What is the key to success?
There are countless career coaches and spiritual gurus that claim ownership to the answer through seemingly endless monologues about the potential of the inner self, that are often too lengthy and dull to grasp. I’ve browsed through thousands of motivational quotes, looking for inspiration, but none of them actually got me stimulated to begin writing. All of them tell us that if we work more and work harder, we will eventually be rewarded with success. But once I sat down in front of the white screen, I realized that working hard doesn’t necessarily guarantee success (working hard does not equate to working smart). And so I organized my ideas in a bullet point list and found myself typing away. Why? Because it was easy to stay focused and work once I got my thoughts organized.
So, the key to success is not a secret mindset.
The key to success is organization.
And so, I present you with a blog post on how can Naming Conventions help you stay organized in your HubSpot CMS to ultimately ease internal operations and improve your marketing strategies.
If your site was developed in a content management system (CMS) like WordPress and you are complementing it with HubSpot Marketing Hub, then it may be time to upgrade your CMS to HubSpot to ensure that your data is organized in one centralized system for promoting efficiency of your internal operations and accommodating data-driven marketing campaigns.
We have worked on developing websites with HubSpot since 2012 and the reason we swear by HubSpot is that we see our clients prosper with an easy to use system for creating and managing content. HubSpot CMS provides you with tools that help you stay organized and focused on lead-generation and inbound marketing techniques.
Before implementing HubSpot CMS, our clients greatly struggled with managing lots of data on their site. They were creating and editing a lot of content, pages, and files that would fill up a significant portion of their working hours. On top of that, when they brought on additional fields in their CMS and client information in CRM, they had too much custom data on their plate. It was difficult for them to find and analyze their data to determine whether their marketing campaigns had a positive impact or were a flop.
That is why your business needs a top-notch organization technique that will ease your internal operations and create leverage for everyone on your team, from service through marketing to sales specialists. HubSpot provides an all-in-one tool that will enhance the work of your in-house teams and deliver a seamless customer experience.
“Start from the beginning with the right discipline and the right methodologies in terms of how
you’re going to approach structuring your content and data so that not only can you stay
organized, but that later you can reap the benefits of absolute pristine and clear data output
when you need to analyze it on the fly.”
Derek Gerber
ActivePDF
Global Marketing Director
Here, I want to introduce you to our organization strategy within a HubSpot CMS implementation project we have recently begun for a large corporate client based in the security industry. Their goal was to develop a website that would ensure efficiency of their internal operations, empower their marketing team, and accommodate lead-generating marketing campaigns.
The website design part of the project was led by an independent creative agency that delivered the proposed layouts to us. Once the designs were approved and signed off by our client, we divided the layouts into a comprehensive module system. Modules are reusable and independent components that can be used in templates or added to pages. They are very simple to use and can be applied to a page using a drag and drop tool in the Theme Settings. Depending on the preference of the client, the modules can be limited to a few effects or flexible enough to accomodate modifying more properties.
Taking into consideration the guidelines expressed by the client, each of the modules is customized in the back-end system specifically reflecting their needs and wants, anything from adding color pickers to the possibility of including a video in a header. This way, the client is able to modify their content however they desire and feel comfortable with in the long term.
The next step is establishing a clear naming convention for the modules and templates, meaning implementing titles for each of the units so that they are easily identifiable and accessible by any of the team members in a way that everyone understands how different assets are named. This in turn allows you to swiftly locate digital assets in your HubSpot portal and easily associate them with different marketing campaigns. On the other hand, it will enable you to establish reporting scenarios (visible through dashboards) that clearly reflect the past history and results as well as the ongoing marketing campaigns.
In our project, we wanted to divide the layouts in a way that would produce the least number of the modules so that they could be highly functional and easily reusable across different website templates and pages. This process involves limiting the number of editable fields and functions so that the process of editing the modules will not be complicated for the end-users, such as content creators. We believe in the balance between the number of modules and their functionality as the components tend to lose a bit of their quality and conception when there are too many components to maneuver on a website. HubSpot recommends keeping the number of modules limited to 49, including custom and theme modules, in order to preserve their quality and functionality for the end-users.
After reevaluating the naming conventions with the client and changing them according to their level of comfort, we produced two documents with the naming conventions compiled in Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets formats. The Google Docs included a list of all modules with their specifications, arranged in a way that reflects each of the page and served as the basis for constructing the first templates for the theme. Whereas the Google Spreadsheet included a table of modules and pages, allowing to easily see and edit what module appears on what page.
That way, whenever we needed to add a new module to the page, we could quickly see and add (or even delete) a module before working on the back-end of the website. The Google tools are easy to use and allow for swift editing of information by multiple users and we highly recommend it for organizing your lists of the naming conventions for modules, pages, and templates. This process of organization allowed us to produce easy access to and understanding of the modules for our client, and empower their marketing team through providing an easy to use and interpret information for all modules that appear on their pages.
In addition to the naming conventions, we delivered the client a detailed user adoption and education plan in the form of written documents, video training, tutorials, and descriptions of each module. Through this process, our main goal was to provide our client with knowledge and make them feel comfortable with the final product even before it goes live for the brand relaunch campaign.
The next step in our project is to create a naming convention for all the pages (not just the modules) based on the all assets that we have created for our client, which we will present in more detail in our next blog post.
Profit from a website that makes your work easier
