Why 11ty over a hand-rolled site

Before this rebuild I had one HTML file with a linked stylesheet. Perfectly fine for a single "coming soon" page, but for a blog with several page, a redesign was in order...

I looked at three options:

• Plain HTML/CSS/JS - no new tools to learn, but every new page means copy-pasting the whole header/nav/footer and manually keeping them in sync.
• Eleventy — Declare the layout once, then write the pages and posts in Markdown. 11ty will stitch everything together in the build stage.
• Astro - similar idea as 11ty but with its own component syntax and the option to add React/Vue components.

I decided to go with Eleventy since I am still working on JavaScript fundamentals (It would slow my progress learning an extra syntax right now.)

Eleventy's mental model is small enough to hold in my head while I focus on my JavaScript certificate. I haven't fully written off Astro yet, it may be something to look back on when I have more free time.