A note to myself on the items I want to decide first in Hugo
Choosing a theme
The way front matter and shortcodes are written differs from theme to theme, and layout and CSS matter too, so I want to take my time at the start and settle on a theme that is easy to customize
Since a Hugo version upgrade can turn some syntax invalid, it may be better to pick a theme that is updated frequently
My personal recommendations would be Academic, Tranquilpeak, Learn and Beautifulhugo
Permalinks
If you want the site’s output URLs, which look like your-site/post/content/, to be shown per category or with the date, changing that later once you have many articles is a lot of work, so it is better to decide the output URL format up front.
On this site I use the your-site/content.html format.
Reference: Notes on Hugo permalink settings (in Japanese), URL Management
Managing images
As for where to keep images, displaying them from an external site by way of a linked URL is certainly easier. However, because they are loaded from an external site, the display gets slower, and if the external site shuts down that is the end of it. So the safe option is to keep them locally, and it is usually common to put them in the img folder inside the static folder For SEO, it is probably better to compress images periodically
Categories and tags
Unlike WordPress, you cannot edit categories and tags all at once afterwards, so it is better to decide categories and tags in advance when you write an article. It might be easier to make everything a tag