Lately I’ve been getting interested in building sites with Hugo.

This site of mine is an example, but my goal is the remaking of my wife’s site computersenzapensieri.com.

Her site is currently created in WordPress and hosted on Aruba.it; undoubtedly presents two problems, even considering that to date it has not yet become a source of income (which we hope will soon become):

• The first problem is related to performance: in my opinion WordPress is a platform that requires too many resources. And if we talk about small sites with few daily visits, it is absurd to think of having to spend a hundred euros a year between hosting and SQL to avoid that a page loading takes several seconds.
• The second problem is linked to the cost of hosting. For a hobby-level site like both mine and my wife’s, it is expected to take up virtually no resources and therefore can be easily hosted by mostly free services. Be sure that as a developer I am mostly against the concept that software and internet must be mostly free (we all must bring bread at home) but we must make sure to consume an adequate number of resources with respect to the type of project and therefore for small sites with few daily visits it is useless to have to deploy enormous computing powers.

I then stumbled upon static site engines including Hugo.

At first, I created this site simply using one of the themes available directly from the Hugo site (https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/portio-hugo/), and recently I have been working on the remaking of https://computersenzapensieri.com.

For my wife one, I decided to buy an HTML template (I am not a graphic designer and therefore I will gladly pay some help from someone more experienced) and then I adapted it to become a Hugo template.

The last step is the desire to introduce a membership concept within the site to start creating a community around the contents made by my wife and why not also to enhance her efforts by asking for a small monthly fee to those who want more personal help.

With WordPress, surely all of this would have been easier but enjoying programming challenges, I am looking forward to finding a way to achieve the same result using Hugo.

So, I came across this interesting article https://www.netlify.com/blog/2020/07/13/manage-subscriptions-and-protect-content-with-stripe/ by Jason Lengstorf in which a site is created with membership using Netlify Identity and Shopify.

I then started its implementation in Hugo and will keep you updated on the progress in the next posts.