Hi there,
I designed and set up various iterations of a government website from c# to our latest Drupal version. I am relatively new to Hugo, but really am impressed with Hugo’s architecture.
I can see the advantages–and I won’t waste time listing them here!
So in what ways can I provide assurances that this is a good direction to pursue?
Any suggestions and guidance would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
One point: Sites created by static site generators are by nature more secure than more complex CMSs, so that might be something that is interesting in a gov’t setting.
Other than that it’s hard to say; could you say more about what the site is doing?
Really good point about security! The site provides public information to different customer groups. News is important and featured on the front page. There are probably 80 or so web pages.
Navigation is important–and I have both left side navigation and breadcrumbs working and looking quite nice…plus search. There are a few non CMS items needed such as forms processing, but I think I can isolate these.
I’m glad you’re responded on this. Security is a huge concern tehse days.
This list is valid for all static site generators:
Security and scalability for very little money.
Excellent list. I set up a small commercial site using Hugo recently on Netlfy. Much appreciated!
@jdh I can tell you the U.S. Govt uses Hugo (as well as Jekyll, but they’ve recently added Hugo). Here’s the Federalist Platform that they use for hosting static sites, which you might find some information relevant to your case: https://federalist.18f.gov/
I don’t do design/development for the government, but as a frequent user of their websites, I can tell you that it’s a lot of really, REALLY broken ajax/server side java which makes many common tasks like updating information evolve into merely submitting a support ticket (if you can even figure out how to do that).
So, you could make the reliability point fairly easily I believe.
And that is really cool. But as a government, I think the US variant has reached the size and pain point where they have to think smarter to be able to administrate all the sites.
Smaller countries (like Norway), in general, don’t think the same thoughts, as they:
Arguments left for those governments are environment (only use CPU once when generating the static pages) and security.
@bep. That may be the Norwegian government’s concern, but the govt. and NGOs I’ve worked with are highly fragmented, so don’t have teams of sysops sitting around available to every project, and managers in higher positions don’t think as much as you’d think about website security.
At any rate, my response was to help the original poster answer this question for his boss.
Technological adoption typically follows a pattern where later adopters look to earlier ones as proof that it’s viable.
All of this is helpful and quite interesting. I think another point I can make is how responsive the Hugo community is! Thanks!