I do blogspot blogs and the interface is brilliant in terms of letting anyone of any skill level interact with it. They have precoded templates you can just click on. They have the option to "customize" where you can click on different colors or whatever without knowing any coding.

You can also use your own hex codes to change colors to exactly what you want. You can add custom CSS snippets safely without digging around in the code.

If you are a serious coder, you can access the code and edit. I do everything but that last because I know some HTML and CSS (and UX etc) but I don't have the programming experience to figure out how to go into the guts of the code.

I spent hours and hours learning my way around the blogspot interface. Yes, anyone can just click a template and swap out background photos or whatever but if you don't already have prior experience with their backend and some basic design knowledge and UX knowledge, good luck making it do what you want while looking good and yadda.

I spent some time thinking I could sell my skills as a blogspot expert but there doesn't seem to be a market for it. People with money and ambition and so forth don't use blogspot. People who use it don't pay for help with it. They do it themselves.

So I have some idea of how much background knowledge someone needs to have to "do X in minutes" though I'm not a serious coder. I'm the computer geek in some circles I hang in though I would never identify that way on HN, just like I don't generally try to tell HN that I'm some mathy person.

I am often the "mathy" person in other settings. Just not here.

Anyway, thanks to anyone who suggested some entry level options for me.

Aren't various boilerplates created for this which already route all the necessary libraries and tools like analytics, stripe etc?

Sure, there are. They do almost nothing about having to modify the generated code afterwards though. They are just a start; you don't have a command like "modify this validation to be this or that".