Ask HN: Best static site generator for non-designer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best static site generator for non-designer?

43 pointsaliasxneo24 comments

I'd like to take a shot at creating my own portfolio page using a static site generator. However, all of my experience is working in languages like Go/Python with little to no experience in frontend design. But, at the same time, I don't mind learning something new!

The problem is I have no design skills and very little motivation to spend an excessive amount of time learning things like CSS. Is there a modern equivalent of pretty Lego blocks that I can use to put together something that might look nice?

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Yes, I would suggest you don’t pick a generator but look for themes in Hugo, Jekyll, Pelican etc. that you really like. And from there you’ve fallen into a generator and you can customise the theme a little to your needs.

Here is the source code to my own website (in Hugo) if it’s helpful: https://github.com/hnarayanan/harishnarayanan.org

Very practical, I do the same and am happy. Astro has some great themes too

I can't answer your question, because I don't know about such an HTML framework, but Django-distill (https://django-distill.com) is a fantastic SSG. You just write whatever Django you want, and then it compiles that into a static site.

Much more flexible to just write your own code than trying to configure Hugo or Jekyll.

Thanks stavros!

You're welcome!

My vote goes to Astro.build, a pretty new but very solid tool that seems to fit your needs well. It's Javascript but nothing extra-challenging and the docs are awesome.

- Pick a theme: https://astro.build/themes/ - Pick where to deploy: https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/deploy/ - write your content in markdown or JSX templates (very easy to learn if you're new to it)

For my tiliaradix.com [0] I use Hugo [1] with the mini theme [2]. The domain is mine and points to a github pages repo, so I get HTTPS with it too.

I think the theme is pretty clean and lean and is kinda enough for me that also don't want to mess around with css and styling. And the blog is something basically no-one would find or read unless they are getting involved with me as freelancer (embedded wireless).

[0][https://tiliaradix.com/] [1][https://gohugo.io/] [2][https://github.com/nodejh/hugo-theme-mini]

I use Jekyll. Downloaded some theme and fixed it to my liking.

It works for me. You may wish to give it a try, or try one of these https://jamstack.org/generators/

I'm using Quarto [0], pretty happy with my blog [1].

Before it was made with Zola [2], which is also nice.

[0] https://quarto.org/

[1] https://blog.horaceg.xyz/

[2] https://www.getzola.org/

I'd personally use hugo[1] with the "blonde"[2] theme these days. Some time ago I wrote a tutorial[3] about getting hugo to work with a specific theme and making it NOT look like everything else, but unfortunately it still lacks dark mode.

Maybe I'll give hugo's "blonde" theme a shot in the future, because it integrates dark mode pretty well.

1: https://gohugo.io/

2: https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/blonde/

3: https://pilabor.com/blog/2021/05/building-a-blog-with-hugo/

There's some pretty great CSS stylesheets that don't require you to write selectors at all. https://www.cssbed.com/no-class/ This site seems to have a good list with examples. Then you can generate HTML and only have to write CSS for the parts that really need customization.

For the HTML generation you don't need much if you go this route. I have built sites by writing markdown, generating HTML with Pandoc and then voila done.

I can highly recommend water.css (which is featured in that list). It’s incredibly simple to get started with.

Another vote for Astro and its themes here.

I work at a headless CMS company, and I see Astro frequently taking the place of Next and Svelte and Vue for simpler sites these days, especially for people who don't want to do a lot of coding.

You don't need to design anything or learn the intricacies of frontend, just pick a theme you like, maybe tweak the colors and fonts a bit if you must, but otherwise it's pretty much just providing your own content and the framework takes care of the rest of it.

I was working on something similar https://github.com/harshithmullapudi/tsukuru, so to create a personal website by just writing mdx files. Here is my website https://github.com/harshithmullapudi/harshith.sh

I use MakeDocs with Material theme as most of my websites are for documentation. It all depends on what sort of website you want and for what audience. Go to the static website generator sites, look at how you install it, how to specify a theme, and how you tweek it, what themes there are and pick one. As most website generators use Markdown its relatively easy to switch from one generator to another if necessary.

I use Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com).

I'd switch to Hugo, but every time I try, I give up. It's not that I can't, it's too much up-front investment and fiddling than I care to deal with (recommendations and tips appreciated).

Jekyll for generation: https://jekyllrb.com/ And after, I select a free template to fill (for instance https://html5up.net/)

you can use hugo if you are familiar with golang. you don't have to learn css, you can use some stock theme and stick to it. It does have a bit of learning curve though.

Somewhat related: I have yet to see an SSG+CSS package that provides a turnkey Tufte CSS implementation for semantic HTML.

https://docusaurus.io/ is great

try http://web1.0hosting.net/ not modern, but stable. 100 themes backward compatible with old browsers no annoin frameworks

Seems that you are looking for BootstrapStudio or Publiii?

I think v0 is simple to use

Why a static site generator?

Why not one of the many “no code” SAAS’s targeting consumers?

I am assuming a portfolio is the purpose. Squarespace (etc.) probably have many templates that will be good enough. It is unrealistic to expect to roll your own strong aesthetic execution without years of experience. Of course I could be wrong about your actual purpose and you may not need strong aesthetic execution.

Buying may be better than building. Good luck.

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