My wife started her blog earlier this year, and she’s been taking it really seriously lately. Some days, she’s up until 11:30 at night working on her blog even after watching J all day. She only started a few months ago, and she’s already making money from affiliate programs. I’m very proud of her because I didn’t make a single cent on this blog until eight months in.

Anyway, I’ve been acting as her SEO instructor and quasi-developer. The main issue is I’m a WordPress power user, but not really a WordPress developer. I suppose I could learn PHP and read the WordPres codex before bed every night, but that doesn’t really strike me as a good use of time.

She’s been asking me to add more and more custom functionality to her blog over the past few weeks. At first, we were able to use plugins as a bandaid solution. The latest project has been adding a custom affiliate product module. The one she’s using now is quite buggy and kills page speed, so we were looking for a more lightweight solution that would integrate well with a few of the Japanese affiliate programs she’s using.

After some back and forth, I realized what she wanted would require some custom work. We’re trying to save up for a house now, so we didn’t want to spend money to hire someone. We talked through a few options, and settled on her switching to Hugo – the static site generator I use for this blog.

At first, she was afraid using a static site generator like Hugo would be too technical for her. After half an hour of me showing her my workflow, custom quick actions, and a few other hacks, she was much more comfortable. We eventually figured out what struck her as “super technical” – the monospaced font in Sublime Text. After I told her she could use any text editor with her choice of font, she warmed up to the idea pretty quickly.

Now I’m working on the design of her new static site. So far, I’ve got the basic HTML structure down, and I’ve built the affiliate product module she wanted.

I guess my wife is my first client when it comes to building static sites.

Let’s see how it goes!