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HubSpot CMS Hub Implementation & CRM-Powered Website Setup

Make your website more than just a billboard. 

Launch a dynamic, CRM-connected website with Aptitude 8—HubSpot’s go-to partner for custom CMS Hub onboarding and portal development.

Need help with a new implementation or migration to HubSpot? Contact us for a free consultation.

 

Advanced CMS Certification

Aptitude 8 holds every certification relevant to CMS Hub. HubSpot trusted us to build inbound.com for their INBOUND annual conference for the last two consecutive years.

Introduction to CMS Hub

HubSpot’s CMS Hub starts as a simple site builder—but at the Enterprise level, it powers full CRM-powered website setups with portals, apps, and dynamic content tied to your data.

With the right HubSpot CMS onboarding, your site becomes a scalable, personalized experience for customers, partners, and prospects. But a poor HubSpot implementation creates complexity and slows your team down. Aptitude 8 ensures your CMS is built to perform—for both users and the teams managing it.

 

Want to learn more about CRM powered CMS?

Check out our VP of Services, Emily Wingrove's talk at INBOUND 2022, covering how we built inbound.com on HubSpot!

 

What even is a CRM powered CMS?

The modern business landscape has shifted, driven by changing expectations and system limitations:

Much higher expectations from buyers
Not enough time to work 'how we're used to'
Necessity to work smarter, not harder 
Inability of traditional CMS's to meet those demands

Your website is no longer just a digital billboard. It’s a critical part of your customer experience—and it needs to connect directly to your CRM to deliver the data, automation, and personalization today’s businesses require.

Enter: HubSpot's CMS Hub

What makes HubSpot’s CMS Hub unique is that it’s built directly on the HubSpot CRM. Your CRM becomes the database powering dynamic, personalized web experiences—like auto-generating partner pages or directories based on live CRM data.

This tight integration aligns internal processes with the external web experience. At Aptitude 8, we use it to dynamically generate our Careers Page, from a “Job” object in our CRM.

It’s powerful for any business, but especially for those offering tech-enabled services that need their website to reflect real-time operations.

Membership Portals

CMS Hub Enterprise gives you the power to build secure, private sections of your website for specific audiences—no custom provisioning required. HubSpot handles logins, passwords, and access control.

Built on HubSpot’s Lists and workflows, Memberships let you automate who gets access and when—fully integrated with your CRM. Use it to build portals for partners, customers, employees, or any audience unique to your business.

Partner portal UI for deal registration and documentation access

Partner Portals

  • Create and register new deals
  • Access private documentation and enablement content
  • Access and manage tickets
  • Correspond with your team 
Customer portal for support tickets, invoices, and resources

Customer Portals

  • View invoices or purchase history
  • Access support documentation
  • Create and manage support tickets
  • Surface new offerings or marketing collateral
Employee portal with onboarding tools and forecast data

Employee Portals

  • Show forecasted commissions and calculators
  • Store employee handbook or resources
  • New hires and employee profile

These are just some examples! We have built portals for resellers, dealers, students, coaches, and many other audiences that are unique to our customers. We’d love to help support you with yours. 

 

Interested in learning how to build an ATS in HubSpot?

Click here to check out our blog where we walk you through building your applicant tracking system right in your HubSpot instance!

 

Our Implementation Process

01 Solutions Design

We start your implementation with a deep discovery and design phase, mapping out key user journeys, desired functionality, and getting clarity on the underlying data model needed to provide it.

We validate that what you need is possible and let you know what limitations exist and how we can work around them. We will deliver you low resolution mockups and click paths with representative data models so we can agree on end functionality. Then we build a gantt chart showing your project timeline and deliverables. 

02 High Resolution Mockups

After Solutions Design, you’ll be equipped with a CRM consultant and a UX/UI consultant from our team.

They will work with you to design high resolution mockups in Figma of your CMS solution, using data driven designs that will represent your CMS site with highly personalized pages and user journeys based on the CRM data it is built upon.

We will review pages and functionality with your team and approve these design assets before building any functional pages. 

