I haven't used nanoc much, but I will second the recommendation for middleman. My experience with middleman is that it's one of the rare things that makes simple things easy while scaling well to not-so-simple things. Creating a basic site with a few static pages that share a template is completely painless, and because it's based on Sinatra it's pretty straightforward to use things built for that or Rails when you need to do something not built into middleman.