The recent discussion on removing the link to the server manager from the default landing page got me thinking. I haven’t changed the landing page from its default because I haven’t had anything to replace it with–my main domain isn’t intended as a web server as such, but I do provide a number of web services (webmail, Nextcloud, a weather station). It’s a family domain, and a number of members of my family have accounts there. I’d kind of like to build a decent-looking landing page there with links to the various services I’m hosting. Adding some instructions on email client setup would be nice too.
The problem is that, to put it kindly, my knowledge of HTML is very limited. I could hand-code a page like this, but it’d look like it was from 1995 (though I fortunately know better than to use the <blink>
tag). I can see three options, none of which sounds very appealing; I’m hoping you can suggest others:
- Teach myself enough HTML to hand-code the page I want
- Install a CMS like Joomla! or Wordpress
- Use Dokuwiki to build such a page
- ???
I’m sure teaching myself HTML would be a worthy endeavor, but I don’t see me using it much in the future, so it seems like a lot of work for relatively little return.
Joomla! and Wordpress both have plenty of nice templates, attractive themes, and make it relatively easy to build content-rich, attractive sites. I’ve dabbled in Joomla!, and I know there’s a module for Wordpress, but both seem like complete overkill for a page like this.
As I was writing, I realized that I might be able to use Dokuwiki for something like this–I could at least do the links and text, and it’d certainly look better than if I hand-coded it. I don’t think it’s exactly what Dokuwiki (or any wiki) was designed for, but it also seems like less overkill than Wordpress or Joomla!. I don’t know, though, how (if at all) that would interact with my existing Dokuwiki installation.
Or… what? What I’d like to find is a relatively easy, lightweight way to produce a reasonably-attractive (I know, that’s pretty subjective), hopefully relatively responsive (should look OK on mobile as well as desktop) page for free. Software that I need to install could work, a web tool could work. Heck, I could probably take a HTML page template and edit it, assuming there were good instructions for dummies like me. Any thoughts?