Ask HN: How to set up a minimalist professional web page these days | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to set up a minimalist professional web page these days

18 pointsACow_Adonis21 comments

I'm thinking it might be time for me to start branching out on my own. I've been doing analytics and stats for a long time now. But I haven't done anything with the web for almost a decade.

What's a recommended path to setting up a nice clean, minimal, compatible website/web presence these days for myself.

I'm thinking things like no advertising, email domains, minimal overhead, maximum compatibility. Oh and I guess I'll need a domain :p

Dev time on my behalf kept to a minimum would be a plus, obviously? I'm willing to pay a bit of money (think what one guy can afford on a decent salary) for tooling...(but I want to do the actual work myself).

Content wise I'm thinking primarily involving written articles, books, papers, blogs, visualisations, and maybe links to video/presentations.

So how about it HN? Possible, easy, silly? What do you suggest?

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1) Use a service like SquareSpace or Medium, no dev involved.

2) Use WordPress: just pick a simple, one purpose theme and avoid bloated ones (ie ThemeForest). It requires a LAMP/LEMP stack.

3) Ghost is an alternative blogging platform with minimalistic and usually well designed themes. It runs on Node.js.

4) Pick one of the many static site generators based on the language of your choice. They require no database and only need basic static hosting: https://www.staticgen.com/

Mine is a true home page. There isn't anything on their but hand written HTML that contains links to my online stuff. Not really anything special. It also contains a picture of myself and my email. I wrote some obfuscated javascript to write my email to the document.

OP here: Html + css was where the tech was last time I involved myself with the web, WordPress had just come out as "a thing". I'm not against it, but is like to know where we're at and what's feasible/standard these days.

Ideally I'd like something a bit more involved than raw html (unless it's become far more sophisticated than I remember), as I imagine I'll be updating and writing and presenting quite often, so a way to structure/manage/maintain/present/modularise/categorise material would be great.

As I'm on the data science end of things, I'm guessing I'd also be looking at hosting/presenting small data sets, or at least visuals representing such to be inserted/included in posts/demos/documents...

I wrote my homepage[1] in about an hour (with bits and pieces of js borrowed). I used to have a wordpress blog styled exactly the same, but I never posted on it so it is gone now.

I by all means don't think this is 'professional', but I doubt what you want to make would need much more work than I have done.

These days there's resources for everything, webservers which have really good proxying if you want to code in a language other than php or manually writing html, pre-made 'article-writing software' in many languages made for the web.

Tools? All you'd need is notepad, or nano (or, your preferred text editor)! You shouldn't need to run compiled code for the web, in my opinion, as there's no noticeable speed differences.

Googling for specific things in a specific language will probably give you results, e.g. 'nodejs blog' will land you to Hexo[2], which really neat, customizable, and fast.

[1] https://avail.pw [2] https://hexo.io/

Can you provide more detail on what you're actually looking to post and how much functionality you want to include?

On the lowest effort end, squarespace is a pretty decent option for getting something that looks nice up and running quickly without needing to deal with server stuff. It works for several colleagues, but has some flexibility limitations.

The next step up would probably be a Wordpress installation either on your own server or the lower-effort hosted solutions from wordpress.com. Personally I can't stand wordpress (it's become immensely bloated and keeping it updated and all your plugins/themes/whatever in sync and playing nicely can be a pain), but it works well for a huge number of people.

After that you're looking at rolling your own custom page on your own server, maybe a simple themeforest template on a shared host. I don't recommend this approach these days unless you're itching to get your hands dirty with some code whenever you want to update something.

Thanks for the reply: very quickly, I'm looking primarily at essentially showing off my analytical abilities and making available articles and writing. It is essentially marketing for...me. I appreciate I'm being a bit vague, because I'm just trying to gauge what the state of play/possibilities are at this point.

I'm really not concerned with (in fact probably against) social involvement such as comments or community forming things on my site. Its all me. I'm torn about whether it could be integrated with the likes of social media (to automatically make posts to an equivalent facebook/twitter page/account). I do not need/want to make any money off of the site itself, so I don't want to worry about advertising, and indeed, want to keep it off the site and make it 100% gauged around user accessability. Its goal is to make money by people being interested in hiring me and what i do, rather than generate revenue by views of the site.

