We are here to help guide you through the process of getting your website set up.
First things first: You’ll never need to learn any web programming skills to add to or revise your website! There is no software to update, no servers to deal with. If you can move text files from one folder to another, you can make and maintain a website!
We’ve tried to create all the instructions you need to do things on your own, but there can be a lot to take in if you’ve never thought about making a website before. Below we’ve tried to sketch out below the general concepts and plan.
We’ll help you get familiar and comfortable with a web hosting platform called GitHub Pages. It’s a free, open source platform that’s been around for a long time and hosts almost 500 million projects and websites. It’s stable, mature, and safe. The idea is that you upload some text files there, and it makes a website for you. It is the standard platform for digital cultural heritage projects.
We have simple directions to follow that get you up to speed quickly, and we assume you have no idea what you’re doing. We’ve already created several basic and functional website templates that you’ll use as a starting point. You’ll make your own copy of the template that has filler content, and you’ll learn your way around by swapping out the fictitious content for your own.
It’s exciting to see the power of collaboration at work even in a small class! Students love seeing their work take on a public life of its own instead of a just another Word doc they upload to Canvas.
Next time you teach a similar class—in one year or ten—and want students to contribute to the project, your site will be just as you left it and ready to go. GitHub Pages is entirely free, so there’s no server or service to maintain in the meantime. Nothing can break in the meantime.
This of course is just the high-level overview. The detailed instructions can seem long because they are hyper-explicit. But following along will get you your own website in about 10 minutes, with plenty of documentation to help you take the next steps. Head over to our generic website template (called Xanthan, as in the gum). Your can tour the site to see what you’ll be starting with; all the instructions are under the Website Guides tab.
Happy building!!!