Create a Website with Github Pages

Introduction

Academic staff and researchers often want or need to create a website for different reasons:

• collaborative research project
• open educational resource (OER)
• scholarly blog

In this workshop we’ll work through the process of creating a site on GitHub Pages, an accessible and free solution to making and hosting a website.

We’ll see that, while it is relatively accessible, using Github Pages for this is a bit different from content management systems like Wordpress.

We’ll be working with text files without a user interface, mostly using a format called Markdown, a lightweight and accessible markup language. With just a little practice, you can quickly learn enough to create a site from scratch or fork (copy) an existing site template for you to customise and maintain.

As well as Markdown, you will learn how GitHub Pages integrates with the popular static website generator Jekyll to turn your Markdown files into a fully functioning website.

What we’ll cover

✅ Intro to Github and Github Pages

✅ Learn about Markdown, YAML and Jekyll

✅ Make your own website!

All of the technical part we’re going to do in the Github interface in the browser. So you don’t need a text editor or to install anything at all.

Workshop Setup

To work along with the exercises for this workshop, you can create a free GitHub account if you don’t have one already. Once you create your account, you may be asked to verify your email before you can create content.

So, with your GitHub account in hand, you are all ready!