What will we do in this section?

Creating a community-archive web site has lots of technical steps.

This section covers the individual steps you’ll need to take to

  • Create a Github account
  • Configure your Github account properly
  • Create and configure a project repository, or storage space, for your community-archive files
  • Add item information, photos and other parts of your oral histories (like audio files and transcripts)

If you’re comfortable with GitHub and technology in general

Skip to our Expert-Mode setup instructions. Follow those 5 condensed steps to make a copy of our example site and customize a few things for your community.

If you’re not comfortable with GitHub or are new to technology

Proceed through the individual sections listed below in “Setting Up Your Site” table of contents (or the links in the left-hand navigation area underneath the “Setting Up Your Site” link) one by one.

Each of these steps will break creating a website at Github into smaller, more manageable activities.

Learning Github As You Go

As you work through these steps, you might get lost in Github’s user interface. These three strategies will help you learn Github as you create your site and make changes to it.

  1. The <> Code tab (left side of the navigation bar underneath the little Github cat icon). Think of this “Code” tab as the “Home” button for the files that make your site work.
  2. Actions tab (middle of the navigation bar underneath the little Github cat icon). Think of this “Actions” tab as a status update. Each time you make a change to one of the files in the “Code” tab, a workflow will run that processes those changes and turns them into pretty web pages. The Actions tab has a running list of whether that workflow has completed. A yellow icon means the workflow is still running, so your changes aren’t public yet.
  3. Our troubleshooting documentation page (in the left-hand navigation of this documentation site). There are several common things that people run into when they’re first using Github. If you get lost, if your site isn’t publishing as you expected, or if the Actions tab shows you a red-icon “build failed” message, check for one of these common issues.

Table of contents