ISC's New Static Website

Where is the ISC website I’m used to?

Gone. Well, hopefully we have a backup somewhere.

That site was built using WordPress, a very powerful, flexible, and full-featured open source software system. I loved WordPress and I really appreciate the team that has been maintaining and extending that software for years. Thank you guys!!!

Back to basics

We like to think that our users have superior taste, and don’t prefer a website with flashing, spinning graphics and lots and lots of repetitive marketing text.

We think our users want a short path to get to the 5 things they need on our web site, with fast download performance and less clutter. Now that we have a new Knowledgebase with a really good search function, we don’t need to put as much information on the website. So, we thought we would clean house and go back to basics.

Also, we had one bad infection on our WordPress site a few years ago, and we expect that this static site will require less software maintenance (we’ll see) and will be less prone to viruses.

So what is this site?

We decided to use the Hugo static site engine. We hired Themefisher to create a custom theme for us, mostly because we saw they were contributing a lot of free open source themes to the Hugo ecosystem. The software on the download site, and eventually this whole site, are being cached by the Fastly CDN (for free, thank you Fastly!!) - so it should be much faster than the old site.

What are we losing in the process?

Some people will miss things they liked about the old site. I really enjoyed cooking up cheesy new graphics for the old site. (I suspect that behind some of the momentum for a static site were people with more sophisticated graphical taste.)

We did decide we could do without some of the bells and whistles we had on the old site. In migrating to a static site, we gave up the live RSS feeds from our Twitter channel, as well as the automatic updates from our user mailing lists and Knowledgebase. We have links to those things and people will just have to go and look there themselves.

What can we do to make this site more useful and effective for you?

If you have comments, criticisms, or requests, we are happy to hear from you at web-request@isc.org. If we can fix it, we will.