Tldr we want a static website that will last a long time and also look pretty nice.
Right now, we have a wordpress website. It looks very nice. It also have 4 extensions that aren’t configured to auto update. Also whenever I try to make changes to the website they don’t apply because the website was configured via the extensions and I hate it.
I want a static site of some kind. It’s simple to self host or host anywhere, and it’s also simple to secure and keep maintained for a long time.
I am currently looking at static site generators, like quarto, or docusaurus
However, they are difficult to theme to the “niceness” that I want, and their nature results in these somewhat fixed output formats. Like, it is somewhat difficult and annoying to put images anywhere I want them and etc.
Is there like a fixed WYSIWYG html editor? Something between designing a website from scratch and a static site generator. Or is there a way to finagle static site generators to be more flexible than blogs or documentation sites?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL nginx Popular HTTP server
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Static site generators. Jekyll, Hugo, etc. Pick a template, write in markdown.
I would recommend learning basic HTML CSS and making a website without external tools. This way the maintenance cost is 0 as your website will likely work forever.
Write all your HTML first then your CSS, it will be easier this way. Use vanilla JS if you need to but avoid external libraries , same for php.
To add to this a bit, if the site is just a single page that will be fine. If your site has a bunch of pages that all need to share the same theme and headers and footers and such it may be worth learning a simple templating system that runs before the site is sent for hosting.
That way if you need to update something in the design or theme you can do it once, rather than on dozens of pages.
Personally I use eleventy for my little site.
If you want something boring, use a static site generator like Hugo. But you already said you found them restrictive
I built my previous site with Ruby Mustache, an extremely simple templating thing. But I abandoned it because it got hard to maintain.
My current site is plain HTML and CSS. This is the way if you want ultimate customizability. It works pretty good and I would recommend it. Simpler is better.
Remember: Having a website was one of the ways people communicated on the net back in the day. HTML and CSS are intended to be used by regular people, they are very easy to learn. Don’t be scared of them
There is no decent WYSIWYG html editor i know of
Put it in an AWS S3 bucket and enable static website hosting. Use Claude to spit out a full site. Warning: The site will look like 1 million other Claude generated sites.
don’t bother learning html and css, just use claude code and it’ll get you a nice basic website, unless you’re looking to code as a hobby then go for your life
Honestly AI isn’t bad at basic websites, webapps, little simulations even.
I know it won’t be popular because people would rather downvote and claim AI is useless but it genuinely is amazing and claude is clearly the best by far
if you want to self host your own you can do that for example with /c/localllama@sh.itjust.works