Tools We Use: Hugo

Unlike many brochure sites on the web, this site is a static HTML site. This means all the pages are created once, prior to deployment. It also means my site loads in web browsers super fast.

There are some trade-offs, of course: WYSIWYG editors aren’t built into the tool we use to generate the site, we have to write content in a markup language called markdown, and each time a change is made, every page affected has to be re-deployed.

Two of the three “trade-offs” are positives in my mind: I get to use the same text editor I use for development (vim); and markdown is a very minimal markup language allowing me to keep my writing as close to pure text as possible.

There’s one more trade-off: as mentioned earlier, the site has to be generated prior to deployment. Until recently, I’ve tried a couple ruby-based solutions, but their sluggishness became more and more apparent on sites which had numerous posts. I eventually settled on the Hugo static site generator. It’s stupidly fast, taking less than 700 milliseconds to generator this site.

This solution is right for me, because it fits within my existing workflow without disruption, but I would never recommend it to any of my existing or previous clients; it’s not the right solution for them.