Free is good
- Free hosting via Github Pages
- Free & open-source framework via Hugo
- Free & open-source theme via Beautiful Hugo
The hardest parts
- downloading requirements and updating PATH variable
- configuring the website (hugo.toml)
- using partials to customize a couple small things (and understanding that you are not supposed to modify the theme files directly)
- getting Build & Deploy to work (The trick was to cancel the task that had been running for over an hour and starting a new one)
The usual website things
- favicon.ico
- adding content
For me Hugo was a meaningful upgrade over Jekyll because of the taxonomy support among other readily supported features. Tags just work out of the box. Comparing to another competitor in the blog market, Wordpress, the stack is much lighter, no need for a content database, PHP, theme installations that I don’t 100% understand & control. And Hugo is fast. Free adless Wordpress hosting might be a thing that you can find, but I just felt like Wordpress had a lot of bloat and the editor was miserable to use.
If you are not tech savvy, learning how to setup Hugo or Jekyll might be a deal-breaker. You might be able to find someone to do the setup for you. Now, after a little bit of work, I’ve got a good looking site that I can easily work with and write content for.