There are many great technologies available for putting together a personal website; it can be hard to choose which one to use. When I decided to put together this website, I wanted a simple website with a blog, preferably not too time consuming to manage, and with the flexibility to host projects besides the blog. This post is about the options I considered for putting together my website.

More specifically, I had these criteria in mind:

  1. My own personal domain name.
  2. Custom pages including pages about me and how to contact me.
  3. Blog to write about data and other interests.
  4. Room to grow and host any projects I want.
  5. Not too much HTML, CSS, or JavaScript required. (I know a little bit, but I have no plans to be a full-time web developer.)

Registering my own name dot com seemed like a natural place for my web home. No cute titles or ambiguous branding. I went to Namecheap and purchased my domain for several years. Pretty simple. Now I needed to find a solution to meet the rest of my criteria. There are many nice open-source solutions to help you create a great looking website. I saw the most potential in two types of software: content management systems and static site generators.

Content management system (CMS)

I first thought that installing a content management system (CMS) on a web server was the way to go. Everyone starting a blog has heard of WordPress, right? According to w3techs.com, it powers about 40% of all websites in March 2021. Clearly many people believe it is great for their purposes, and I can understand why. The open-source CMS can be used to create everything from simple blogs to large websites and online merchants, and it has a huge library of plugins to add features to your website. The company wordpress.com (different from wordpress.org) even offers free ad-supported websites or tiered pricing to remove ads and add more storage and bandwidth. Alternatively, you can host on a virtual private server like a DigitalOcean droplet or a similar service.

Another alternative CMS I strongly considered was open-source Ghost, which is primarily a publishing/blogging platform. Ghost makes very nice-looking websites and has a lot of integrations – it is a beautiful publishing tool. They also offer a basic hosted plan with tiered pricing, but I considered hosting on a DigitalOcean droplet. I believe Ghost would be best suited for a publication website with multiple contributors and lots of content.

CMS or something else

At first, I thought “which CMS is the one I want to use?” and “what are the pros and cons of making a WordPress site over a Ghost site?” I also wondered if I should consider any CMS software other than WordPress or Ghost, one that might offer a simpler set of features. I had assumed most websites worked like a CMS generated site, with a front-end, a database back-end, and dynamically generated pages produced by the webserver. This type of website is still popular, but I had failed to notice a growing set of websites generated by static site generators.

Static site generator (SSG)

Static site generators have been around for a long time now. Jekyll was among the first, released in 2008, and it is adopted by GitHub for GitHub Pages. The idea is straightforward: a SSG is a piece of software which compiles HTML (and images, etc.) for a static website. An example website might include a template and content from Markdown files (like blog posts and other pages) and build them into a fully functioning website. Jamstack.org keeps a list of the most popular SSGs ranked by GitHub stars, and includes options like Next.js, Hugo, Gatsby, Jekyll, and Hexo among others. Many of those are written in JavaScript and make use of use React or Vue.js for templating and user interface on the front end.

Best of both worlds?

It is worth noting that there are websites that combine benefits of both CMS and SSG. One example setup is to use a CMS to manage your content, and then use a SSG to create a static version of the website. Since the CMS and SSG are separate, the developer can use the SSG for developing the front-end of the website but pull the content from the CMS via an API. In this example, the CMS is called a headless CMS since it is completely detached from the front-end. A specific example of this could be to combine a headless Ghost CMS with Gatsby SSG. Jamstack.org also includes a ranking of the most popular headless CMS.

In the next post, I will discuss which option I chose (spoiler: SSG without headless CMS) and reasons I made that decision.