Getting Started

Our base website template is called Xanthan. It’s like a sourdough starter that’s meant to spawn variants. But you probably only want to use a subset bit of Xanthan functionality for your site. To make things simpler and easier to learn, we’ve creeated a few different starter templates suited for common purposes.

There’s nothing special about these templates other than they come with a few pages and navbars that suit the point of the template. You can edit everything later on—adding/renaming/deleting pages and folder, changing the navigation bar, adding images, and of course changing the text and style.

This page specifies the steps necessary to create your own website, which takes about 10 minutes.

Create an account at GitHub

• Create an account at GitHub. Whatever username you choose will be referred to below as GITHUB_USERNAME.
• Once you’ve gone through the confirmation process, make sure you are at your account home page. The URL will look like http://github.com/GITHUB_USERNAME.

Make a copy of Xanthan

Rather than create everything from scratch, let’s start with a basic set of core files for your site.

• Go to the Xanthan repository
• Click the green Use this Template button in the upper right.
• Name your repository (referred to as REPOSITORY below). You don’t need to call it xanthan, and you can always rename it later (or delete it and start over).
• Click the green Create Repository button in the lower right.

Confirm your config file

If you named your repository something other than xanthan, you need to make one small configuration edit. If you did not change xanthan to something else, skip this section.

• Click the Code tab near the top left
• Edit _config.yml file to have the same baseurl as your repository name.
• Commit your change with the green Commit button.

Enable GitHub Pages

Now that your have your starter files, we just need to tell GitHub that you want to use your repository to build a website.

• Click on the Settings tab in the upper right of the nav bar.
• On the left, click the link for Pages.
• Near the top, under the Build & Deployment section, under Source, the Deploy from a Branch should be selected.
• Directly below, under Branch, change from None to main.
• Click the Save button that appears on that same line.
• Your site is now being built, and you can see the status via the Actions tab.
• After about a minute, reload the page and you’ll see a link to your site.
• The URL that appears there looks like: http://GIHUB_USERNAME.github.io/REPOSITORY/. For example, your final URL should look like http://fredgibbs.github.io/xanthan

Congratulations on your NEW WEBSITE!

Now you’re ready to explore the components of your site and start editing. Let’s start with Understanding Folders.