• you want to give your marketers/page creators only those options that you want to give them without "let's try this" and "ohh look, this looks great"
• you are not bind to a strict corporate design
• you need it to be "pixel perfect"
• you have special functionality requirements (sure you always can create custom modules in a build page)
• you want/need something where you know how is everything connected and what function is needed for later optimization (it can save you time since you don't need as much time to look for things)

Like @Stephanie-OG said - every theme has customizable fields which give you/the marketer the option to change things (If it's set up - globally) without a developer. BUT how many option it has depends on the theme. For my part - I have build myself a nice configuration over the years which I use for every client and modify/extend it to his needs. 

For example:

a prebuild theme comes with a color option for - let's say - headlines; in my configuration it's setup like "you have only the options from your styleguide as a dropdown" by default. This make the life of the marketer easier since he can't make errors and limits him (in a good way) to be styleguide compliant. So no discussion about "I'm not sure if this is the right color"

and: It's obvious why the agency is against themes - they want to make more money 🙂 

Hope this helps, 

best, 

Anton

[Indra · Accepted solution]

@Jaycee_Lewis thanks for mentioning

Hi @abbiehughes,

Have you looked into the posibility of child themes? You will have a little setup for each site by making a duplicate of a new child theme and setting up the correct colors, but this should be the correct way.

Check out HubSpot documentation about it:

- Creation of Child Themes now available in the Design Tools and CLI

- Child Themes

Another option what you can do is setup a custom module that you can connect to a hubDB and use styles in there.

So the way you do it is like:

• Having one theme and setup default styling.
• Make a HubDB where you can setup colors, logo's all custom field to overwrite options
• Make a custom module and use the the HubDB Row field to load the site default that you would like to display.

I think the best option will be the child theme, since users can select the correct theme of template from there. If you want to use the HubDB/module option, users will always have to add the custom module to each page and setup the correct site option.

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Thank you, @Indra 🙌

[Anton · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jaycee_Lewis, 

Like almost every developer I've worked with prebuild themes and created custom themes.

TL;DR: depends on your requirements. As a developer who creates mostly custom themes for almost every client it's clear what I would suggest 😃

But why do I think so?

From my experience it's like this:

prebuild themes are great if you

• want to get up and running without investing a lot of time
• don't rely on a "strict" corporate design
• page speed doesn't need to be "A+++"
• if you don't want to/can't invest a lot of money

custom themes are great if:

• you want to give your marketers/page creators only those options that you want to give them without "let's try this" and "ohh look, this looks great"
• you are not bind to a strict corporate design
• you need it to be "pixel perfect"
• you have special functionality requirements (sure you always can create custom modules in a build page)
• you want/need something where you know how is everything connected and what function is needed for later optimization (it can save you time since you don't need as much time to look for things)

Like @Stephanie-OG said - every theme has customizable fields which give you/the marketer the option to change things (If it's set up - globally) without a developer. BUT how many option it has depends on the theme. For my part - I have build myself a nice configuration over the years which I use for every client and modify/extend it to his needs. 

For example:

a prebuild theme comes with a color option for - let's say - headlines; in my configuration it's setup like "you have only the options from your styleguide as a dropdown" by default. This make the life of the marketer easier since he can't make errors and limits him (in a good way) to be styleguide compliant. So no discussion about "I'm not sure if this is the right color"

and: It's obvious why the agency is against themes - they want to make more money 🙂 

Hope this helps, 

best, 

Anton

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Thank you, @Anton 🙌

[Stephanie-OG · Accepted solution]

Hi @abbiehughes 👋

I've built many custom themes, have worked editing pre-built marketplace themes and have even built my own marketplace themes (shameless plug-in for the two free ones I launched this week: Inkd and Foodie). 

I think it really depends on what you're looking for. If you already have designs and you want to force a pre-built theme to match them exactly, it might not have the right components to do so and would either not look the same or require a lot of custom development. Personally, as a developer, I'm not a fan of that and encourage building a custom theme instead since it's usually done to cut down costs but theme + custom development might end up costing similar anyway. Maybe that's what your agency is recommending too. 

On the other hand, if you're more flexible you can always download the theme and customize it as needed. Every theme on the marketplace is reviewed by HubSpot and should have: 

• Editable theme fields. These are options to edit the theme across the board. A good theme will have at least as many as the HubSpot boilerplate if not more.  HubSpot's boilerplate has: colours, fonts, spacing, text, buttons, forms, tables, website header and footer. 
• Drag-and-drop. You have sections in which you can set the background colour/image/gradient and then drag in modules as needed, horizontally and vertically. You can also edit the spacing and alignment. 
• Global content. These are your headers and footers and, unless the theme has gone through great lengths to be incredibly flexible, likely to be one of the least flexible parts of the theme, so make sure you pay attention to what's possible. Personally I, like the boilerplate, code part of the header to be a bit more static so that I can create the mobile version and then have drag-and-drop above and below. The footer is 100% drag-and-drop.
• Custom modules. This is the biggest differentiator since you can do pretty much anything with these. What custom modules are included? What fields can be customized? How are they styled? How much can you tweak that styling? If you're buying a theme, make sure the custom modules included will allow you to build everything you need. Some standard ones are: blog posts, cards, accordions/FAQs, sliders, testimonials... etc.
• Templates: while you can build your own layouts with modules in the drag-and-drop editor, it's handy if there are already pre-built templates. These should be fairly flexible though, so you can always edit and rearrange them. If you like the overall theme design and modules but want to rearrange the template layouts, that shouldn't be a problem. 
• Sections: these might not exist on older themes since they're pushing them more now, but they're prebuilt sections so that you can quickly add a specific layout to your page. 

For either a marketplace theme or a custom theme, you'll also want to make sure they're speedy and accessible. For the marketplace ones, you can run Google Lighthouse on the demo site.  

And, if you're going with a custom-built theme, make sure your developer knows HubSpot. I've seen too many themes built on HubSpot where the developer clearly wasn't familiar with how it works and they're often clunky and/or hard to edit. If your theme is built right, it should be lightweight and pretty easy for you to go in and edit it in the future. 

How much you can edit it really depends though. Maybe you don't want your team to make crazy edits to the website so you only have a few text fields. Or maybe you want tons of flexibility and have a ton of fields to edit every last detail text, that's really up to you and your developer. 

That's everything that comes to mind anyway!

---

Stephanie O'Gay Garcia

Freelance HubSpot CMS Developer

Website | Contact

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Thank you, @Stephanie-OG 🙌

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Hey, @abbiehughes 👋 Thank you so much for the fantastic question. Let's see if we can get this discussion kicked off for you — @Gonzalo @Anton @Indra @JBeatty @mangelet @Stephanie-OG, can you give your honest opinions to @abbiehughes's question?

Thank you! — Jaycee