Introduction to Creating a Website with GitHub and Markdown

Communicating your work is crucial for others to find, understand, execute and contribute to your projects. Communicating your professional background and experience is an important step to establish yourself as an expert in a field. This workshop will focus on one avenue to communication – websites. Using the Markdown “markup” language alongside a set of free tools offered by GitHub and the open-source community, we will create a simple but attractive project website, personal page or blog.

Markdown is a markup language for formatting text. Its easy-to-use syntax gives users the power to style and format text as they write. Markdown offers elements that make it particularly well-suited to writing web content or technical documentation, such as task lists, tables, code highlighting and more. Markdown is also the language of choice for GitHub, Jupyter Notebooks and R Notebooks, so learning the basics here will be useful for more than just websites.

In this workshop, we will use a prepared GitHub template that configures and deploys a basic website – ready to be extended with custom content. We will explore Markdown’s basic syntax and usage and see some advanced flavour-specific features. Participants are encouraged to use the session to start a personal website, blog or project landing page. By the end of the workshop, each participant will have their own live website, which they can confidently continue to develop independently. 

Syllabus:

• Website basics and static site generators
• Using GitHub templates
• Basic Markdown syntax, images, and links 
• Markdown tables and code blocks
• Customising a template for a bespoke website 

This course is open to Research Degree Students, Postdocs & Research Fellows. Limited spaces available for wider Imperial community.

Learning Outcomes:

On completion of this workshop you will be able to:

• Configure a GitHub project using a templated repository
• Format text, create tables, and insert images and code blocks using Markdown
• Utilise advanced Markdown features offered by specific flavours of Markdown
• Create a website for communicating personal or project info

Prerequisites

You must have a GitHub account that you can access during the session. You may wish to bring rough notes or ideas for a personal or project website you wish to create.  

How to book

• Early Career Researchers (Research Degree Students, Postdocs, Research Fellows) should book via Inkpath using your Imperial Single-Sign-On.
• Wider College Community - All other members of the Imperial community, should book here.

Please ensure you have read and understood ECRI’s cancellation policy before booking.