From dynamic to static

Converting a classic Wordpress hosted website to a high-tech jekyll cloud-hosted website.

As long as I’ve read articles on medium, a lot of stories have been about ‘the cloud’. But I still don’t see a lot of documentation of people moving the most popular usage of the internet to the cloud: Websites.

A couple of years ago I started building a website with a small team in our spare time. We wanted to make sure non-technical people would be able to do most of the editing of the website, so a CMS was a must-have. We thought we’d save ourselves some time by taking the beaten path: Wordpress with a purchased theme. We bought a theme that looked nice and started customizing it. When I opened the theme in my code editor, I stared at a programmers worst nightmare: a full plate of spaghetti code.

We stuck with it, spend months wrestling with the code to make the website do what we want it to do. Some parts were rebuilt, but most of the time we adapted existing code. We got it working, but it cost us a lot of time.

The site has been running for a few years without any major problems, but still I have a few annoyances. For instance, adding new features still takes a lot of time (mostly searching through 100s of css classes). Also, our site-maintainers often copy-paste text from Microsoft Word into Wordpress, and upload pictures of multiple megabytes. This gives us all kinds of styling and performance problems. Maybe websites are better maintained by technical people. I figured the time had come to try and make the site better maintainable. Even if that meant that it had to be updated by programmers.

I had been following developments in static websites for a while, especially jekyll. The idea of going back to basics and reducing a website to a bunch of files again sounded really good: security, caching, configuration, hosting everything becomes a lot simpler. Content management? Git seems perfect for that. The only thing missing is a wysiwyg editor, but who needs that anyway right? The site i am talking about is mostly text, images and links, and those few dynamic features can be easily solved using either a SaaS webservice or…

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