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Dynamic to Static Website Conversion

My brother Kevin had worked with Andy and Sally at A&S Home Furnishings, a furniture sales / home removals / clearances company in Barton-upon-Humber, and when he heard they were having website issues he put them in touch with me.

A&S Home Furnings website - a simple, mostly text website with clear links to learn about the home clearance services they offer

The were paying for quite expensive hosting for their CMS website, even though its content very rarely changed and the contact form didn't load properly. I proposed migrating their website to an Eleventy static site, which I would host on Neocities for them at a low monthly cost, with my brother handling support.

The Migration Process

Backing up the existing site: I used the venerable wget to download a full archive of the existing site, with links fixed and all assets included, using a command like the one described on this page which gives a great explanation of what these options mean:

wget -mpckE --user-agent="" -e robots=off --wait 1 example.com

After this you'll end up with a folder called example.com, containing all the HTML pages wget could discover, converted to work on your home computer.

Converting the HTML files to Markdown: Eleventy, my preferred static site generator, can use Markdown files as its input - a really easy to edit format. I used pandoc to convert the HTML files from the last step to Markdown files, with:

pandoc -s -r html input.html -o output.md

This resulted in Markdown files that were mostly good but needed a bit of tidying up, and the Eleventy "front-matter" added. A&S didn't have many pages though, so it didn't take too long, and I used Claude Code to automate much of this process.

Creating an Eleventy site: I used files from the Chobble Template to install Eleventy alongside some bonus neat functionality, like a Formspark contact form, a sitemap, responsive images, and as a Nix development environment.

Converting the design to Liquid: Rather than copying the existing A&S design exactly, I re-implemented it in fresh CSS. This was pretty easy, because the pages were straightforward, and using Flexbox and modern CSS features meant the resulting stylesheet and template was pretty minimal.

Fixing the bugs: I could then run serve to start an Eleventy development server with live-reloading, and I used this to iron out the bugs on the pages - mostly quirks to do with image paths and the dropdown menu for services.

Host on Neocities: My Forgejo server automatically builds the site whenever I commit a change to the source code. It builds the site with Nix, and then uses an action to push the completed site to Neocities.

DNS switching: I helped Andy get set up with a Krystal account, and the I helped migrate his domain into it. Combining this with the open souce website I made means A&S now have full control over their web presence, now and forever.

The Results

The new site is super fast, very reliable, and its hosting is cheap at just £10 per month. It can be edited through the Forgejo web interface by changing simple text files, although A&S handle all maintenance of the site through Kevin, which means they don't have to learn anything technical.

If you're currently paying a high hosting cost price for a website that's not working for you then get in touch with me to arrange a migration. It's your website - you should own it.