My journey to static website generators

You’ve likely seen all the stats about the awesome companies using static website generators and the various reasons why. If you haven’t, then read Why Static Website Generators Are The Next Big Thing.

For me, I use them because they fit nicely into my desired workflow. I develop locally, preview on a staging server, and deploy to a production server. After years of headaches from juggling databases in a LAMP stack, I had had enough. During the same time, I had been building a ton of landing pages for Marketing Automation systems. Many of which had similar elements (boilerplate code) that I got tired of writing repeatedly. Something had to change.

Luckily I started working with JavaScript task runners (Grunt and Gulp) and templating languages (Handlebars and Liquid). Before long I built my own landing page framework to allow me to easily build on top of past projects instead of remaking the wheel each time.

For even more control, I started working with Jekyll and brought Gulp with me. I’ll talk more about this setup soon.