Create Your Site

A live website in 10 minutes. Everything happens in your browser: nothing to install, and no coding or web experience needed. The one thing you’ll need is a free GitHub account, and Step 2 walks you through making one. By the end you’ll have a site on the open web and enough of a feel for how it works to start making it your own.

Step 1: Choose your starter site

Pick the starter site closest to what you're building. Selecting one updates the links in the instructions below.

Not sure? See the starter site overview for details on each option, or just start with Portfolio—you can always change direction later.

Step 2: Create a GitHub Account

What is GitHub? Think of it like Google Drive for websites. GitHub stores your site files and hosts your website for free. No ads, no subscription fees. It hosts millions of open-source projects and websites and facilitates collaboration.

  1. Go to GitHub and create a free account
  2. Choose a username (this will be part of your website address for now)
  3. Verify your email address
  4. You’ll land on your GitHub homepage at http://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME

Step 3: Get Your Starter Site

Rather than start from scratch, you’ll copy a complete working site with example content. GitHub calls this using a template, so that’s the wording on the button.

  1. Go to the template repository
  2. Click the green “Use this template” button (upper right)
  3. Select “Create a new repository” from the dropdown

Step 4: Name Your Repository

When ready, click the green “Create repository from template” button.

Step 5: Set Your Site’s Address

Xanthan has to be told where your site lives, and that depends on what you named the repository in Step 4. There is one rule with one exception:

  • Named it anything else — set baseurl to that name, with a leading slash. A repository called medieval-maps gets baseurl: /medieval-maps.
  • Named it YOUR-USERNAME.github.io — leave baseurl empty. That site lives at the root of your account, so there is no sub-path to add.

To make the edit:

  1. Click the “Code” tab (top left)
  2. Find and click _config.yml in the file list
  3. Click the pencil icon (✏️) to edit
  4. Set the baseurl: line: 
    baseurl: /your-repository-name

    or, for a USERNAME.github.io repository, leave it empty:

    baseurl:
  5. Click “Commit changes” (green button, top right)
  6. Click “Commit changes” again in the popup

You do not need to set url. GitHub fills that in for you.

Step 6: Publish Your Site

Now tell GitHub to turn your files into a live website.

  1. Click the “Settings” tab (top right)
  2. Click “Pages” in the left sidebar
  3. Under “Build and deployment”:
    • Source: Make sure “Deploy from a branch” is selected
    • Branch: Change from “None” to “main”
  4. Click “Save”

Your site is now building! This takes about 1-2 minutes.

To see your live site:

  1. Click the “Actions” tab (top of page) to watch the build
  2. When the yellow dot turns green, your site is live
  3. Go back to Settings → Pages and you’ll see your website URL

Your site is live

You now have a website on the open web, built from plain text files under your control. Every change you make is versioned—you can always undo mistakes—and the whole thing runs on infrastructure that’s free, open, and not going anywhere.

This is the same workflow professional developers use daily. The tools are just text files and version control—nothing proprietary, nothing you can’t take with you.

Next step

Make Your First Edit — change something on your site and see it go live.