Ask HN: Where are the good static site themes

[brkumar]

One of the impressive things about WordPress is the ecosystem of high-quality templates like Elemetor, Divi, and Oxygen that have democratized website building to non-developers. Given the issues of security and performance, we would like to avoid WordPress.

I am unable to find a similar vibrancy of themes for static sites. Forestry.io showcases (https://forestry.io/showcase/), some beautiful websites as examples of what can be done. However, I cannot find themes that can be picked up and built like the showcased examples, without hand-coding or going through an agency to create similar high-quality static sites. For example, JAMstack themes (https://jamstackthemes.dev/) has some templates, but most of them lack quality and finesse.

Any help on where one can find good quality static site templates?

[cpach]

What’s your use case?

For a personal site it might be worth it to create your own layout.

For a commercial site, maybe hire someone to fix a theme for you?

Otherwise ThemeForest might have something decent, https://themeforest.net/

[nenadpantelic]

I always struggle to find something decent on themeforest. Most themes are bloated with unnecessary JS libraries, font icons packs etc.

[cpach]

Yeah. IMHO the best option is to create a new layout instead.

[jeromescuggs]

unfortunately there isn't an easy answer here, but you could always check out individual static site projects and peruse their available themes - hugo's gallery is pretty decent

echoing the other comment: with the caveat that i've always had a basic familiarity with css/html, i wound up throwing everything out and just building my own theme up from scratch. the real headscratcher is figuring out the whole grid/flexbox div positioning stuff, but from there it's not super tough to look at website source code for ideas, and/or google around.

it kinda seems like you're shooting for a solution in which you'll find exactly what you're looking for without having to pay a designer or even put in some time on google. in my opinion, learning css was far easier than learning how to properly maintain a static site - so it kinda threw me for a loop. on top of that i'm not really sure what you mean by 'quality' and 'finesse', except that from all possible existing designs, i can safely exclude 'most of the ones of jamstackthemes.dev'

[LarryMade2]

CSS Zen Garden has some good ideas - some are older and not responsive though - http://www.csszengarden.com

[ajawee]

You can try https://cruip.com/

[slmjkdbtl]

if it's a personal / portfolio type site check out cargo's site-in-use https://cargo.site/In-Use for inspiration