
Ask HN: How to set up a minimalist professional web page these days - ACow_Adonis
I&#x27;m thinking it might be time for me to start branching out on my own.  I&#x27;ve been doing analytics and stats for a long time now.  But I haven&#x27;t done anything with the web for almost a decade.<p>What&#x27;s a recommended path to setting up a nice clean, minimal, compatible website&#x2F;web presence these days for myself.<p>I&#x27;m thinking things like no advertising, email domains, minimal overhead, maximum compatibility. Oh and I guess I&#x27;ll need a domain :p<p>Dev time on my behalf kept to a minimum would be a plus, obviously? I&#x27;m willing to pay a bit of money (think what one guy can afford on a decent salary) for tooling...(but I want to do the actual work myself).<p>Content wise I&#x27;m thinking primarily involving written articles, books, papers, blogs, visualisations, and maybe links to video&#x2F;presentations.<p>So how about it HN? Possible, easy, silly? What do you suggest?
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achairapart
1) Use a service like SquareSpace or Medium, no dev involved.

2) Use WordPress: just pick a simple, one purpose theme and avoid bloated ones
(ie ThemeForest). It requires a LAMP/LEMP stack.

3) Ghost is an alternative blogging platform with minimalistic and usually
well designed themes. It runs on Node.js.

4) Pick one of the many static site generators based on the language of your
choice. They require no database and only need basic static hosting:
[https://www.staticgen.com/](https://www.staticgen.com/)

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_RPM
Mine is a true home page. There isn't anything on their but hand written HTML
that contains links to my online stuff. Not really anything special. It also
contains a picture of myself and my email. I wrote some obfuscated javascript
to write my email to the document.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
OP here: Html + css was where the tech was last time I involved myself with
the web, WordPress had just come out as "a thing". I'm not against it, but is
like to know where we're at and what's feasible/standard these days.

Ideally I'd like something a bit more involved than raw html (unless it's
become far more sophisticated than I remember), as I imagine I'll be updating
and writing and presenting quite often, so a way to
structure/manage/maintain/present/modularise/categorise material would be
great.

As I'm on the data science end of things, I'm guessing I'd also be looking at
hosting/presenting small data sets, or at least visuals representing such to
be inserted/included in posts/demos/documents...

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avail
I wrote my homepage[1] in about an hour (with bits and pieces of js borrowed).
I used to have a wordpress blog styled exactly the same, but I never posted on
it so it is gone now.

I by all means don't think this is 'professional', but I doubt what you want
to make would need much more work than I have done.

These days there's resources for _everything_ , webservers which have really
good proxying if you want to code in a language other than php or manually
writing html, pre-made 'article-writing software' in many languages made for
the web.

Tools? All you'd need is notepad, or nano (or, your preferred text editor)!
You shouldn't need to run compiled code for the web, in my opinion, as there's
no noticeable speed differences.

Googling for specific things in a specific language will probably give you
results, e.g. 'nodejs blog' will land you to Hexo[2], which really neat,
customizable, and fast.

[1] [https://avail.pw](https://avail.pw) [2]
[https://hexo.io/](https://hexo.io/)

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mdorazio
Can you provide more detail on what you're actually looking to post and how
much functionality you want to include?

On the lowest effort end, squarespace is a pretty decent option for getting
something that looks nice up and running quickly without needing to deal with
server stuff. It works for several colleagues, but has some flexibility
limitations.

The next step up would probably be a Wordpress installation either on your own
server or the lower-effort hosted solutions from wordpress.com. Personally I
can't stand wordpress (it's become immensely bloated and keeping it updated
and all your plugins/themes/whatever in sync and playing nicely can be a
pain), but it works well for a huge number of people.

After that you're looking at rolling your own custom page on your own server,
maybe a simple themeforest template on a shared host. I don't recommend this
approach these days unless you're itching to get your hands dirty with some
code whenever you want to update something.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
Thanks for the reply: very quickly, I'm looking primarily at essentially
showing off my analytical abilities and making available articles and writing.
It is essentially marketing for...me. I appreciate I'm being a bit vague,
because I'm just trying to gauge what the state of play/possibilities are at
this point.

I'm really not concerned with (in fact probably against) social involvement
such as comments or community forming things on my site. Its all me. I'm torn
about whether it could be integrated with the likes of social media (to
automatically make posts to an equivalent facebook/twitter page/account). I do
not need/want to make any money off of the site itself, so I don't want to
worry about advertising, and indeed, want to keep it off the site and make it
100% gauged around user accessability. Its goal is to make money by people
being interested in hiring me and what i do, rather than generate revenue by
views of the site.

