Publish Your First Website

What you're building

By the end of this module you'll have a live personal website at an address like https://your-username.github.io. You can put it on your CV, LinkedIn and portfolio.

Before you start, your my-website folder should contain:

my-website/
  index.html
  style.css
  script.js
  me.jpg

Check the content

A good first personal site has:

1. Header: your name and one line on what you do.
2. About: two or three sentences.
3. Projects: two or three cards, each with a title, a sentence and a link.
4. Contact: email, LinkedIn and GitHub links.

Keep file names lowercase with no spaces (me.jpg, not My Photo.JPG). Web servers treat Me.jpg and me.jpg as different files.

Publish with GitHub Pages

You need a free GitHub account (see the Git & GitHub course).

1. On GitHub, create a new public repository named exactly your-username.github.io, replacing your-username with your GitHub username.
2. Click uploading an existing file (or Add file → Upload files), drag in everything from your my-website folder, and commit.
3. Go to Settings → Pages. Under Build and deployment, set Source to Deploy from a branch, choose main and / (root), and save.
4. Wait a minute or two, then open https://your-username.github.io.

Your site is live. Every time you commit a change, it updates within a few minutes.

Other free options

• Netlify (netlify.com): drag your folder onto the page to publish.
• Vercel (vercel.com): connects to GitHub and publishes on every push.

Check before you share

• Open the site on your phone.
• Click every link and check every image loads (broken images are usually a file name mismatch).
• Right-click → Inspect → Console to check for red errors.

Try it

1. Finish your four sections: header, about, projects and contact.
2. Publish the site with GitHub Pages.
3. Test it on your phone and fix anything broken.
4. Add the link to your LinkedIn, CV and portfolio page.