How did Elixir Solutions transform their website on CMS Hub

On 21 September 2020, we launched our new website on CMS Hub. Now our website has a new look and feel (e.g. brighter colors, animation, patterns). But how exactly did we transform our website on CMS Hub? Keep reading. 😀

Why did we make the switch from WordPress to CMS Hub?

Our previous website was hosted on WordPress. As a HubSpot Diamond Partner, it would make more sense that we build our website on CMS Hub.

In May 2020, HubSpot released new features in their CMS and became ‘CMS Hub’. This became HubSpot's fourth product alongside their other powerful, easy-to-use tools: Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub. Together these tools will make your company grow better.

HubSpot announced new features, like themes and a drag-and-drop editor. If you use a theme for your website, you have the opportunity to edit the global areas of your website. There's no need to go to a stylesheet when you're using themes. With a drag-and-drop editor, you can easily move elements on a page or add new modules on a page. Another update is, when you're using the entire CMS suite, you have the choice of how to structure your blog (subdomain or subdirectory). 

These new features convinced us. There was also no maintenance needed in CMS Hub. With WordPress, you constantly need to update your website and plug-ins, which can break your website. But most importantly, we manage all our marketing activities in one environment; HubSpot. From there on, we decided to create our website on CMS Hub Enterprise. End of August 2020, we canceled our WordPress subscription, because our go-live was scheduled in September 2020.

Phase 1: our rebranding

Since we decided to design our new website on CMS Hub, it was also the right time to change our branding. We went to a brand identity agency for this. They created our new logo, imagery (e.g. animation), patterns and gave some example mock-ups for our new website. Here you see a before and after of our logo:

Phase 2: creating our website 

After we had our new branding elements, we started with the creation of our website. Our approach was to start from an existing theme. From there, we build new modules and templates. Afterward, we began with building our website and landing pages. Thanks to the drag-and-drop editor in CMS Hub, this was a piece of cake! 🍰

Phase 3: go live

If all our website and landing pages were created, we planned to go live. Our website went live on 21 September 2020. 

Phase 4: adapt the default settings in HubSpot

Once when we were live, we adapted the default settings in HubSpot. We changed our logo and colors in the general settings of HubSpot.

In System Pages, we changed our 404 error page and and 500 error page. 

Phase 5: creating the navigations

When our website was live, it was easy to do our navigations. In your footer or menu you have an overview of your important website pages (e.g. jobs, contact us, blog). The navigations in your footer are created as global content. When you want to change your navigations in your menu, you need to go to your settings in HubSpot (Website > Navigations). 

Phase 6: adapting the landing pages, email templates and blog

The last step was adapting the existing landing pages, email templates and blog to our new branding (e.g. logo and colors). Here you see all the different email templates we created with our new rebranding:

This was in brief how we transformed our website on CMS Hub. We also do CMS Hub projects for our clients. These projects are never the same because it depends on the needs of your business. 

Do you want to know which CMS Hub offers we provide? Download our CMS Hub one-pager! 

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