In today’s digital age, creating a website has never been easier. With the help of static site generators like Hugo, creating a beautiful, high-performance website can be accomplished in no time. In this post, we’ll explore the design decision to use Hugo as a static site generator and the benefits it brings to a portfolio website.

Hugo, an excellent tool for building static websites

Hugo is a popular open-source static site generator written in the Go programming language. Its main objective is to make website creation faster, easier, and more enjoyable. Hugo boasts an impressive list of features, including speedy builds, automatic image processing, live reloading, and support for various content formats.

  1. Hugo is fast. It generates websites in milliseconds, making it the perfect choice for sites that need to load quickly, which can have a positive impact on user experience. Watching edits happening in real-time makes using Hugo fun!

  2. Hugo is extremely easy to use. The command line interface is lean, fast, and helpful. Getting up and running with Hugo takes less than 5 minutes. Following the quickstart guide taught me the basic workflow, creating pages, and publishing the finished website.

  3. Hugo offers an extensive range of themes and templates. If your are like me, then you want a basic site to add content and manage simple layouts. Some developers love making beautiful themes and I applaud them for their work, but I like to get something pretty and work on creating content. The theme ecosystem is incredible, I encourage you to check them out!

Jekyll to Hugo

Jekyll is another popular static site generator, written in Ruby, that enables developers to create static websites and blogs. It has been around for a while and is widely used in the web development community. My first exposure to Jekyll was using GitHub Pages.

While Jekyll is a great tool, there are several reasons why one might want to consider moving to Hugo instead:

  1. Hugo is faster than Jekyll: One of the biggest advantages of using Hugo is its speed.

  2. Hugo has a simpler setup process: Setting up Hugo is much simpler than Jekyll, which can be complicated for beginners. No more managing gemfiles with Hugo!

  3. Hugo has better content organization: Hugo has a clear separation of content, layouts, and static files, making it easier to organize.

Overall, while Jekyll is a great tool, Hugo offers several advantages to create a better experience for developers.

In conclusion, Hugo is an excellent choice for portfolio websites. Its impressive features, ease of use, and speed make it a popular choice among developers. If you’re looking to create a portfolio website, consider using Hugo to make the process faster, easier, and more enjoyable. With its extensive range of features, you’ll be able to create a beautiful, high-performance website in no time.

Hopefully, this post inspired you to give Hugo a try. If not, thanks for reading until the end.

Resources for Hugo