Overview

This course teaches you how to build a static website—like a marketing or landing page—with simple, zero-cost CMS support.

Introduction

As developers, working with Markdown is second nature. But many clients and non-technical folks aren’t comfortable with Markdown, Git, or code in general.

At the same time, requests for marketing and landing websites are extremely common. This course will walk you through building one of these sites in a way that allows anyone—technical or not—to update content, all at zero cost.

A marketing or landing site has two main parts:

• The presentation layer: all the design and styling that users see.
• The content layer: the actual text, images, and information on the page.

This content can live in many places: a CMS like Notion, or even directly in the website files as Markdown.

But here’s the challenge: clients want to edit content themselves without needing a developer. Most CMS platforms that solve this problem come with a price tag.

In this course, we’ll explore a free, developer-friendly approach using Astro that makes it easy to create beautiful websites and lets non-technical users manage content safely.

Course Content

This course will cover only the CMS-part of things. We will provide the initial Astro boilerplate code to build upon. But otherwise, this is mostly a quick intro to Pages CMS.

The tech stack for this course:

• Astro
• Pages CMS

Starter Repo

We have created a GitHub repository with the initial setup to make it easier for you. You can fork or clone the repository and start working on the project. The branch should be 0-init.

1. Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/yaralahruthik/fh-personal-website-with-cms.git

2. Then run the following commands:

cd fh-personal-website-with-cms
pnpm install

3. Finally, run the dev server:

pnpm dev

4. Also, publish this to your own GitHub account, otherwise, you won't be able to follow up with the rest of the course.

In the next section, we will setup Pages CMS.