Hugo with a simple theme like book or paper should do it. Alternatively Jekyll or Docusaurus, in principle they’re all the same in that they process markdown files and dump out a static site.

Astro for a more feature rich “development” experience.

That’s interesting, Hugo is the only SSG I’ve had luck with so far. I’m kind of stuck on Docusaurus at work and it’s a disaster.

On the face of things they’re all so simple, but aren’t documented well for users new to SSGs, and the build often spits out something unexpected with no way to figure out why.

I know I’m not part of the target audience for pretty sites, but the average user gets frustrated with poor design choices and outright broken websites as well.

Just as one recent and therefore present example, I was on a pretty site the other day and nothing happened when I clicked on “About Us”. The next thing I did was close the tab. As you say, first impressions mean a lot.

I hear complaints about these kind of things at work constantly as well. As an internal product owner of sorts users think I and the devs make poor design choices on our own, but all we can do is manage the best we can with the UX garbage Microsoft comes up with.

Pretty sites are cool and all, but in my experience super simple things often just don’t work. I’m not patient anymore when it comes to stuff like that, so I’ll close the tab real quick and find the information elsewhere or move on to the next thing.

Forgejo is a git server, forked by Codeberg from Gitea after Gitea got bought up by a for-profit corporation.

Codeberg is a non-profit organization which runs a public instance of the Forgejo git server.

You can make an account on Codeberg.org, save repos there, and contribute to other repos, like on Github. Or you can run your own Forgejo instance to use either privately or open up to public use.