Having worked with a variety of web frameworks I’m used to building interactive sites primarily with Phoenix LiveView or ReactJS. These both have their downsides and I’ve found don’t always meet my needs. I built this site in order to try out tools that are optimised for content, with a solid component system, and an easy way to get a reasonably well styled website up and running quickly.
There are A LOT of choices for static site generation, and ultimately many would meet my needs. The reasons I chose Astro were:
I started the site based on the Astroship theme. It gives a pretty decent starting point, taking very little time to get started. It also introduced me to Web3Forms which is a nice low effort way to get a basic contact form on your site. I’d consider switching to Mailchimp forms in the future, but Web3Forms took about 2 minutes to get working so I haven’t switched over yet.
Overall it’s a pretty good experience so far.