You want to build a website?

The following are your four major options. Starting with those giving you the least control, and ending with what’s giving you the most control and capabilities:

• Use an off-the-shelf service like Wix or Canva (which produce horribly bloated websites that load slow on mobile phones – it’s kind of the fast food of website builders), or Webflow (which is better in terms of output quality). These get you started really quickly and are okay for temporary websites, but they lock you in and it’s basically impossible to switch away from them without redoing your website.

• Use a traditional CMS like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. In contrast to the services above, these are all open source, giving you the option to move your website to a different host later on, if you should choose to do so. Although there has been some drama, WordPress has still a huge ecosystem of third-party plugins and themes that you can install and configure without learning any HTML, CSS or other programming language. But their quality varies wildly, and it’s often hard to get them to do exactly what you want if you have specific needs (either in terms of functionality or design). And worst of all, you’re the one that needs to keep all the plugins updated to avoid security vulnerabilities (which happen semi-regularly), unless you want somebody to hack into your web server.

• Use a static site generator such as Jekyll, Hugo or Eleventy. This doesn’t require you to run a server, because a static site generator produces the entire website ahead of time. It is then served to your website visitors from a CDN, which is what services like Netlify or GitHub Pages offer you for free (if you have a modest number of visitors). While there are usually some ready-made templates, these tools give you the full power to write your own HTML and CSS, giving you full control over the design and layout of the page.

• Use a web framework running on a server like Ruby on Rails, Django or Laravel. In addition of HTML and CSS, these require knowledge of the programming language they’re using (Ruby, Python or PHP, respecitvely). Because they server-side render the page on every visit, they also require a server (and usually also a database). If you’re not sure, you probably don’t need a full-blown framework on a running server.

Finally, if you’re building more of a web app than a website, there are client-side JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue, Svelte or Solid.

But in this guide, we’ll focus on websites. In the first half, we’ll be using Mastro as a simple static site generator. In later chapters, we’ll use it as a web server.