Really, its going to be a very close form to that of a fancy blog/versions,
but posts may take forms of blog posts, articles, presentations, books or
software links/articles etc. I would appreciate some way to apply themes and
manage or structure my content.

Don't know if that helps at all...

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bobwaycott
There is a plethora of static site generators in just about any language,
nearly all of which have some decent-looking templates you can use. Then
managing your site is just a matter of writing markdown for text content, and
pushing it up somewhere for hosting. Github can handle this, as can many other
services (e.g., S3).

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LarryMade2
I like dokuwiki -
[https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki#](https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki#)

You can use a CMS template to make it blog like, lets you do nice formatting
no cruft.

Here my use of it (need to do some updating, been a while):
[http://www.portcommodore.com](http://www.portcommodore.com)

Heres a good example page:

[http://www.portcommodore.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=larry:proj...](http://www.portcommodore.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=larry:projects:flash_attack_cable&s\[\]=flash&s\[\]=cable)

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probinso
If you do not want to see yourself as web developer, you can often find free
templates that are simple HTML CSS. You can either use this as your template
depending on the license, or create a derived piece.

I use Dynamic DNS and a lamp(hp) server hosted on a Raspberry Pi.

This cost me a total of $10 a year + trivial Electronics costs.

My site consists of 0 interactive parts. I have no use of a database . It only
lists work that I've done, Often linking out to GitHub repositories.

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bbcbasic
Just to throw a few numpty options out there we have Wix, Wordpress.com,
Blogger.

Then there is Github pages and some people have created template repositories
that you can clone or fork that look rather nice and are easy to post content
to if you just learn Markdown which takes five minutes

E.g. [https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-
now](https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now)

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snehesht
If you just need a blog try this
[https://posthaven.com](https://posthaven.com)

However if you need an intro page I would suggest wordpress, they have a
hosted one too, incase you don't want to deal with server stuff.

p.s My site [https://snehesh.me](https://snehesh.me) is built on react and
nginx

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kelt
I went this route for a simple web pressence:

\- html theme from themeforest

\- amazon s3 for hosting the static files

\- linked a domain

\- used formspree.io for the contact form

Not much traffic, couple of cents a month. I don't do much updating too.
Worked well for me.

Good luck!

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bigmanwalter
My choice right now is to build a small Django site with a sqlite db backing
it. This way you get a free admin dashboard for updating the site. For the
theme, grab something from www.html5up.com

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kirankn
I would suggest Jekyll on Github pages with a custom domain and possibly Zoho
for custom email. All this is free and can be setup on a quiet Sunday
afternoon.

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walrus01
What is your level of proficiency with Apache/php/mysql? There are some good
minimalist WordPress templates that do not look like a blog.

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sheraz
Wix, weebly, or square space. Done and done.

I'm a dev and would doing it if I were not such a cheap bastard.

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peternicky
Check out codepen and/or GitHub pages...very simple and flexible.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
My concern/hesitancy with github (possibly completely unfounded) is that the
site is primarily targeted at developers. So while I already have a github
account, and developers appreciate it and that setup, I think it's kind of
hostile to non-developers. Non tech people don't like/want to be referred to a
git page.

Say for example I want to show commercially/professionally that I can predict
elections, real estate prices, gambling markets or pedestrian/traffic
movements, and I convey this through words and visualisation. I think in a lot
of that space, any window/connection to git or software development is a
barrier to many of the people who would hire me to do such, and the technical
people would dig deeper if they wished. Or they can home in on the
specifically technical articles.

So is it possible, if hosted on git pages, to divorce the page on a
presentation level from any concept of git/repositories/software development
concepts if I so choose?

~~~
hanniabu
You can use a custom domain with github pages so nobody would know the
difference, plus the housing is free. I use this in conjunction with
CloudFlare [1] for free partial SSL and Formspree [2] for free static email
capabilities. I would make a simple medium/markdown styled page and all you
have to do for blogging is reuse the same frame, write your content, update
the meta tags, and add a link to your blogging page. It may take about 5 more
minutes per post you make, but in the end I think it's worth it considering
how much faster your site will load with the static content.

[1] [https://blog.keanulee.com/2014/10/11/setting-up-ssl-on-
githu...](https://blog.keanulee.com/2014/10/11/setting-up-ssl-on-github-
pages.html)

[2] [https://formspree.io](https://formspree.io)

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marvel00legend
Try WIX

