Building a site with hugo

I thought the best way to get this blog started would be to let you know how it was created. My goal for this website was to have an extended CV that I could share quickly and to have a place on the web to share my experiences. My fist thought was wordpress. While I have no experience using wordpress I know that it is very widely used and I like that it provides a cheap open-source way to the web.

However, just before getting started with this project, a friend told be about the blog he built with the static site generator hugo. I looked it up and was convinced. It is light, easy and open-source. I was sold.

Step 1 - Learning hugo

The first step was to try to get an understanding of hugo. For that I suggest to just quickly go to through the quickstartguide and then skim over the following youtube video series. I went over almost all of the videos at 2x speed and managed to get a good overview from that.

Step 2 - Are you generic?

From here on out you can already be almost done. All you do now is to choose one of the many themes that gohugo provides and fill with content of your choice.

For me the love of customization, however, was to big so I decided to build my own template. This was a good practice for my Bootstrap/CSS skills. If you want to copy some of my code, you can find the site on my github page.

Step 3 - Hosting

Once you have built your site you are ready to host your site. Again it would be best to just follow the official documentation that hugo provides. I choose to host on github, because it is free and easy to do. Netlify also seems like a good option to me, especially if you don’t want your code to be public.

Other tipps

While I am not claiming that this is a perfectly designed website, I spent some time thinking about my design choices.

• My fonts I took from google fonts
• Type-scale is a good tool to give you some css for headlines and linewidth to get started
• Flux is a good youtube channel to start with some design basics (colorr, typography, ..)