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?
Wordpress to static, i like gutenberg, there are prob many easier ways for a static web page. IK runtipis appstore has a few.
You dont say what kind of website it is, just not blog or documentation style.
But SSGs can be skinned a bunch if different ways, and have been set up for a bunch of different purposes.
https://github.com/myles/awesome-static-generators
I have been using Zola for myself lately, its less blog post and more article oriented, but still doc heavy. I like the duckquill theme (with… More than a few changes, but still), which I doubt fits what you want. For comparison, here is duckquill: https://duckquill.daudix.one/
But you may like the Portio theme: https://quentin-rodriguez.github.io/portio-zola/
If you don’t need to update often though, I think some basic html could be the way to go rather than using an ssg.
@curbstickle @selfhosted Awesome list! I could have really used this a year ago. 😒
yeah i was also using hugo and free hosting with github pages, I recommend Hugo or Jekyl as you can host for free in a github repo.
but think twice, the internet is dying, people use social network 5 to 10h a day, dont read blogs and use AI chat more and more. A blog yes but maybe not public anymore, you feed tons of AI Bots and you compete against AI generated blog and avatar.
this page list a lot more issues https://www.waltercedric.com/posts/leaving/
Good luck!
“Nice” is entirely subjective. I think my site is nice, but someone else might think it’s garbage.
I use Hugo to generate my site. It’s not wysiwyg, but it supports markdown for pages, which is even simpler than html. It also has a live server mode, where you can see changes immediately.
The community has a created whole gallery of themes (templates) that you can use. It might be worth looking through the gallery to see if you think any of them look “nice” to you.
The closest you’re probably going to get to a half decent looking WYSIWYG editor is something templatized top to bottom. Odoo, Ghost…things like that.
Hugo or similar
You have several conflicting needs there. Why not just continue using Wordpress but without the weird extensions?
Because the extensions replaced wordpress’ sitebuilder/editor. If I were to get rid of the extensions I would basically have to recreate the site anyways so I might as well switch away from wordpress.
You could try a Wordpress static generator extension like SimplyStatic. Then you’d be able to export your existing site to static files but it might not work properly with some extensions.
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.
Wordpress meets almost all of these requirements. It’s not static pages, but if you don’t use weird extensions it’s perfectly simple, secure, maintainable, WYSIWYG, and it falls exactly between from-scratch and a static site generator. Plenty of themes you can use and tweak in a modular fashion.
Although I’m pretty sure there are extensions that’ll render to static pages if you want. Certainly there are caching extensions that do almost the same thing.
Generally I’d recommend against Wordpress due to how shitty Automattic is being to the community, but it sounds like it fits your needs. Maybe Drupal as an alternatice.
Build a website on your preferred platform, you’re already using WP.
Create a static version of it. There’s plugins for exactly that purpose.
Put the static files on a web host, I use s3, but you can use whichever you prefer.
When you update the site on WP, run the static extraction again and update your actual site.
To add to this, if you want to design your site using FOSS and locally on your own machine, I’ve had great success with Publii, but any static site generator will do.
Static site generators. Jekyll, Hugo, etc. Pick a template, write in markdown.
It depends what you mean by nice and how complex it is? I built my own site which is basically my front end access to all the services I host. I wrote it extremely basically in html and got just the very basic context of what I wanted setup. Then I put the whole thing into Claude, and asked it to tidy it up. Then I started a new Claude session and put the whole thing in again and asked it to modernise it. Then did the same again but asked it to improve it. After about 5 or 6 run thoughts, I was happy with it. But it only has 2 pages, the first main page for anybody, and the 2nd admin page password protected just for me.
Quarto and Docusaurus are for documentation. You may be looking for a more general static site generator like 11ty.
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.
https://html5up.net/ if it is a single landing page. Just grab a template and edit its content to your liking.
Publii if it is some kind of blog or has a few subpages.
Publii is probably what you want. It’s a GUI similar to WP/SquareSpace, but it spits out static pages.
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.
