The early parts of projects are always easy. Gather content, sketch web pages, make pages to hold content, publish "Hello world" to a new web site. It's easy to get 80% of the way there, pulling together bits and pieces of prior work.
It's hard to make "Hello world" stink, but it isn't much. You can better it easily, but doing great work requires consistent practice. More, it requires care.
Prior versions of this blog used Jekyll as a static site generator (SSG) and GitHub Pages to host the site. Github is still the code repository. I took a long look at Hugo, but really enjoyed the idea of using fewer languages for development.
As a designer, I never really understood all the things I was doing to install Ruby or Go and maintain development environments. I could kind of do it, but I never completely understood it or wanted to be an engineer. I tried using Glitch, which was really fun, but felt a little too toy-like for me. I already know command line, so why not stick with it.
Somedays, I miss FTP. Not really.
Though 11ty is a really new SSG, its support for many forms of content and its use of Javascript convinced me. More, it is approved by my guy.
As a Chicagoan, I always have a guy. My web guy is Daniel Ryan, or Dr. Yan if you'd rather. He helped me work out a few issues with my build script or my short term memory or something. Long story short he got me going, as did this Netlify article on using 11ty with them. Dryan's the most amazing maker of web and internet adjacent visual presentation technology products.
Anyway, enough for today. Next we'll chat about CSS and grid systems.