Development Process When Using HTML Generation

I have a general question about the process that people use to create a dynamic web page using an html generation library like hiccup for clojure. I've been working with Django templates lately and I first create a static page with html/css and then later turn that page into a Django template by replacing the dynamic portions of the page with Django tags. My question is, what is the process when using html generation rather than templates? Do you first create a static page and then write the code to generate the page? Do you break up the page into sections and have different functions generate the different sections of the page? I have just started working with Django and am finding the template language to be kind of cumbersome and limiting am therefore looking for alternatives.