So, you’ve tried Hugo, you’ve tried org-publish, but you’re still not satisfied with what you have. Hugo is way too complex and org-publish has a bare-bones "je ne sais quoi" that kind of requires you to code some elisp to get things done.
For people who like Hugo’s auto building & serving but who want to not spend hours fiddling with config files to have a fine-looking site, Bastien Guerry has published orgy.
The code is on codeberg and the tutorial is on Bastien’s site.
The whole thing depends on bbin, which is an installer for babashka things. With babashka being a native Clojure interpreter for scripting, implemented using the Small Clojure Interpeter.
So you have (SCI >) babashka > bbin > orgy.
orgy takes an org files directory and transforms it into a nice-looking website with navigation, tags, an rss feed and plenty of other goodies.
orgy server serves the thing on localhost:1888 and automatically rebuilds the site after each modification.
orgy was announced on the 14th of April on the French emacs list.