Evolution Of This Site

- 2 minutes read - 407 words

I have recently started to use Hugo to develop this website. This site originally started as a WordPress site and originally developed by the publisher of my book Pearls of Wisdom Stories. Since I had to manage the site on my own, I exported the site to my own WordPress site hosted on AwardSpace, a free hosting platform. This worked out great but then I wanted to hook in Google Analytics to see site traffic. I am sure I could have added some plugins to do this, but in my research I heard about Firebase and how its possible to host for free through Firebase and get Google Analytics as part of that hosting.

In order to host on Firebase, I needed static HTML pages of my WordPress site. Doing some research on this, I found a way to export my WordPress site into static web pages. This allowed me to host all the pages through Firebase. I’ll post on that some day.

After some time, I really wanted to add a blog to my site and since the site was mostly static web pages, I couldn’t find a simple repeatable way of adding new blog articles with the existing structure. I started looking into other web development solutions that also offered a blogging platform. The obvious solutions came to mind like WordPress. I also looked at Squarespace. Since I wanted to easily publish pages, I stumbled on CMS solutions like Strapi, Prismic, Contentful. I thought of doing a React based application with a CMS.

After trying a number of different options, including FireCMS and Gatsby, I found Hugo. There were number of times I just wanted to give up because I felt all these options either over complicated what I needed or it was not easy to customize with my own images, favicon, logos, etc. Through it all, I felt God pushing me along and eventually lead me to Hugo.

Hugo is really simple to setup and offers a number of basic themes that you can start with. I started with the Ananke theme, which seemed to fit exactly what I needed in a site. The Ananke team also offers a lot of support through their GitHub.

I can definitely go into more details or if you have any questions on the development of this site, feel free to email pearlsofwisdomstories@gmail.com. I want to help others build simple sites, easy to maintain, and at low cost.

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