It looks like it's basically a markdown to HTML translator, with a scheme for specifying formatting in YAML. It's almost easier to write HTML by hand.
(I still use Dreamweaver 8 for static pages. They render just fine with modern browsers.)
(I still use Dreamweaver 8 for static pages. They render just fine with modern browsers.)
You can use hugo to fetch JSON, YAML or CSV data from remote URLs and use those data as part of the build process. And if you use local data files instead of HTML you can use a tool like netlify-cms (github.com/netlify/netlify-cms) to give end users an easy way to work with that structured data without ever touching text editors or the like...
And as jacquesm said, once you have a more complex site with lots of pages, you'll want to use partials, reuse content in different places (show a summary of an article on an index page, full article inside, small blurbs on the homepage, etc), and once you get there you really don't want to write HTML by hand...
Also worth mentioning is OSG [2], a sitemap generator written in go that I use in my bash script. It's very fast. This may have some advantages over hugos built in sitemap generator depending on your site, though I think I would use hugos in most cases. Might be useful for others using other static generators that don't support sitemaps and also have other CMS's and carts / forums installed too.
Netlify will make sure you get true atomic deploys where no changes go live before all changes have been uploaded and handles instant cache invalidation.
We have built-in support for hugo for our integrated continuous deployment system, and can do builds triggered by webhooks. So for any setup where you're building based on external files, you can easily trigger rebuilds whenever one of those datasources gets updates...