Hugo for business Websites: Should Themes Be Involved?

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Using Hugo for a Business Website (not a Blog)

Background Knowledge

I realise I’m not the first person to want to do this, and there are many successful business websites using Hugo. I’ve successfully built a website myself for a business (www.btx.co.za), so this question comes from having experience in studying the documentation, using a few of the features to “make hugo work” for my expectation and binging a working site online.

Theme-of-Discussion

I wanted to start an open discussion around this topic: What would be the correct way to use Hugo for generating a static business website, rather than having “posts” or “blogs”.

If you study the documentation of Hugo one can derive that it was built from the ground up to be an excellent blog/article site. What I mean by that it is THE BEST TOOL if you want to start a site that focusses on articles and regular “posts” of news or a subject matter.

Discussion Topic

I feel like Hugo is very similar to why they started WordPress, there are a large need to easily post articles for news or otherwise that utilises a “theme” that ensures that you only focus on each articles content and the system (WordPress or Hugo) will garnish the content to match a consistent theme of a website. Effectively separating the HTML and CSS from the content.

When building a website for a Business, you don’t follow this same requirement, you then rather build a site using “blocks” (similar to WordPress). For this reason, WordPress started the “pages” feature to allow users to build a business type website, with an integrated blog/article section.

When using Hugo, I’ve experienced that Hugo is not yet matured around that feature. It can definitely do it (since I’ve been able to do that). But one very big difference, is that I haven’t been able to really get a “block” system in place, also I used NO theme, the whole theme engine seems to be focussed on the article/block concept. I’ve seen themes that are meant for single page sites and other variations, but I can’t place my finger on whether they make sence to use. In my case I also wanted to use Material Minimum Design and thus created a site from scratch.

Before this gets to long winded. I want to see if I can pull from other experienced users to see if we can come up with a standard system and understanding of how to use Hugo for this scenario?

Am I making a mistake not using a Theme, or does that make sense and other has also done that. Also with a business website, you “cannot” separate the HTML and CSS from your pages, the HTML and CSS are the core way you build sections and layout “blocks” so the main feature of Hugo of writing articles in Markdown is not useful.

How do you layout a site in this case, you do want a template, that allows you to not worry about the and boiler plate HTML. But you do need to keep all HTML abilities for the of a page, excluding any Menus, headers and footers.

It seems like there is not a large online presense of users that need this level of control. It’s highly technical (you need to understand HTML and CSS plus the CSS engine like Bootstrap or MDB in my case) so this exclude a large number of users that are more about the content than “designing a website”.

If we can have a discussion around the technical nature of how to build websites that don’t use the themes and article concept that would be wonderful, I would like to know how others have achieved this and if I’m on the right track with what I did.

Thanks all!

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When a customer is willing to pay for having a site built they also want custom design and features. I do not think ready made themes match well with this. Starting from more or less scratch is a better option. I have built a bare bones base theme that I use for all my projects to speed things up a bit.

I think Hugos page bundles is a good fit for many different kinds of business pages. You can have separate files for each section/block and all the assets in the same place as well.

You then have features like “Content adapters” that can be really useful in building catalogs and many other types of content for a business. I generally think Hugo allows me to build more or less anything.

The problem I face is in maintaining the sites content for a business. A business does not want to go through a developer every time a site needs a content update. A site editor is, in most cases, not comfortable with git and a text editor.

There are several decent CMS solutions for static sites but they only work well for more simple article based sites in my experience.

Most sites I have built for customers are generated from outside content via APIs etc. The customers never touch the Hugo files, they are automatically generated when the content is updated.

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I was making a single-page landing business website for a guy and I also had this thought.
What is the point of making this in Hugo?

I wasn’t using any themes at that time too.

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For a one off single page landing page I see no point in using Hugo, or any other such tools. I would code it directly in HTML.

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Can I just say, excellent feedback!

What is the benefit of this bare bone theme? I could not see any benefit to using a theme, so I have not even a bare bone theme. Interesting basically every tutorial online starts with a theme (it’s easier for beginners, because of the chicken-egg problem with site generators)

I will definitely need to study “page bundles” more, I read about it, but I concluded it adds extra complexity. Maybe now after completing a site, I may understand it’s use better (and my mental capacity is available again!)

So far my website and potential future websites are very static, so I didn’t need to worry about this for now.

Absolutely the biggest challenge with static site generation. If this is the case, I would simply use WordPress, since it is a CMS. My issue why I don’t want to use WordPress anymore for these static websites, is because the maintenance is high. But very specifically the constant WordPress updates (for good reasons like security) eventually break the site layout, and then I have to build it from scratch again. The client doesn’t understand the technical problem, so they don’t want to pay to just “redo” the exact same website.

Also in my case, my clients don’t event want to update the content, I am the jack of all trades, I also maintain the content. Also important my client base are not the type that spend $$$ to get perfect content and rankings, they simply want a business website to promote their services and contact details. (Basically, like having a entry in a telephone book (or yellow pages) in the 90’s.).

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Absolutely agree! If you are building a single page website or landing page, I would not use Hugo. Hugo has an extremely high learning curve with no benefit in this case.

The only reason you want to use Hugo is if you have more than one page. That should use consistent styling and layout for the “shell” of the site (for different pages of the website, or for different content written for articles/news/posts). AND you don’t want to use a dynamic site generator like WordPress.

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See GitHub - frjo/hugo-theme-zen: A fast and clean Hugo base theme with css-grid and Hugo pipes support. and you find the stuff I think is useful it most sites I build.

Mostly boring but important things like meta tags in head, search function, css reset, multi language stuff, mobile menu, cookie consent, contact form etc.