Surfgreen is a simple tool for making HTML-based sites. It eschews a lot of functionality commonly found in more sophisticated static site generators, in exchange for an authoring experience that puts a lot of the fun back in building small, simple websites.
Why?
It's a fair question. There's a stupefying number of static site generators out there; why one more?
Modern web tools can do a lot of things. Hundreds of frameworks, components, and libraries exist to build complex applications and make sophisticated experiences possible.
But you know what's also cool? HTML. And for many, many websites, that's all you really need: a handful of HTML pages, a dollop of CSS, and (maybe) a dash of JavaScript. But it's surprisingly difficult to find site builders that aren't part of an expensive, proprietary platform, or don't introduce tons of cumbersome dependencies and build steps.
Enter Surfgreen, whose focus is on simplicity and maintainability. You create pages by editing HTML and Markdown, with some simple templating hooks available. Surfgreen's one configurable dependency — Webpack — is only necessary if you want to write Sass or transpile JavaScript, and is easy to turn off. And the build step generates regular HTML files, not heavy JavaScript bundles.
What's Surfgreen good for?
Small websites. That's Surfgreen's whole thing, and all of its functionality is optimized around it.
You could argue that such websites could just be made with fully hand-crafted HTML, and in many cases, that's true. But even small sites can end up needing a dozen-ish pages; while not a huge deal, it's annoying to not be able to take advantage of simple templating features.
You might also ask: can't you just use Squarespace or another platform for those sites? Absolutely you can. And, again, those services offer great features that you'll never find in Surfgreen. But even putting aside the cost, building sites with HTML and CSS is fun. Surfgreen is designed on that premise, providing just enough functionality to bring out the most fun parts of small site development.
What's Surfgreen not good for?
It's important to acknowledge that Surfgreen very well may not be the right tool for you. It doesn't, and won't ever, include a lot of important functionality in modern web application development. It will be particularly ill-suited for:
- CMS-powered websites with high-volume publishing needs
- Single-page applications built in React or other frameworks
If you have a lot of content to manage, or your website is more like an app, consider exploring one of the many much more powerful tools out there. If not though, dive into the docs to see if Surfgreen might be a good fit.