why-use-github-pages.md

Why Use GitHub Pages?

The Least You Need to Know About GitHub Pages shows you how to create a website using GitHub, which is normally thought of as a resource only for programmers. However, this guide requires no programming skills, use of the command line, or knowledge of HTML and CSS (though the latter will help you as you grow). Everything is done interactively on the GitHub website, and it's totally free.

If you can type, you can create a website

All you need to know to create your website is how to type, with a few exta characters thrown in to structure the document. For example, the heading to this paragraph was created by typing ## What brought you here. That's called a level 2 header. It was used to generate the HTML code shown here in simplified form: <h2><a id="user-content-what-brought-you-here" href="#what-brought-you-here"></a>What brought you here</h2> The heading to this page was created by typing # The Least You Need to Know About GitHub Pages. That is of course a level 1 header. You create a link to a site such as Google by typing [Google](https://google.com). These are examples of an an industry-standard format called Markdown or CommonMark.

Learn only the Markdown you need to create a full informational site

This guide teaches enough Markdown to let you create a complete, full-featured informational site, then points you to more comprehensive sources when you're ready to up your game.

There are several themes available

Your GitHub Pages website can use these free themes from GitHub.

Designed to make even big sites simple to create and maintain

This guide will show you how to create structured informational websites of any size. Informational is an informal way of saying that you have limited control over the visual appearance. Even so you'll be able to link to outside websites and pages, link to interior pages and selected locations within those pages, use images, handle simple formatting, and do a fair bit of visual customization using CSS to override the defaults.

Your skills will transfer

Nothing you do here will ever need to be thrown away. Should you decide that the limitations of GitHub pages are too severe, you will lose none of your work. Markdown is an accepted input format for hundreds, perhaps thousands of content management systems. The Markdown pages you create here can work with any other static site generator.