Jekyll is a beautifully lightweight alternative to the likes of WordPress. But the main disadvantage, for ‘normal’ users, is that you really need to be at least slightly geeky to get it to work. Even in order to edit the content on an existing site, you need to be comfortable managing text files (without Microsoft Word!), and, if you are hosting it (for free!) with GitHub Pages, you need to be competent with handling remote repositories. Not an insignificant hurdle, and the psychological barrier is very high compared with learning to use WordPress, even if that actual time taken to pick up the skills might well be shorter.
Enter Prose. Prose provides me with a friendly text editor in a web browser, and it handles the GitHub commits without me having to worry about it. This means that when I (a semi-geek) want to create a simple website for a Muggle to maintain and edit, there is a plausible alternative to WordPress. True, some geekery is still needed to change the appearance of the site, but simple edits to the content could be done by anyone.
I’m just trying it out at the moment… Let’s see if it works…
(Not quite, but almost!)
(Update: editing files directly in GitHub would be a good alternative: let’s see if this works…!)