[Pelican](http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.3.0/) started out strong with a good layout and structure out of the box.

However it used a lot of *front-matter* and if that metadata was wrong (or in my case duplicated due to my taste for cut and paste rather than remembering the mandatory fields) then the generator failed with a cryptic error message and the entire site failed to generate.

Ultimately it felt like a fussy version of Jekyll in Python

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[Jekyll](http://jekyllrb.com/) is the daddy of static site generators due to its position as the default generator for Github Pages.

Jekyll does blogs and pages equally well, has a lot of good support and documentation.

It obviously requires Ruby and goodly number of gems and I think it isn't trivial to understand how to use metadata in templates but it is the yardstick for home to judge this sector.

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Pelican seems pretty nice for blogs but for categorised pages of information Jekyll still seems to be best.

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[Wintersmith](http://wintersmith.io/) is entirely Javascript-based (which means you don't need to worry about Ruby and installing Gems) and by default has a beautiful template.

It does seem very post-based despite its claims to be flexible.

I haven't tried to use its integrations to build a SPA yet though, something that the information site mentions.