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?
Plain text HTML.
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.
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. 😒
Hugo or similar
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.
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?
Oh I completely forgot about this
I was halfway through designing a fake CDE-styled login page, then I failed to fit it in mobile browsers and then I got distracted.
The file is still sitting there https://aesistril.com/login.html
So initially, this login.html was the homepage and home.html was to be reached by clicking a button on this page.
When I scratched the login page idea, I just renamed index.html -> login.html and then linked home.html -> index.html
Well I could’ve just renamed home.html but I am way too UNIX-headed for that. Lets say its a symbolic link so I could change the homepage easily in the future
“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.
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
Even if you use AI tools for drafting, you’ll want to know enough CSS and HTML to be able to parse the code and make adjustments where needed. Being completely ignorant of how to read the output from AI coding tools is never a good idea.
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
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Just a few minutes ago I learned about neocities.org. At first glance it looks like it might do what you want.
Quarto and Docusaurus are for documentation. You may be looking for a more general static site generator like 11ty.
Static site generators. Jekyll, Hugo, etc. Pick a template, write in markdown.
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.
Publii is probably what you want. It’s a GUI similar to WP/SquareSpace, but it spits out static pages.
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.
