I am a back en dev who is terrible at anything frontend. I can not design web pages. I know my stuff in the hosting and back end development though.
Now I have started my own firm for consulting as a dev/ops engineer and would like to serve some sort of company web page.
What I want is very simple. One page. Good looking design. Information about my company and what I do, and a mailto -link for contacting me.
One single simple static web page for this. No fancy scrolling or effects.
How do I go about this? I have tried 11ty, Hugo, WordPress, and simple HTML templates.
I feel like neither of these are the right tool. They are either very complicated, full of features, or they create badly looking web pages.
11ty, Hugo and Jekyll all seem nice and more like what I need, but they are focused towards blogging which does not fit my use case. The templates that look good that I found didn’t work and had minimal or no instructions at all about how to get them to work.
What is clear to me is that I have a huge front end shaped gap in my competence that I should work on. Please do not bash me over this.
Now that you understand my situation; What tool or template would you recommend that I use?
I just want a simple good looking landing page with info and a link.
Thank you for any support or advice. I am just tired of failing at something I feel like should be an easy task to manage.
Imagine if someone wanted to develop a simple web game or something, but they didn’t have backend experience. They’re asking what tool they should use. They say they tried nginx, apache, and caddy, they messed around with PHP and node, but they’re very complicated, full of features, and they create malfunctioning web pages.
What tool or template would you recommend that they use?
I’m not saying this to bash you, just gently telling you that you are using the correct tools, and I suspect that you’re unfamiliar with being a beginner at something web-related, so you’re assuming that the tool is the issue if it doesn’t work exactly the way you want it right away. The issue is just that you haven’t learned your way around yet.
Wordpress is probably your easiest option. Pay for one of the paid themes that looks nice and fits exactly with what you’d like to do, and customize it. Hugo, Bootstrap or something similar may better suit how you want your workflow to be, although they’ll be a little bit less professional.
If you have a Hugo theme in mind that looks nice, I’d be happy to take a crack at getting it working, I’ve worked with Hugo before.
Yeah, I am very much aware that I am a beginner and getting started really is the biggest problem here. I don’t know where to start. Doing bullet lists in html for hours on end in some web course feels like I am not learning much other than the names of different tags. But what is my next step? I don’t know. All tutorials, courses or guides I find are either way to basic or way to complicated. This is where I am at, not knowing how to progress really.
I have done a blog using a simple Hugo theme before which was great. Therefore I was leaning towards that sort of tool now.
I have been looking at this Hugo theme, but never got it to work as I wanted it to. Also, it has to be re-done from “marketing” to just a dead simple company info page.
I appreciate you offering, but I don’t expect you to work for me. I will figure something out eventually. I am just a bit frustrated. It feels like I should be able to whip something up. The task is not big, it is just new to me.
Thank you for your reply
Makes sense. I know it has a bad reputation, but GPT or Claude can sometimes be really useful to bridge that gap when you’re first getting started with something until you get your feet under you. I know exactly the feeling you’re talking about. The chatbots aren’t smart enough to really get the big work done, but they can point you in the right direction for the first few steps so you don’t have to dig through 10 different tutorials to find where the basic stuff is.
You might have already found this, but if you do decide to start out with that Hugo theme, content/*.md, layouts/_default/baseof.html and layouts/_default/index.html are the big starting points for page content and presentation. Start with just compiling the completely default site, make sure it looks like the demo, then make changes one by one, asking the chatbot for what file to change if you get lost for how to make a change or it doesn’t seem like it’s functioning right, but ignoring its attempts to do it for you since it usually won’t get it completely right.
Best of luck!