Today, more than ever, a website is like a business card. As a graduate student or academic, by having a nice website you are not only providing a one-stop-shop for all of your necessary information, you are showing that you are savvy enough to know the importance of a high-quality web-presence, and lastly you are illustrating that you have the technical prowess to accomplish this.
By the end of this (hopefully) you will have,
Okay, let’s get started.
First things first, let’s set up our github repository for hosting this site.
“Hosting this site”?
Whenever you go to a website, e.g. www.Vanderbilt.edu, your computer is sending out a request across the series of tubes known as the internet to a server sitting on top of some cloud somewhere (aka Indiana) that it would like to look at Vanderbilt’s website. That server, which is simply another computer, receives the request, then goes into its hard-drive and pulls up the file it has stored for Vanderbilt.com and sends that file back to your computer. So when we say “host your site” we simply mean we need to find a server to put your website’s files on that will then deliver those sites to people who want to see them via their web browser of choice.
This all sounds very complicated and expensive, and it used to be, but now computation is so cheap that companies literally give away server space to people all the time. One example of this is github. Every time you host a repository on github it is stored on a server for access.
Create Repo
Click the plus icon in the upper right corner of your github page and select New repository.