Academic home page with low maintenance burden It's been mentioned before on this site how important it is to have a webpage.

Most academics don't have a lot of experience with web development, and do not realistically have time to learn it and keep the knowledge up to date.

What are some good ways/tools to create and maintain a professional website when the priority is minimizing long term maintenance burden?

My experience is that it's not uncommon that people will put in the effort to build a very nice website once, but they simply won't be able to maintain it long term.  Either it's too much effort to add new content (too busy to do it), or they change institutions and it's too much effort to migrate the site (because e.g. the new institution's hosting doesn't support some of the necessary tools, such as PHP, etc.)  Even if I put in the effort to learn a bit about web development today, I won't be using this knowledge contiually, so I'll forget how to do it.  At that point it might become too much of a burden to keep a website up to date, so eventually I'll neglect it.

This question is about how to avoid this situation, and what tools or hosting methods to use to minimize maintenance burden so a home page can realistically be kept up to date.

The simplest solution seems to be to only use basic (static) hand-written HTML and maybe a simple CSS stylesheet.  Many (most) academics are doing this.  The result will probably not be very beautiful and will look like webpages 15 years ago, but it can serve the purpose.  Are there any better ways?  (Typing all that &lt;p&gt; and &lt;em&gt; and &lt;pre&gt; and &lt;ul&gt; is in fact still rather tedious and error prone compared e.g. to writing MarkDown here.)
tl;dr: Wordpress (installing a Markdown plugin), if you are a techie, Jekyll. 

(My website is in Wikidot, I created for my group with Wordpress.

EDIT: Now I use Jekyll; here's why)

See Software for Scientists: Website tools:

For personal homepages, lab notebooks and conference websites.


  
  WordPress - code  and WordPress - hosting
  
  
  Examples:
  
  
  https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/
  https://gowers.wordpress.com/
  http://netsci2013.net/wordpress/
  
  
  Jekyll
  
  
  For writing blogs in Markdown and easily putting them on GitHub 
  Tutorial for using LaTeX in it: http://cwoebker.com/posts/latex-math-magic
  Examples:
  
  
  Open Lab Notebook in Jekyll
  A homepage
  
  
  Wikidot
  
  
  e.g http://offtopicarium.wikidot.com/
  
  Wikispaces
  
  
  Simple wikis, very easy to create and manage
  Used as open science notebooks, for instance http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/
  
  Site44
  
  
  Showing small site by putting files into a Dropbox folder
  
  GitHub Pages
  
  
  Static websites with Git 
  
  Instiki
  
  
  Wiki especially for mathematical collaboration
  Examples:
  
  
  http://www.azimuthproject.org/
  http://ncatlab.org/
  
  
  WorkingWiki
  
  
  Wiki especially for mathematical collaboration
  
  Sphinx
  
  
  Great for writing documentation
  Example (in Polish): http://django.carrots.pl/
  
  Jekade
  
  
  Jekyll-like static pages with built-in LaTe support, in Node.JS