celebrant

in january 2025 i had the opportunity to attend my cousin’s wedding in new zealand. i have family there, and since the 18th of jan, more family there.

the ceremony was officiated by another cousin, lydia, which made the whole thing even more special.

lydia enjoyed the experience and wanted to start a little side business, and wed by lyd was born.

hugo

hugo is a static site generator built on go, making it very fast compile to raw html, css and a little js.

the content doesn’t need to be dynamic for a about and contact sort of website, so it was perfect for the use case.

hugo is built around designing templates then writing structured text (e.g. markdown) to fill the named sections of template.

i found a high quality template hugoplate which integrates tailwindcss, which i am fairly familiar with, and modified it to suit my needs.

thanks robbie for suggesting hugo, hope the house move went well.

design

i tried to keep it simple as its my first hugo site but found the macros to be super simple once i found the appropriate documentation to get started. its definitely cleaner than react, but also doesn’t do all the things react does. it was refreshing to use after spending a couple months working on sittr which is built with react.

having seen other celebrants websites for inspiration, and using the basic design knowledge i have, i put together a fairly attractive homepage which seems appropriate for the use case.

to keep it a bit informal, which reflects the sort of wedding ceremonies lydia aims to conduct, i gave some elements slight rotations on larger screen sizes, and made certain elements interactive. tailwind makes this so easy with a simple rotate-1 or hover:rotate-3 duration-300.

decap cms

having searched for a decent cms to connect to the site, i came accross netlify cms which seemed to have simple configuration and lets you edit from a web browser. it was depreciated a couple years before writing, but development has continued under the decap project. all that is needed is a simple config file which defines the structure of content. if content in the /content folder is written to conform to this structure, it will appear in the CMS.

this setup seems ideal for small web design applications, as netlify hosting has a generous free tier (and is fairly cheap after that), and is very straightforward for users to edit their content once the CMS is configured by a developer.

use the theme

celebrant is available on my github along with instructions on how to install it, deploy it, and attribution to the original version

want your own static site?

if you want your own custom designed site for whatever it is that you do, contact me, and i will see what i can do for you. i will probably make it for free (+ the price of a domain).

if you are a developer - see the previous section