Overview:

The Hugo Winston theme is a minimalist blogging theme that offers a bold and clean design. It is designed for use with the Hugo static site generator and offers a variety of features to enhance the blogging experience. The theme is fully responsive, ensuring that it looks great on all devices. It also has excellent performance scores on Google Lighthouse, making it a fast and optimized choice for a blog. The theme includes features such as support for Markdown posts and basic pages, integration with Google Analytics, and automatic generation of meta data for SEO purposes.

Features:

• Posts (Markdown): The theme supports writing blog posts using Markdown, making it easy to create and format content.
• Basic Page (Markdown): In addition to blog posts, the theme also supports basic pages, allowing you to create static pages with Markdown.
• SCSS (Hugo Pipelines): The theme uses SCSS (Sassy CSS) and Hugo Pipelines to compile and minify assets, providing a streamlined and optimized CSS workflow.
• Responsive design: The theme is fully responsive, ensuring that your blog looks great on all devices, including desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.
• 100/100 Google Lighthouse speed score: The theme has been optimized for performance and achieves a perfect score on Google Lighthouse’s speed test, ensuring fast loading times for your blog.
• 100/100 Google Lighthouse SEO score: The theme includes features to help improve SEO, such as automatically generated title, meta description, and meta tags for every page.
• 100/100 Google Lighthouse accessibility score: Accessibility is important, and the Hugo Winston theme meets the highest standards with a perfect accessibility score on Google Lighthouse.
• Google analytics configured in config.toml: The theme includes pre-configured integration with Google Analytics, making it easy to track and analyze the traffic to your blog.
• Configure GID using env variable HUGO_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID, compatible with Netlify: To further customize the Google Analytics integration, you can configure the Google Analytics ID using the environment variable HUGO_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID, which is compatible with hosting platforms like Netlify.

Installation:

To use the Hugo Winston theme, follow these steps:

1. Install Hugo: Before using the theme, ensure that you have Hugo installed. You can follow the official installation guide for detailed instructions. Note that the Hugo Extended version is required for this theme.

2. Create a new Hugo site: Use the command to create a fresh Hugo site in a folder of your choice, e.g., hugo new site mynewsite.

3. Install the theme: Download the theme or clone it using Git into the themes folder of your Hugo site. The folder structure should look like this: mynewsite/themes/hugo-winston-theme.

4. Copy the example content: Copy the contents of the exampleSite folder in the theme to the root folder of your Hugo site (mynewsite). This can be done through the terminal by navigating to the root folder and running the appropriate copy command.

5. Run Hugo: After installing the theme, generate your Hugo site by running the Hugo command from the root folder of your Hugo site. For local development, you can also use Hugo’s built-in local server by running hugo server.

6. Configuration: Customize the theme by modifying the config.toml file. There are options to add your Google Analytics ID and Plausible Analytics domain.

7. Deploying to Netlify: If you want to deploy your site to Netlify, the theme includes a netlify.toml file already configured for deployment from the exampleSite folder. If you have removed or copied the exampleSite folder, make sure to delete the netlify.toml file before deploying.

Summary:

The Hugo Winston theme is a minimalist blogging theme for the Hugo static site generator. It offers a clean and bold design, with features such as Markdown support, SCSS integration, and responsive design. The theme has excellent performance scores and includes pre-configured integration with Google Analytics. With easy installation and customization options, it provides a solid foundation for creating a stylish and high-performing blog.