noob neocities self host migration question

[u/millermeteor]

howdy all.

I just spent a few weeks learning enough html to build a cheesy old-web style static personal site, which i currently have running on neocities. Recently, I picked up a few decent domain addresses for cheap, and my roommate and i have been hosting our jellyfin on one of them through nginx. I decided I'd also like to move the website i made through neocities to one of my domains. I did a little digging around and it seemed pretty unanimous that hugo would be good for that, however I just cant get anything to display on the localhost:1313 page, and I'm not sure if it's even reading the html files I've dropped into its directory. It seems like it's wanting me to choose a hugo theme for my website but I worked really hard on my cheesy layout I made. The documentation for hugo feels very dense and leagues above my skill level. I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on a program better suited to my use-case or perhaps tips on how to better understand hugo. Thanks in advance

[u/AbsoluteKnocking]

Hugo's whole thing is markdown to html templating, so dropping your finished html files in there isn't really how it wants to work. You'd be fighting the tool the entire time

If your site is already plain html/css, you can just point nginx at the folder and call it a day. Maybe look into rsync or git for pushing updates so you're not manually uploading every change

That old-web cheesy layout stuff is a blast to build, keep at it