Unlike commercial platforms such as Wix or Squarespace, Xanthan emphasizes openness and durability over quick customization. Updating your site takes a little more attention to detail, but you don’t need any technical background to get started.
Many popular website creation sites are good solutions for a quick and temporary need. But most free website tools are not good choices for open, collaborative, and sustainable projects. Often they:
People often argue that learning web tools is futile because technology changes so fast. But static site tools like Xanthan actually represent the opposite trend—they embrace stability, simplicity, and longevity in web development.
They rely on enduring web fundamentals. Static sites are built with plain HTML, CSS, and sometimes minimal JavaScript—technologies that have been stable for decades. Unlike many web frameworks that rise and fall in popularity, these core technologies don’t go away. Learning them gives you skills that will still matter far in the future.
They resist unnecessary complexity. Modern web development often piles on layers of abstraction (frameworks, dependencies, servers) to functional at all. Static sites intentionally strip that away. You don’t need an interface to edit your site, you edit simple plaintext files that you can open anywhere. This simplicity is a form of technological resilience.
They model sustainable design principles. By focusing on lightweight, portable content that can last indefinitely, static sites embody the ideals of digital preservation. They don’t depend on a proprietary platform or a server that might vanish.
They teach timeless design thinking. Learning to use a static site template is also learning how to structure information clearly, design for readability, and separate content from presentation—all principles that extend far beyond any one technology stack.
None! You will need to learn Markdown, and you’ll probably want to learn a little about how HTML and CSS work together to “style” a website. It’s not really “coding” per se, but there is some syntax to learn that enables you to design your site however you’d like.
It take 10-15 minutes to read through and follow the directions for creating a new site from the Xanthan template. At that point, you’ll have your own copy of Xanthan that you can start to customize to fit your needs.
As you do things for the first time, it takes about an hour to make substantial edits because you will be learning where files are, where to make changes in the files, and so on. But it’s fast and easy after you get a sense of how things work. This is the investment that building your own site requires, but it pays great dividinds later on.