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?
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
So great, signed your guestbook!
Random question, why is index.html just a pointer to home.html?
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!
Ouch a bit doomer but I kinda get it.
On the other hand, there’s also “The Indie Web.” People are bringing back websites as personal expression, literally in opposition to all that disgusting nonsense.
It’s really cool to see and I kinda wanna be part of it.
Static site generators. Jekyll, Hugo, etc. Pick a template, write in markdown.
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.
Hugo or similar
Quarto and Docusaurus are for documentation. You may be looking for a more general static site generator like 11ty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
