1.9 What can we build with Hugo? #

The Jamstack is a versatile concept, and we can apply it to a variety of problems. Hugo has been a poster child for the success of the Jamstack with its ability to handle scale. Hugo shines when information flows from the server to the client, then the users can focus on consumption rather than creation. This approach fits the traditional definition of publishing, where content creators provide content via a medium like the web to con- sumers. The following sections introduce us to the things that Hugo specializes in.

1.9.1 Personal websites and blogs #

Hugo is well suited for getting up and running with a personal website. Big goals for personal websites are low maintenance, low costs, and the flexibility to showcase your tastes. Throughout this book, you will see how we can build something with little supervision, almost free hosting, and enough flexibility to customize as much as you desire. You get outstanding performance, the ability to update when and where you want, full SEO support, and a quick start.

You can pick up any publicly available Hugo theme to get started and be up and running with a decent website in minutes. (You will be surprised at how many features are available without any customization.) Once there, it is straightforward to fork the theme and start customizing it to leave your unique impression on the internet.

1.9.2 Nontechnology business websites #

Hugo scales to teams updating content in parallel without any problem. Businesses whose core competencies do not include building websites need something easy to maintain, with low cost, and outstanding performance. They also want flexibility and control. Hugo ticks all of these boxes. It is well thought out and easy to understand for any vendor team. Hugo provides few places where a developer could write harmful code that would slow down the website. The entire mechanism is flexible enough to add the one custom page that the business needs immediately without going through and ripping apart the whole website.

With the JavaScript and API layer of the Jamstack, you can extend Hugo websites to provide features reserved for dynamic websites updating on the fly. You will see in this book how we can build low-cost, low-maintenance features like shopping carts while statically managing the rest of the website.

1.9.3 Documentation websites #

Hugo has excellent support for reading structured data from a CSV or JSON files and then creating a website from those, and you can still apply custom themes! It has built- in support for syntax highlighting and can scale to a large number of pages quickly. These make it well suited to write custom websites that can read from the API docs and prepare a neatly formatted version from the specification.

1.9.4 Hybrid Jamstack-based websites #

All websites have pages for displaying content. These pages include, for example, a privacy policy, a generic About Us page, a blog, a product listing page, and a news-room where the company releases press statements. Hugo and the Jamstack can help keep that content running at a low cost with high availability and good performance. The server technology-based pages can be delivered separately or can be built-in JavaScript, communicating with the servers using APIs exposed by them.

Exercise 1.5

True or False: Hugo-based websites require the full setup to be present locally to write content.