I use Hugo, it’s not super complicated.

You basically just define templates in pseudo html for common content (header, nav panel, footer, etc), and then you write your articles in markdown and Hugo combines the two and outputs actual html files.

You also have a content folder for js, css, and images which get output as is.

That’s about all there is to it, it’s a pretty minimalist static site generator.

Hosting wise you can just put it on github pages for free.

I’ve been meaning to change my website from Hugo to Zola. It has a few good themes to choose from and it’s easy to set up. Hugo has way more themes though.

You might want to check out a lot of SSGs to see what themes each has, and pick the one you like the most.

Hugo can be as simple as installing it, configuring a site with some yaml that points at a really available theme and writing your markdown content.

It gets admittedly more complex if you’re wanting to write your own theme though.

But I think this realistically applies to most all static site generators.

Lots of great responses here already. In terms of simplicity and ease of maintenance, Hugo is going to be the best solution with its single binary, built-in features, and ease of setup/use.

If you use github pages, you can create, deploy, and host static websites for free. Only cost, if you want your own URL, is for a custom DNS name.

You can use their default Jekyll static rendering engine, and create the content using Markdown. And with github actions, all you need to update the content is create markdown, then push the change to the same repo. After a few minutes, the new content shows up.

https://pages.github.com/

Hugo can also be used, but it takes a few extra steps: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/

You can also find ‘themes’ to customize the look and feel of the site, specific to the site generation tool.

If you want a lot of extra features, Docusaurus is pretty much as good as it gets, and you can set it up to push out to GH pages: https://docusaurus.io/docs/deployment

I recently built a site with hugo. Its very easy. You pick a theme, then write some markdown files. And when you need flexibility, you have it for later. I also think it’s the most popular right now, which lends to a lot of themes to pick from and a lot of cpmmunity support.

What I use for a lot of my sites is SvelteKit. It has a static site generator. If you like writing the HTML by hand, it’s great. Also HTML5 Up is where I get my templates. I made the https://nymph.io website this way. And https://sveltematerialui.com.

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I’m currently using Astro for that. You can write the pages in markdown, html or one of the many js frameworks. It also allows you to mix them.

By default it generates static websites with out any js, but it allows you to add js where needed. Optional server side features are wip, if you decide to need them later on.

They also have pre made themes on their website if you don’t feel like writing css.

i recommend using Jekyll to make the website, and for hosting I recommend codeberg pages.

What about Publii?

WYSIWYG static site generator but personally I like to keep the content in markdown pages in a git repository so i can keep unlimited edit history; this saves everything in a local sqlite database.

Unfortunately the most powerful one that checks all the boxes, including automatic upload to s3 is hugo, but as you said the learning curve is high. Maybe try to see if you can run the example site of this theme, install hugo in your system, then go in the examplesite directory and run hugo serve. Slowly edit the files until you understand how it works.

Grav may fit your needs.

You could write your content in markdown and use pandoc to generate a html file. Add header/footer in template if you want

How about GNU M4 + Make (output)?

(to be clear this is a joke suggestion. but yes it is what I legitimately use)

Maybe https://picocms.org/

But Hugo is fine, no need to use all the advanced features.