Sai Karthik

Since a long time, I was thinking of switching from my old static website to a static site generator. After doing some research, I settled at hugo. Hugo is a popular static site generator created in golang.

The reasons i chose hugo are:

• It is a single binary to download & run
• It is super fast ( builds my entire site in ~10ms) 😃
• More control over the appearance of website & content
• SEO friendly websites
• Most of the required features are available built-in

I was very pleased with hugo & decided to contribute back something to the amazing hugo community. I chose to port a theme. The Reason is that it serves a dual purpose, I can learn in-depth about hugo & in return i will have a theme to contribute.

So, I picked up an existing CC-BY-3.0 licensed HTML5 restaurant business theme named Resto created by freehtml5.co. Hugo has an amazing, well maintained documentation to get started. But, Initially i was a bit confused about using it. Later, I came across Mike Dane’s Hugo Tutorial playlist for beginners. He explained about the basic usage & terminologies very well. I would recommend watching this for new users & then head over to documentation to learn more in-depth.

Finally, After a few days of learning, I have successfully completed porting my first theme & named it as Resto Hugo (Source code). I have submitted it to the hugo themes showcase & it was approved !

Conclusion

Learning hugo was fun & exciting. For beginners, There’s a bit of steep learning curve involved. But once you get familiar, you will start liking it!