Opinions on site generators (carrd, hugo, etc.)

[kingdomcome]

I've been hand-coding my site for a couple years now, and as proud of myself as I am for doing so, I think I've deterred myself from updating my site & adding more pages to it because I don't wanna have to manually by hand code everything. I use my index page as a template when I make new pages, so it's not totally by hand, but it still takes a lot of effort and energy out of me. Using a drag and drop or other type of WYSIWYG editor would save me so much time and energy, and would enable me to add more cool stuff to my site, make it look nicer, add more blog posts, etc etc. But I don't wanna lose that feeling handmade sites have. I don't want my website to feel corporate or un-hobbyist. It's very important to me that my site still feel like a passion project. Does anyone here have any advice on the topic? Thanks in advance

For extra context: I have chronic fatigue, so I get exhausted from very small tasks, and try to reduce said exhaustion as much as I possibly can while still trying to do things I need to do and enjoy.

[Misanthropic Monster™]

Honestly I don't think anyone should gatekeep how someone makes a website. Some people take joy in coding, others just want an easier way to be creative. I think if you find something that does the code side of things and simply lets you drag/drop things onto the page (think like Dreamweaver - no idea if that is even still a thing?) then I say more power to you.

[wygolvillage]

No point in gatekeeping but I will say that I find stuff like Carrd to be extremely limited in terms of actual functionality and customizability. Maybe it's just me but I find sleek drag and drop menus to be way more confusing. I tried Carrd once and I just didn't "get it" lol.

[starbreaker]

I build my own website with shell scripts and makefile, writing my own HTML, but that's because I find tools like Hugo too limiting for my liking. These tools are all designed to build a particular sort of website, and rather than fight their design to make them do things my way, I find it more sensible to build my own tools.

But that doesn't mean everybody else should build their own tools if existing tools suit them well enough.

[CATBYTE]

carrd is the service i have the most experience with as both a previous user and viewer.
my biggest issue is the design trends that the limitations in the carrd editor brings. a large amount of carrds look very similar if not close to identical. this creates visually fatiguing experience when browsing through them at points. i just don't care for the overly clean yet empty aesthetic, i find it a bit too sterile for my tastes. there are of course websites that go against this trend (to the extent possible in the limited editor), but it's less common in my experience.

but ultimately, regardless of my tastes, i feel services like carrd do an objective good by allowing people to express themselves more easily through creating websites. they're made to be accessible to general users, who may not have the time or want to learn css/html/javascript.
gatekeeping website creation is silly and as long as the user is able to achieve and create what they want, the service serves it's purpose.

additionally, particularly in the online art sphere, carrd websites often serve as a way for artists to easily compile their services and examples. not everyone is going to want to go in-depth into website creation just to list commission prices and ToS, and that's completely understandable. so even if i'm not too fond of the aesthetics often seen in these websites the purpose they serve outweighs that for me.

[xixxii]

i've never tried to use any site generators and to this day still do not entirely understand what carrd is, but if they're more fun for you i don't think there's any reason not to use them? it's a hobby you're doing for fun (i assume), not a homework assignment where you can get a bad grade in "making a website" haha. if it's your passion project it's your passion project regardless of what tools you're using; you're the one making it, so if you don't want it to look a certain way then you can just make it not look that way. if you end up not liking how it looks you can delete it and make it different.

[petrichoran]

i think wordpress would be a happy medium between carrd and neocities if you decided to stay away from carrd. i don't know that you could get what you wanted out of carrd because there's a very limited amount of pages you can have, which doesn't lend itself well to blogging. it's also extremely unreliable with archival if that's something you care about!

[Memory]

im not fond of them persay but i’ve used them in the past. mostly because my neocities is still a huge wip so i’ve used carrd before as a temporary replacement.

[Memory]

If you want to get a comment section below your blog posts, I'd say Wordpress and the other CMS make things a lot easier.

I think the modern site generators are only unauthentic, where the website is about MS-DOS / Windows 3.11 computers. Because websites made with a modern site generator probably looks broken on the old machines.

