You're used to thinking cms or wordpress for building websites that require templating or ease of editing; but in my experience 90% of the time it ends up feeling like your "killing an ant with a sledgehammer". It's not every day you discover a vastly more simple solution to a very common problem, but static site generators + markdown are it. I'm convinced.

Build Websites

Jekyll is a static site generator that helps developers build websites and solves problems including:

• templates & partials - easy to maintain and DRY
• canonical urls - seo friendly
• asset optimiziation - blazing fast
• markdown - really easy to edit
• free hosting - when combined with github pages

And What's More

It does this without a hundred thousand pounds of code, without more expensive hosting, without needing tons of security patches and without a database. In my mind it's a whole new way of building website and it's refreshing.

One Catch

You have to install ruby and the gem. But it's really not that big of a deal...

1. Install Ruby

You can use my preferred approach or find instructions on google quite easily

2. Install the jekyll gem

gem install jekyll

3. Add Jekyll to your path

On my machine I found Jekyll in the following folder and added it to my .bashrc as follows

export PATH="$PATH:$HOME//.rbenv/versions/1.9.3-p362/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jekyll-1.1.2/bin"

Then you can create a jekyll site with the following:

jekyll new my-site

Try it out... it's fantastic.