Here is what I did to build this my very first website. I used Jekyll, a static website generator, to build the website, and used GitHub Pages to host this website.

For building the website with Jekyll, I find this video very useful. You can start with a theme you like from Jekyll Themes; my theme is jekyllDecent.

For publishing the website with GitHub Pages, I basically follow this tutorial and this video(I don’t follow their suggestion modifying the head.html and my website just works fine).

Tips:

• Installing Jekyll: If you use a Mac like I do, it’s likely that gem install jekyll does not work (you may check this troubleshooting page). Try sudo gem install jekyll instead.

• Publishing the website: You need to go to _ config.yml and change url: and baseurl: to be the base hostname & protocol for your site. If you use the same theme as I do, modify robots.txt as well. Make sure your url is something like https://<yourusername>.github.io, not http://..., which may lead to a display error like This page is trying to load scripts from unauthenticated sources (find the solution here).

• To change the order of your pages shown in the navigation, go to _pages, and add a weight: <#orderYouWant> parameter to the layout section of each page.