It's hard to say. For any project there is a mixture of planning and doing. I think the person you're responding to is planning too much, but a certain amount of research is necessary.

In the case of my blog project I did try a 'spike implementation' with hugo and got so far to get a test instance online. It wasn't love at first site so I'm probably going to try another static site generator, probably one written in Python so I'll be able to incorporate a lot of code I've already written.

Wider than that I need to school myself more on CSS and particularly how to make layouts that scale across desktop and mobile (and don't make me want to puke!) That's a project of its own that is kindof the opposite of a spike implementation because i want to cover the ground thoroughly.