Some static sites have a little note to write comments via e-mail, which becomes quite a lot of manual work for the site owner, if he / she wants to publish the comments.

[Marchy]

I've tried quite a few different site generators, but none of them really have the same feel as a hand-built site.

If you're already hand-coding everything (and enjoy it), it might be worthwhile looking into a framework like Next.js. Using only exactly what you need from the framework is a great way to get the most out of it. It supports markdown for blogs out of the box as well with MDX support for advanced components. Adding server-side features like form submissions, bundling, caching, and even branch preview deployments work out of the box to allow you to grow your "toolbox" of components and CSS snippets with react and CSS modules. Eventually you end up being able to do much more with much less code which might help!

[Absentmind]

i think wordpress would be a happy medium between carrd and neocities if you decided to stay away from carrd. i don't know that you could get what you wanted out of carrd because there's a very limited amount of pages you can have, which doesn't lend itself well to blogging. it's also extremely unreliable with archival if that's something you care about!

This ^

I am a WordPress developer and I would say this would be the best method for what you are trying to achieve. Great way to learn PHP too if you are interested in that. I'd say start there and look to build your own theme. Like everything else though, It will take a long time to get it to how you want it because you'll have to learn how it all works. WordPress is only limiting when you don't know how to sculpt it properly! 

[brisray]

WYSIWYG editors need not be template driven. There are plenty around that offer both code and display views. I use Adobe DreamWeaver because I don't have to pay for it, but there are dozens freely available. Whichever window the cursor is in, is how you do the editing either visually or via the code. Most editors, when creating a new page give you just enough code to work with. Depending on how I want to work I either create a new document and copy the headers and footers from an existing page, or start with an existing page and delete the content sections and write new before saving it as a new file.

@kingdomcome seems to have already settled on a style and theme for most pages. What I would do is move the styling to a new CSS file and use that. Changing the style later just means editing one file instead of having to go through every page. Individual pages can have their own styling in the head section or on individual elements - that's what the cascading in CSS means.

It's not a matter of whether you are writing commercial or hobby pages, it's the way these files were designed to work for every site. It may even make creating the pages easier and less stressful, you can write the content without worrying too much about the look of it. If you don't like the look of it after it's published, you can always change the styling.

We write our hobby sites for our own pleasure, if we're lucky someone might find and read what we write. It should be fun not a chore, so we all have to find a way of working that suits us. Some prefer to use templates, others like to write everything from scratch, others, like me, started from scratch then reuse bits of pages so they are at least a little bit consistant.

[renyoi]

i generally tend to be anti template websites because, as others have mentioned, there is only so much you can do with them. hand-coding is an important part of web revival to me & i dislike that the internet largely looks the same now because of services like squarespace, wordpress, carrd, etc. HOWEVER, it's a great way to start and if you want to take less time to make something, of course these services are valid to use. i would never shun someone for using them.

when i find myself feeling exhausted by the concept of making new pages, though, i tend to first look for others' coded templates and see if i can find one that works well enough for what i need and then edit accordingly! this is a good in-between imo, as you're still navigating code and familiarizing yourself with it.

again, though, no actual harm in using template services for your personal websites; at least you're making one in the end! i would encourage everyone to know the basics of coding beforehand, though, even just so they can better understand why the template services may be acting the way they are.

[Stonmann]

I have a lot of respect for a site that creates with pure code, but if it's not possible there's no shame 

[Junebug]

I don't judge people badly for using site generators, mainly because it doesn't make a person better or worse if they don't want to hand code everything. It's really just about what results a person wants. Sometimes hand coding is the way to get really specific kind of site, but even people who do this may create boilerplate code for new pages to their site. I know for sure that I'm going to be doing this eventually since I don't want to re-type by hand the HTML every time I add a new page to my fansite. I have created a pre-built page layout that does what I want it too. I could use a site generator, but since I want to educate myself through this project I avoid it for that reason also.

Long story, short, I don't think a person's a sellout for using site generators. I'm guessing that's the feeling that's leading to the uncertainty.