On Fri, 15 Apr 2016, Louis Kowolowski wrote:
It used to be that you could get by with just knowledge of HTML, but
today, its not really the case any more.
As many others have said, this is very true -- esp. if you want your
site to look decent on phones, laptops, desktops, and large displays.
It's even more crucial if you want to avoid comingling content and
presentation. Keeping data separate from look-and-feel is essential
for any site that expects to expand content over a long-ish timeframe.
Otherwise, design changes (even small tweaks) take an inordinate
amount of time and effort.
My first suggestion is a static site generator. There are many to
choose from. I’ve played with a couple. They’re mostly variations on
the same thing, but use the superior language of the day. They
essentially have you write your content in markdown (not terribly
complicated, and you can use pretty much any editor for this). The
generator parses the markdown and generates html pages. There are
various plugins that give you extra features, and templates to let
you customize what different kinds of pages look like style wise.
This is where you will need to be able to potentially modify HTML,
CSS, JS. I’m fairly happy with pelican. It took me about 3mo to
convert 3 wordpress sites. The bulk of the work was done in about
1-2wks, for each, and the rest of the time was spent customizing
things, playing with plugins and figuring out how I wanted to adjust
the layout.
Static site generators are great. I use Hugo--among its fine traits is
that it doesn't require a boatload of dependencies--but I'd suggest
surveying the field. My brief thoughts on moving from a custom
toolchain to a static generator are online:
https://www.madboa.com/blog/2015/11/01/redesign-2015/
The second suggestion is to look at Twitter Bootstrap. Its fairly
popular with web devs for making things fairly quickly. Again,
you’ll have to know HTML/CSS/JS. I’ve not done anything from scratch
with bootstrap, but I have played with some themes for pelican that
are bootstrap based.
Agreed. Bootstrap in combination with a static site generator can do
wonders, leaving you with a site that displays well on a wide variety
of computing devices. The online documentation isn't as thorough as it
might be, but it's a solid B-.
--
Paul Heinlein
[email protected]
45°38' N, 122°6' W
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