[javajosh]

The OP's one-hour recipe is strictly better for a pure static site, because it's substantially cheaper than shared hosting (which is $5/mo, github pages is free). Note that shared hosting provides persistent compute/store capability, which this project doesn't need.

[pcthrowaway]

If you're making a purely static site, you could save yourself ~40 minutes of that by using http://neocities.org instead of github. You don't have to bother installing git, creating files locally, intializing a repo, committing changes, signing up for github, or pushing code if you don't want to. Of course, using version control is a good practice, but neocities will host your static pages, scripts, stylesheets, and other assets for free, and there's an in-browser code editor. You still have to register your domain name and change your DNS record to point to neocities, but if your goal is to get a page up and running as fast as possible, that's the way to do it.

Also, don't github pages need to be deployed to the gh-pages branch?

[lazyjones]

> The OP's one-hour recipe is strictly better for a pure static site

But it's still a lot worse than the simple web page builders (using a web-based UI) that have been around for 15 years or so. Why not just use about.me or some similar modern service?

[alexchamberlain]

Because we are software engineers and website designers and we can do better... (Please don't look at my website...)

[lazyjones]

Certainly we can do better, but 20 carefully researched one-liners aren't nearly as technologically advanced, elaborate and useful as a well-crafted, intuitive UI with a more maintainable end result.

[lowboy]

We can do better than 3 pieces of About.me advertising over our homepage, including a modal: http://i.imgur.com/p9NY8k6.jpg

Taken from https://about.me/laraodm, which I got to from the About.me homepage > staff picks.