Before You Start #
- This section assumes that you have experience with terminals, CLIs, and IDEs (e.g., VS Code)
- You should ideally have a git tool (e.g., GitHub) to store and manage your site repo
Why use Hugo? #
- Affordable: Technical Writers usually have a razor-thin budget; you can deploy docs with Hugo + Netlify (or Render, Vercel) for free in most cases (Startup, Open Source)
- Scalable: Hugo is the fastest SSG, supports localization, is un-opinionated in terms of style, and is easy to evolve alongside your product
- Ergonomic: The drafting UX is markdown focused with near-instant local previews; for non-tehchnical contributors, you can plug into CMS interfaces (e.g., Frontmatter)
- Agnostic: You’ll always own your docs, and transforming content into JSON or XML is as easy as defining an output template (great for search tools like Algolia!)
Why use This Theme? #
- No Manual Menus: All sections are auto-sorted based on either a
weightvalue ora-ztitle order - Deep Section Nesting: Tech docs tend to need sub-sub-sub sections, y’know?
- Discovery UX Components: Algolia Search & ChatGPT UIs are OOTB for easy hookup
- Battle Tested Shortcodes: I’ve been deploying Hugo for tech docs for 5+ years; this is my personal collection of need-to-haves, made as agnostically as possible
- TailwindCSS + VanillaJS: You’ll be able to modify this theme to your liking using the basics with minimal dependencies
- Brandable: Colors and fonts have their own CSS files; the TailwindCSS extensions mapped to these styles use generic names like
font-brand,font-semibold, andbrand-color-1.