Your GitHub Pages sites will appear at

https://username.github.io/some_site

Of course, this will be with your GitHub user name and with the names of your GitHub repositories.

I’d recommend putting something at https://username.github.io, since people might look there. (When I started with GitHub Pages, I thought you were required to have such a site, but either they’ve changed things or I’m just mistaken; you don’t need this anymore.)

You create one of these sites in much the same way as you create an independent GitHub Pages site. The only real differences are

• The repository needs to be called username.github.io
• The site sits in the master branch rather than the gh-pages branch.

My personal site, kbroman.github.io (which shows up as kbroman.org; see the GitHub help page on setting up a custom domain) is minimal and is actually written in straight html rather than Markdown. If you want, you could just make an edited version of my site:

• Clone my kbroman.github.io repository
• Remove the .git directory
• Edit index.html, 404.html, README.md, and License.md
• Use git init, git add, git commit
• Create a new repository on GitHub named username.github.io
• Go back to the command line and do git remote add and git push -u origin master

Alternatively, you could use the procedure I described for making an independent website. The only thing you do differently is to use the master branch rather than a gh-pages branch.

A final note: the 404.html file will serve as the “page not found” page for all of your GitHub Pages (that is, if you want a personalized 404 page).

Up next

Now go to making a project site.