Got my new webpage running! I decided to use github pages w/ Jekyll. Found a super helpful guide at https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/build-blog-jekyll-github-pages/ that got me set up in a few minutes. The author of that post made a template repository https://github.com/barryclark/jekyll-now; all I had to do was fork it to my repository and edit the config file. Good things about this approach:

• Easy to start (literally 2 minutes).
• To add new posts, I just make write a markdown file. Github pages takes care of converting to html etc.
• No need to download and configure all the software and dependencies needed to build the pages locally.
• No databases needed.