What's the easiest way to create a content based static website

#discuss #webdev

I guess a truly easiest way as well as maintainable, is Awesome GitHub repos kind; but what are alternatives?

Top comments (12)

I just started rebuilding my personal site after years of procrastination and settled on Hugo. It's lightening-fast and supports all the things I want from a static site generator including image resizing, themes etc. Hugo is written in Go, but they have pre-built binaries for most platforms so you don't have to install Go to use it.

Herculino Trotta • Jul 27 '20 • Edited

Quite happy with Github Pages with Jekyll.
Plenty of themes and resources, allows Markdown posts, and Github supports it out of the box.

I've used it to build my website.

Arturs Smirnovs • Jul 25 '20

I have heard about them:
heroku.com/home
netlify.com/

Haven't used them, because find GitHub repos good enough for my needs for static sites.

Maybe somebody can explain more about them or check them out ;)

Tom Anderson • Jul 25 '20 • Edited

I would honestly suggest taking a look at Eleventy! 👍

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Jul 25 '20

But any static website builder will require me to maintain CSS as well, unlike writing solely in Markdown.

Unless there is a truly perfect readymade theme...

Tom Anderson • Jul 25 '20 • Edited

Very true. CSS is one of those things that I've yet to find a perfect solution for.

The best answer I can offer for full flexibility while following the KISS Principle as close as possible would be to use something like TailwindCSS baked into your 11ty layouts so that the pure markdown posts (used as 'data' by 11ty) inherits the styling from the templates.

Plus, you could always just take an existing HTML Template/Theme and use that as your base layout augment it with data from the markdown files.

Paweł Świątkowski • Jul 25 '20

But that's true for everything. Is GitHub theme perfect when you host awesome repos? With your own website at least you have a possibility to tune the theme. And it won't change without your consent.

Matthew Cale • Jul 27 '20

Surge.sh is a splendid tool :)

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Jul 27 '20

I only know surge.sh as a deployment tool. Too easy to deploy that I quitted it, and use Netlify instead.

Matthew Cale • Jul 27 '20

Netlify is also a great tool for deploying static sites! Sorry, I should have been more precise in my original comment. Surge.sh is a very easy way to deploy a static site. Not create one. My apologies 🙇‍♂️