Pageboy

The world’s simplest static site generator.

Build a static site from plain HTML, no templating or command line required.

Get it — $13

• 📣 Say more! Pageboy is a tiny app that lives in your Mac’s menu bar and helps you make static websites a bit more easily. Use the good ol’ HTML, CSS, and JS you already know to build your headers, footers, and partials — then bring it together with a simple tag and instantly see the output. Neat!
• ❓ How do I use it? Just put this tag in your HTML wherever you want to include something: <include src="partial.html"> — the contents of partial.html are written into the parent file when compiled. This is super helpful for making consistent headers and footers across multiple pages, for example.
• 👀 How can I preview the output? Pageboy includes a built-in webserver that points to your output folder, and it recompiles the site whenever there’s a change in your source folder. Just refresh to see the changes! (There’s a link to open the local server in the Pageboy panel, if you accidentally close it.)
• 🔗 What about nesting? And links, and images, and CSS, and whatever? Any relative links to other pages or resources will be automatically rewritten in the output HTML. So href="link.html" becomes href="../link.html" when inside a directory, for example. Absolute links are left alone.
• 🗂️ Do I need to use any particular folder structure? Nope! Whatever makes sense to you. Pageboy will traverse your source folder and figure out how you’ve organized things.
• 🗑️ Does Pageboy empty the output folder every time it processes HTML? It does not! It only overwrites files created from the source folder — anything already in the output folder is untouched. This is pretty handy if, say, you’ve initialized a Git repository in the output folder to distribute your compiled site.
• 💾 Does Pageboy help me deploy the static site? Alas, no. (Or: not yet?)
• 🧑‍💻 Why don’t you just use ____? There are tons of amazing static site builders out there. If you need things like chronological posts & navigation, or more complex builds, check’em out. If you just need to build some simple, small sites (and don’t want to learn a new templating language, or use the command line) then Pageboy might be for you.
• 🚧 Does Pageboy track me? Pageboy doesn’t collect, share, or retain any data.
• 🕺 Who made this? Pageboy was made by Tom Creighton (that’s me) just for you.
• 💌 Where can I send feedback? Suggestions, questions, shoutouts, and slams can be sent to hello@pageboy.app. I’d also love to see any sites you’ve built with it!