The "why" behind my SSG conversion project

Updated: Thu Apr 17 2025

Frankly, it was strategic. My contract ended at the end of 2024. I needed a job. To get a job, you need writing samples. Mine were woefully out of date, as was my WordPress site. I didn’t realize just how out of date it was until I got deep into this project.

It was an opportunity to review 15 years’ worth of content, get rid of cruft, reduce my hosting costs, learn some things, and put together a portfolio.

The content strategy was to blog about the process, and to put that content out on a regular cadence to draw traffic. I also hope to inspire other tech writers to get more technical, and understand how the content we create is consumed programmatically.

Goals

My goals were to:

Technical goals

• Update a 10-year-old design.
• Retire a complex site using WordPress that didn’t get much traffic and needed maintenance.
• Quickly (“quickly”) revamp my website to increase my chances at getting hired.
• Add value by developing with SSGs, which isn’t a skill a lot of technical writers have.
• Learn newer technologies (that leverage old ones like HTML and CSS).

Content goals

• Have a steady stream of blog content that I can drive traffic to and show as writing samples.
• Review all the content on my site and see if and how it’s promoting my career in the best light.
• Decide whether to archive old content, like those early days of blog posts.
• Understand how to structure content not only for SSGs, but other programmatic use.
• Enjoy writing again.
• Do something for me.

Cost goals

Financial and personal/time costs:

• Reduce the overhead of maintaining a content management system. I haven’t blogged in some time, and my podcast has been on hiatus since 2022.
• Reduce hosting costs. SSGs can be hosted in many places that WordPress sites can’t, which gave me flexibility to move to a zero-cost host. That doesn’t mean there are zero costs to hosting the site, but getting rid of an annual hosting fee could allow me to allocate those resources elsewhere.

My use case

Here are my initial structure thoughts that changed as I built things out:

• Home - promotes posts across all of the content types — podcast, writing samples, skills, and this SSG series.
• About
• List of skills of all the ways I can help a potential client/employer
• Podcast
• Tech writing examples - gallery page
• Speaking engagements/presentations
• Blog (etc) - gallery page
• Podcast pages - gallery page
• A sidebar that displays a tag cloud
• photo galleries (?)
• Contact
• Resume(?)

Most of them ended up in the finished product. Some I may include after I publish version 1.0. I intend to keep this site more updated than the last one (!remindme 1 year), but I wanted it to be as feature-complete as possible on publish day.

The what

Choosing a static site generator