004 | Building and Hosting a Website: Part 3 — Static Site Generators (Hugo) and GitHub Pages

25.05.2025

We’ve already covered website builders for a quick start and CMS platforms for maximum flexibility. Now it’s time to look at the third approach — static site generators, such as Hugo, Jekyll, and Gatsby. This method requires more technical knowledge but offers exceptional performance, security, and cost advantages.

Static Site Generators: Speed, Security, and Cost Efficiency

A static site generator is a tool that takes your content (usually written in Markdown), pre-made templates, and assets (images, styles), and compiles them into a set of plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. These files are “static” — meaning they don’t need to be processed by a server on every page request like CMS platforms do. The final output can be hosted on virtually any server — including free services like GitHub Pages.

003 | Building and Hosting a Website: Part 2 — CMS Platforms (WordPress, Joomla, and Others)

24.05.2025

After reviewing website builders — a great choice for beginners — let’s move on to a more powerful and flexible solution: Content Management Systems (CMS). These are software platforms that you install on your hosting server to manage website content via a user-friendly admin panel — no need to write code for each page. The most popular examples are WordPress (the market leader), Joomla, and Drupal.

CMS Platforms: Flexibility and Full Control Over Your Website