It is easier than ever to create a student website using services like google sites, squarespace, and wix. However, building a site using one of these platforms can often feel repetetive and uninspiring, as countless other users are following the same templates to generate sites.

If you’re interested in creating a more unique student site you can tinker with and control more of, I’ll teach you how to create a site like this one with little coding experience:

Why Build a Student Website?

Creating a personal website can be a game-changer for students. Your student site can be a dynamic platform to showcase achievements, skills, and passions. It’s not just about impressing others; it’s about crafting an online identity that sets you apart in a competitive world.

Through your website, you can paint a vivid picture of who you are, what you’ve accomplished, and where you’re headed, leaving a lasting impression on users. Plus, building and maintaining a website isn’t just about the end product; it’s a learning journey that hones valuable digital skills like web design, coding, and SEO—skills that are increasingly useful today. Your website isn’t just a one-time project–it’s a long-term investment in yourself.

Let’s learn how to create one together!

How to Build a Student Site

Now that you know why you should build a site of your own, how can we actually do it? Although there are many approaches a user can take to launch their own student site, this guide is going to focus on developing an AcademicPages static site using Github to store and deploy the code, and Porkbun (optional) to attach your unique domain name.

Using GitHub

If you don’t already have a GitHub account, no worries. It’s easy to sign up.

1. First, Navigate to GitHub.
2. Enter your email address and click “Sign up for GitHub.”
3. Follow the prompts to create your personal account.

During sign up, you’ll be asked to verify your email address. Without a verified email address, you won’t be able to complete some basic GitHub tasks, such as creating a repository.

If you’re having problems verifying your email address, there are some troubleshooting steps you can take. For more information, see “Verifying your email address.”

Forking Repositories

Once we’re signed up for GitHub, we’ll want to fork a respository. The site we’ll be creating in this tutorial uses the repository, Academic Pages, as the foundation for our site. We’ll fork this to get started.

If you’ve never forked a repository before, don’t worry. We’ll walk through how to fork the Academic Pages repository below:

1. On GitHub.com, navigate to the academicpages/academicpages.github.io repository.

2. In the top-right corner of the page, click Fork.

1. Under “Owner,” select the dropdown menu and click an owner for the forked repository.

2. By default, forks are named the same as their upstream repositories. Optionally, to further distinguish your fork, in the “Repository name” field, type a name.

3. Optionally, in the “Description” field, type a description of your fork.

4. Optionally, select Copy the DEFAULT branch only.

For many forking scenarios, such as contributing to open-source projects, you only need to copy the default branch. If you do not select this option, all branches will be copied into the new fork.

1. Click Create fork.

Accessing Repository via Local Computer (optional)

Syncing Cloned Repository to GitHub (optional)

Once your site is forked to your very own repository, you’ll want to deploy it for the world to see! Don’t worry, you can come back after to make more changes.

Deploying Site

To check your site out on the web, we’ll lastly need to deploy it. To deploy:

1. Under your repository name, click Settings. If you cannot see the “Settings” tab, select the … dropdown menu, then click Settings.

2. In the “Code and automation” section of the sidebar, click Pages.

3. Under “Build and deployment”, under “Source”, select Deploy from a branch.

4. Under “Build and deployment”, use the branch dropdown menu and select a publishing source. I publish from the main branch.

1. Optionally, use the folder dropdown menu to select a folder for your publishing source. I use /(root).

Due to regular Jekyll theme updates, your AcademicPages fork of Minimal Mistakes may fail to deploy the first time you try¹. If your build fails, head over to the issues tab of the AcademicPages repository and read issues about “deploy.” The more recent issues will likely show more relevant answers.

How to Customize your Site

Now that we’ve got a working site, we’ll want to make some changes. To begin, play around with the _config.yml variables in your files. Many of your variables can be updated in the # Site Settings and # Site Author sections, like follows:

# Site Settings
locale                   : "en-US"
title                    : "Home"
title_separator          : "-"
name                     : &name "London Chamberlain"
description              : &description "personal description"
url                      : https://www.londonchamberlain.com # the base hostname & protocol for your site e.g. "https://mmistakes.github.io"
baseurl                  : "" # the subpath of your site, e.g. "/blog"
repository               : "chamberlainlondon/chamberlainlondon.github.io"

# Site Author
author:
  name             : "London Chamberlain"
  avatar           : "London_Headshot_Greyscale_Background.png"
  bio              : "Economics @ The University of Texas at Austin"
  location         : "Austin, TX"
  employer         : 
  pubmed           : # example: "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=john+snow"
  googlescholar    : # example: "http://yourfullgooglescholarurl.com"
  email            : "london.chamberlain@utexas.edu"
  researchgate     :  # example: "https://www.researchgate.net/profile/yourprofile"
  uri              :
  bitbucket        :
  codepen          :
  dribbble         :
  flickr           :
  facebook         :
  foursquare       :
  github           : "chamberlainlondon"
  google_plus      :
  keybase          :
  instagram        :
  impactstory      : #"https://profiles.impactstory.org/u/xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx"
  lastfm           :
  linkedin         : "londonchamberlain"
  medium           : 
  orcid            : "http://orcid.org/0009-0008-6432-8474"
  pinterest        :
  soundcloud       :
  stackoverflow    : # http://stackoverflow.com/users/123456/username
  steam            :
  tumblr           :
  twitter          : # example: "replacethistwitterhandle"
  upwork           : 
  vine             :
  weibo            :
  xing             :
  youtube          :
  wikipedia        :

Local Changes

Tip: Make small changes one-by-one and test the effects. Making multiple commits and alterations often ends up with unexpected results where developers don’t know where the issues lie.

Pushing to Web

Using Custom Web Domain

Using a custom web domain when

Purchasing a Domain

Connecting Domain to Static Site

Moving Forward & Resources

Check out my next post that delves into how to customize your site to your liking: link

If you’d like to alter your site in a way I haven’t covered, check out the issues page of the Academic Pages repository, linked here. Other users like yourself have

Resources