Why the conversion?

In today’s web world, most sites are run on Content Management Systems such as Wordpress. You login, say “new page”, and start authoring content. Once completed, that content is dynamically generated each time a page on your site is accessed. To support this, you must pay monthly hosting costs that could be over $1,000 for what is typically a few pages.

With the advent of static site generators, you can now cheaply host your website, make updates in real-time, and host your site on various hosting providers such as Netlify, GitHub, Azure, or any other static site hosting provider.

Process

You will go through an interview process to gather various details about your current site, including:

• Hosting Provider
• Current CMS Platform (Wordpress, Joomla, etc.)
• Email Services
• DNS Hosting Provider (where your domain name is maintained from)
• Ongoing needs for the site.

With that gathered, a plan can then be put into action.

The typical workflow is:

• Discuss format changes you would like
• Scrape your current site into a series of pages to be used as a template
• Quickly create a new site, in Hugo, to host the static pages.

Once this has been completed, the new site is then refactored to use templates and your existing content. This is then deployed to a draft site for your approval. Once approved, a few changes are made to point to your new static site, and you are live.

For editing purposes, you can do one of several things:

• Edit the content files directly
• Use a static site content-management-system such as Netlify CMS
• Discuss options for ongoing support of the site.