Static site generators

I’ve played around with Wordpress in my days - for instance I’m responsible for our tenant’s association website built on Wordpress. I also did some basic web stuff in the late 90s for my father’s company website (now long gone, but it was based on frames, which was the style at the time). Back in the 90s, I sort of knew what I was doing. In Wordpress, I have just edited stuff and downloaded plugins for everything that needs to be tweaked, without really understanding how everything really works.

Learning Jekyll

Learning Jekyll was a really nice introduction to static site generators. In a previous course, the main exam was to create a website from scratch using just HTML and CSS, which was a good refresh on everything that’s happened in the last 20 years since I previously even touched HTML. A lot has happened, but some things are still tedious, like repeating the same code over and over on multiple pages, only to discover you need to change some minor thing…

Most informational websites can be static sites that don’t need databases and only need updating now and then, maybe with some news, maybe a blog post etc. I think SSGs really shine here. It’s easy to make a change to e.g. the site’s title or add a page and have it “magically” show up in all the right places in an SEO-friendly manner. And if you have someone on your team who’s responsible for putting up blog post or news (and maybe this someone is not very “technical” by nature), you can learn the basics of Markdown in 10 minutes and just put the relevant file in the designated place. No need for databases, applications, logins and WYSIWYG editors - just a quick website that’s easy to update. So IMHO it’s suitable for personal sites/blogs like this one, for companies that just need to have a basic informational website, for specific projects etc.