June 16, 2017
Starting new projects like this is always an excellent opportunity to test out new technologies and for a while now I wanted to test out static website generators. I used wordpress before and I continue to use it for my personal blog, but I always found it very unwieldy. And after GitHub made Jekyll as popular as it is, I wanted to try it out, and for this website I went with Hugo.
First impressions
In all honesty the first impressions were not that great. I did encounter some cons:
- Finding the themes was kind of difficult. Firstly, the selection is simply smaller and secondly browsing the themes was painfully slow.
- Deploying Hugo on your chosen service provider. When it comes to Wordpress then nearly every hosting provider has some pay and ready to go solution for Wordpress. Hugo, not so much.
Content creation
But all in all, the cons mentioned are one time problems, that only happen in the beginning. When it comes to the content creation then so far I have been satisfied. Once again a bit less refined when I compare it to Wordpress, but writing MD comes pretty naturally. And there is one huge pro when it comes to Hugo:
- I feel in control and when I want to customize something then I don’t need to read docs to know how. For me as a web develop it is just so much easier to grasp than traditional CMS.
- Secondly I don’t need to worry about anything happening to my website, I can sleep peacefully in the night.