Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dod9er 3068 days ago
Sorry for offtopic, but I´ve seen many nice-looking website generators here, but being a backend-guy I struggle more with the frontend, getting a nice layout/theme/font without deepdiving into css/js/html. Any suggestions here ? Any Wysiwyg-Editor which generates a reasonable output ?
3 comments

* Avoid custom fonts. You probably don't need a custom font. Just use system fonts. Using built-in fonts will allow your site to load faster.

* Getting a "nice layout/theme" is a design problem. I'd suggest following someone's style guide. I'm fond of the U.S. Web Design System [0] since it's lightweight and accessible. Disagree with their suggestion to use a custom font.

* Keep the layout as simple as possible, with a focus on content. You can go incredibly far with semantic HTML and a smattering of CSS. I don't think it requires a deep-dive.

[0] https://designsystem.digital.gov/

You can get some decent mileage out of a framework like Bootstrap[0] or Foundation[1] without diving too deeply into it, but it really depends on what your tastes are. I'm not sure about the WYSIWYG options out there though.

[0] https://getbootstrap.com/

[1] https://foundation.zurb.com/

I know this is controversial but the default html layout is what most people need. You can use markdown or org mode etc. to generate it. One improvement may be centering the content on bigger displays, which I do for my blog with two @media rules as follows: https://www.gkayaalp.com/style.css