First, pandoc does a pretty decent job of converting Org Mode to HTML or several other formats. Second, "firing" up Emacs sounds odd to Org Mode's target audie

First, pandoc does a pretty decent job of converting Org Mode to HTML or several other formats. Second, "firing" up Emacs sounds odd to Org Mode's target audience. :) We already have Emacs open! (I typed this comment in Emacs). I don't know how hard it is to make a nice looking website in Org Mode, but to make bland websites for academics (like this schmuck's page: https://www.matem.unam.mx/~omar/ https://www.matem.unam.mx/~omar/), I think Org Mode and org-publish are great. And probably it's not harder to make a nice website with org-publish than with anything else: the trick is being willing to learn CSS. :)