Your account setup includes:

UX/UI design mockups with fonts, colors, and icons
Page level design 
Fonts, colors, icons, and all the design assets
Clickpaths showing user journeys across website pages
User Journeys & Clickpaths 
How users will navigate your site and how pages link together
CRM-driven CMS page architecture mapped to CRM records
CRM driven CMS pages
Map the web experience back to your core CRM data
Personalized content components driven by CRM segmentation
Personalized web pages
Dynamically change content on your site based on who’s visiting

03 Design Revisions

We do our best to capture the intended user journeys and design requirements from your team during the solutions design phase, but prior to moving to development we want to ensure nothing is missed.

We often also find that once designs come to life, clients discover additional functionality they want to include or that some of the vision feels in-cohesive once manifested.

We will guide you through this process seeking to limit scope changes, and ensure they’re handled optimally should they come up. We handle these all prior to development. 

➢ First round revisions

Discuss deliverables at a high level and adjust accordingly

➢ Figma comment revisions

Leave comments directly on our pages and make detailed edits

➢ Final approval

Once all changes have been implemented, approve your designs for development

04 Development

Once we approve our designs, we’re ready to get building. CMS Projects often encompass more than just page level development.

Our team will build modules that optimize the content editor experience, design data models and connect external data elements both inside the CRM and headlessly on the site itself, and build pages that are responsive and match the designs specced. 

Custom CMS modules for reusable content blocks
Module development 
We will ensure maximum modularity so your content editors can repurpose pages in the future
Data integration between CRM and CMS front-end
Data integration 
Whether inside of your CRM, or headlessly at the page level
Page builds matching approved mockups and specs
Page development 
Match your real working pages to the designs we specced in the previous page

05 Internal QA & Testing

Our team will test each page we’ve created, the modules we’ve developed and ensure everything works as expected.

This will include both people familiar with your project, as well as “fresh eyes” outsiders from our team so that assumptions don’t get in the way of working end results. 

Internal QA by CMS project team
Project team QA
The team that built it will make sure it works as expected
Fresh eyes QA from external A8 team members
"Fresh Eyes" QA
Additional A8 team members not staffed on your project will test without bias

06 User Acceptance Testing

Once we finish our internal QA, we will ask your team to join the process. You will be provided with a testing and QA sheet to make testing easy, and ensure we are following the right process to get user journeys tested and approved.

We want the actual end users from your team to participate so we ensure we haven’t made any assumptions earlier in the process that prevent them from using the finished product. 

⇢ Module usability

Ensure end users can edit and update content easily 

⇢ CRM driven content testing

Your CRM data looks as it should both on page and inside your CRM platform

⇢ User journey testing

User experience matches both design and expectations

07 Training & enablement

Ensuring your team knows exactly how your new platform works is crucial for your success. Our team will always make sure to walk you through what we've set up, what you can expect & show you exactly how everything is meant to function.

If you have internal developers, we can help them get up to speed on anything custom, but our end goal is that you and your team can manage anything we produce for the long haul without relying on us or other external resources. 

Expert-led CMS training sessions by role
Expert trainers
Who are aligned with your goals and available to you throughout the project
Role-based CMS Hub training sessions tailored to specific user groups
Specialized sessions
For your user-groups, so they get relevant training based on their roles
Hands-on exercises for CMS editors and admins
Hands-on exercises
Designed to let your team practice what they will be doing in the system
Documentation for internal CMS support and onboarding
Documentation
Provided for your team to reference and for onboarding new employees

08 Go Live

Once your team feels comfortable with your new CMS solution it's time to get it live. We will cover all of the redirects, work with your team on any user provisioning requirements, and support your new CMS solution during the go live window.

We often consider CMS projects a “phase 1” and transition to ongoing support engagements to continue optimizing the platform as your business grows. After your launch is successful, we’d be happy to explore that as an option with you. 

Redirect configuration for CMS page migration
Configure redirects
To ensure you don't have any floating pages or 404s
User provisioning for gated or private CMS content
Provision private content access
Send activation emails and enable your users to access private content
Live support for CMS deployment and issue resolution
Go live support
If anything breaks, we’re here to help

Contact Us

Let's make things happen together.

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