I use Hugo, it’s not super complicated.

You basically just define templates in pseudo html for common content (header, nav panel, footer, etc), and then you write your articles in markdown and Hugo combines the two and outputs actual html files.

You also have a content folder for js, css, and images which get output as is.

That’s about all there is to it, it’s a pretty minimalist static site generator.

Hosting wise you can just put it on github pages for free.

If you use github pages, you can create, deploy, and host static websites for free. Only cost, if you want your own URL, is for a custom DNS name.

You can use their default Jekyll static rendering engine, and create the content using Markdown. And with github actions, all you need to update the content is create markdown, then push the change to the same repo. After a few minutes, the new content shows up.

https://pages.github.com/

Hugo can also be used, but it takes a few extra steps: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/

You can also find ‘themes’ to customize the look and feel of the site, specific to the site generation tool.

If you want a lot of extra features, Docusaurus is pretty much as good as it gets, and you can set it up to push out to GH pages: https://docusaurus.io/docs/deployment

What I use for a lot of my sites is SvelteKit. It has a static site generator. If you like writing the HTML by hand, it’s great. Also HTML5 Up is where I get my templates. I made the https://nymph.io website this way. And https://sveltematerialui.com.

I’ve been meaning to change my website from Hugo to Zola. It has a few good themes to choose from and it’s easy to set up. Hugo has way more themes though.

You might want to check out a lot of SSGs to see what themes each has, and pick the one you like the most.

I’m currently using Astro for that. You can write the pages in markdown, html or one of the many js frameworks. It also allows you to mix them.

By default it generates static websites with out any js, but it allows you to add js where needed. Optional server side features are wip, if you decide to need them later on.

They also have pre made themes on their website if you don’t feel like writing css.

Hey there! For a friendly and simple static site generator, you might wanna check out Jekyll. It’s pretty lightweight, works great with Markdown, and has a nice community. Plus, it’s super easy to deploy on S3. You can still hand-code if you want, but Jekyll will save you a bunch of time!

Grav may fit your needs.

Mkdocs is great! Used by many different OS projects. Simple markdown to HTML site.

I use Nikola and it hasn’t let me down. It just works and supports all the ways I write content: markdown, asciidoc, rest, Jupiter Notebooks, html and so on. It does not have so many themes, but the default one works and it’s not hard to customise if needed. If you like to use python it’s also easy to extend. I’ve written a bit about Nikola here in case it picks your interest.

I’ve deployed it to CloudFlare pages, but GitHub pages, Gitlab pages and any other provider also work.

I like jbake. Create templates, pages are either html or markdown. Pretty easy to use.

GitHub supports Jekyll page generation. Or at least did this a few years ago.

And please make sure to also generate an RSS feed for us feed reader users. ;)

I had a workflow a few years ago where I ran and configured a local drupal instance, then ran this HTTrack tool which would export all the pages and images to flat HTML which I then zipped and pushed to an S3 bucket to host the website. Worked great because it just needed to host info, no comments or accounts or anything.

https://www.httrack.com/

DocFx could do what you’re looking for. You would write your stuff in markdown and it generates an interactive and customizable site.

LibreOffice Write, a template, save as HTML, FTP to your host.