To understand the basics of how pages work, let’s examine and make a small change to your homepage, the index.md file. Open this file in your text editor.
You’ll notice the file begins with something like
---
title: Getting Started
layout: base
date: 2024-12-02
---
This is called a YAML header. All pages must have a similar metadata block at the very top, with the title customized for each page. For now, it is enough to know that this block of metadata tells GitHub Pages that it should be part of your website. Be sure you have the 3 hyphens --- before and after your metadata on their own lines.
The index page uses the base layout.
One of the great features of GitHub Pages is that it allows you to write pages in Markdown rather than HTML. If you are new to Markdown, complete this Markdown tutorial. If you need syntax help, check out this cheat sheet.
If you want to write online and preview your Markdown text as you write, use Dillinger. It saves your work as you go. When you are done writing, you can simply copy and paste your text from Dillinger into the edit window on GitHub. Once you get used to the syntax, you won’t need to preview it—you can just write!
To understand more about pages and editing, move on to the Editing your site guide.