Really, its going to be a very close form to that of a fancy blog/versions, but posts may take forms of blog posts, articles, presentations, books or software links/articles etc. I would appreciate some way to apply themes and manage or structure my content.

Don't know if that helps at all...

There is a plethora of static site generators in just about any language, nearly all of which have some decent-looking templates you can use. Then managing your site is just a matter of writing markdown for text content, and pushing it up somewhere for hosting. Github can handle this, as can many other services (e.g., S3).

I like dokuwiki - https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki#

You can use a CMS template to make it blog like, lets you do nice formatting no cruft.

Here my use of it (need to do some updating, been a while): http://www.portcommodore.com

Heres a good example page:

http://www.portcommodore.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=larry:proj...

If you do not want to see yourself as web developer, you can often find free templates that are simple HTML CSS. You can either use this as your template depending on the license, or create a derived piece.

I use Dynamic DNS and a lamp(hp) server hosted on a Raspberry Pi.

This cost me a total of $10 a year + trivial Electronics costs.

My site consists of 0 interactive parts. I have no use of a database . It only lists work that I've done, Often linking out to GitHub repositories.

Just to throw a few numpty options out there we have Wix, Wordpress.com, Blogger.

Then there is Github pages and some people have created template repositories that you can clone or fork that look rather nice and are easy to post content to if you just learn Markdown which takes five minutes

E.g. https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now

If you just need a blog try this https://posthaven.com

However if you need an intro page I would suggest wordpress, they have a hosted one too, incase you don't want to deal with server stuff.

p.s My site https://snehesh.me is built on react and nginx

I went this route for a simple web pressence:

- html theme from themeforest

- amazon s3 for hosting the static files

- linked a domain

- used formspree.io for the contact form

Not much traffic, couple of cents a month. I don't do much updating too. Worked well for me.

Good luck!

My choice right now is to build a small Django site with a sqlite db backing it. This way you get a free admin dashboard for updating the site. For the theme, grab something from www.html5up.com

I would suggest Jekyll on Github pages with a custom domain and possibly Zoho for custom email. All this is free and can be setup on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

What is your level of proficiency with Apache/php/mysql? There are some good minimalist WordPress templates that do not look like a blog.

Wix, weebly, or square space. Done and done.

I'm a dev and would doing it if I were not such a cheap bastard.

Check out codepen and/or GitHub pages...very simple and flexible.

My concern/hesitancy with github (possibly completely unfounded) is that the site is primarily targeted at developers. So while I already have a github account, and developers appreciate it and that setup, I think it's kind of hostile to non-developers. Non tech people don't like/want to be referred to a git page.

Say for example I want to show commercially/professionally that I can predict elections, real estate prices, gambling markets or pedestrian/traffic movements, and I convey this through words and visualisation. I think in a lot of that space, any window/connection to git or software development is a barrier to many of the people who would hire me to do such, and the technical people would dig deeper if they wished. Or they can home in on the specifically technical articles.

So is it possible, if hosted on git pages, to divorce the page on a presentation level from any concept of git/repositories/software development concepts if I so choose?

My page is hosted on github, you can just host HTML and JS files. You need to get a domain and configure your repo to use this domain. It isn't obvious that your page is hosted on github.

I'm using jekyll as my static page builder.

You can use a custom domain with github pages so nobody would know the difference, plus the housing is free. I use this in conjunction with CloudFlare [1] for free partial SSL and Formspree [2] for free static email capabilities. I would make a simple medium/markdown styled page and all you have to do for blogging is reuse the same frame, write your content, update the meta tags, and add a link to your blogging page. It may take about 5 more minutes per post you make, but in the end I think it's worth it considering how much faster your site will load with the static content.

[1] https://blog.keanulee.com/2014/10/11/setting-up-ssl-on-githu...

[2] https://formspree.io

Try WIX

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