New Website, Who Dis?

New website, who dis?

Deciding which hosting services, frameworks, or back-end systems to use when creating a new website is tedious, we know. For that reason, we decided to learn something new when creating the latest version of our wilder.games website.

We wanted something that would be easy to deploy, easier to maintain, and trivial to add content to. After doing a bit of research, we eventually decided on..

Google App Engine and PHP

Yeah, I don’t know how that happened, but it was a bad idea. App Engine is great for complex web applications, sure, but it’s not ideal for small teams who only need simple blogging and mostly-static content serving capabilities. That’s us, we’re the small teams. So, accepting temporary defeat, we made the bare minimum we needed for a website and moved onto more important things.

Fast-forward to a few weeks ago when I was reminded of static HTML generators, and my entire world changed. I’d heard tales of these magical tools before, but for some reason I didn’t give them much thought. This time though, I was instantly into it. The ability to create site-wide templates, make changes, quickly add content, all without needing a complex server setup? That sounded like the dream.

So I decided to try HUGO, and lo-and-behold, it ruled. It was quick and easy to learn, with great documentation and a fairly active online community. After the tedious act of reconfiguring App Engine to serve a static storage bucket as a website, we were able to get a HUGO website building, deploying, and running in less than an hour.

Needless to say, we’re going to be using it for all our web projects going forward.

If you’d like to learn more about HUGO, check out their website: gohugo.io