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Harvard University HARVARD.EDU

Build Your Academic Website in 15 Minutes

Gary King and Katalina Toth

Professional researchers are public figures and essentially all have websites, usually beginning in graduate school. If you are either starting out your academic career and want a website like Katalina's (a post-bac at Harvard's IQSS), or need a more extensive one like Gary's (as a post-post-post-…bac. faculty member and director of IQSS), then follow directions below to build your first version in 15 minutes — from scratch or starting with your existing page. Really, it's easy; further customization is simple; hosting is free; the site is lightning fast; and, although it uses all the best modern tools, you don't need to know any of them. We built this for our own webpages; suggestions welcome.

Get your site up and running

This section is all you need. Just follow the steps — it takes about 15 minutes. Click any step to expand it.

★ Before you begin — what you'll need
  • An AI agent. Any good AI agent will work. We use Cursor, but Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, or others work too. You need an agent, not a browser chat window like ChatGPT. These require a paid plan: with Cursor, create a free account and pick a plan that includes Claude (Pro or above); both Claude Code and Codex also require paid plans.
  • A GitHub account — sign up free at github.com if you don't have one. GitHub is a free service that stores and publishes your website. It uses version control, meaning every change is saved as a checkpoint you can revisit or undo — so nothing is ever lost, and several people can safely work on the same site without overwriting each other.
  • A few files (optional) — your CV PDF, a headshot, and any paper PDFs you'd like hosted.
1 Get your information form

Download the form that fits where you are in your career, then fill in your details:

TXT Grad Student Formfor PhD students, postdocs & fellows TXT Academic Formfor faculty & senior researchers

The forms are plain-text .txt files. You can open and edit them in any text editor — TextEdit, Notepad, Word, or anything else — and just save when you're done. No special software needed.

The form asks for information about you. You have two options:

  • Building from scratch: fill in your information, publications, software, etc.
  • Migrating an existing site: skip the long fields — just paste the URL of your current website into the form's website field, and the assistant will pull the content from it.
2 Create a GitHub repository

Go to github.com, click the + icon in the top right, and select New repository. Name it something like yourname-site or yourusername.github.io. Set it to Public. Don't add any files — leave it empty.

3 Open your AI assistant and give it your form

Open whichever assistant you chose and start a new conversation:

  • Cursor: open it and press Cmd+I (Mac) or Ctrl+I (Windows).
  • Claude Code or Codex: open it in a new, empty folder on your computer.

Then attach your filled-out form (or paste its contents), along with any PDFs/photos, and say:

"Create a new academic website for [Your Name] using the attached information form, into the GitHub repository at https://github.com/YOURUSERNAME/REPONAME. Build it and show me a preview before anything goes public."

The assistant will build your site — this may take a few minutes for large sites.

4 Preview and approve

The assistant gives you a private preview link like localhost:1313. Open it to browse your site.

Good to know This preview runs locally — only on your own computer. No one else can see it and nothing is public yet. Your site doesn't go live on the internet until you publish it in the next step.

If your site has a People page, the assistant builds it automatically from your co-authors and guesses a link for each one by searching the web — so a few may point to the wrong person or page. Skim those links while previewing and ask the assistant to fix any that are off.

This tool uses AI to generate a website tailored to you — different from any other site created with the same tool. If you don't like some of the AI's design choices, no matter how small or large, you can fix them by merely explaining to your agent what you'd prefer.

Tell the assistant what to fix — layout, missing content, ordering, anything — and iterate until you're happy. You can talk to it like a person designing your site.

5 Publish it

When you're happy, just say:

"Looks good. Commit and push to main."

The assistant publishes to GitHub, which builds and hosts the site automatically. Your site goes live within a few minutes. Want a nicer web address like yourname.harvard.edu? See "Change your web address" below.

Keep handy for later

Optional — handy once your site is live. You don't need any of this to get started.

@ Change your web address (use a custom URL)

Your free site lives at an address like yourusername.github.io. You can point a nicer, custom address at it — two common options:

  • Use your university's address. Many universities will give you something like yourname.harvard.edu. Ask your department or IT group to set it up — they'll add a DNS record that points to your site.
  • Buy your own address. Purchase a domain like yourname.com from a registrar such as Namecheap, Cloudflare, or Squarespace (usually about $10–15 a year).

Either way, once you have the address, just tell your assistant:

"Set up a custom domain for my site pointing to [your address, e.g. yourname.harvard.edu], and tell me exactly which DNS records to add."

It will configure the site and hand you the exact records to paste into your university's form or your registrar's dashboard.

+ After it's live: common update prompts

Every update works the same way: pick one of the prompts below or write one of your own, then always finish with the publish step once everything looks good. Each prompt shows you a preview first.

1 Choose an update:

  • Add a journal article
    "Add a new journal article to my site: Title: [title] · Authors: [names] · Venue: [e.g., American Political Science Review, 111, 3, Pp. 484–501] · Year: [year] · Abstract: [paste] · DOI or URL: [link] · Topic: [research area]. The article PDF is attached. Show me a preview first."
  • Add a custom short URL
    "Add a new short URL redirect: Short path: /myproject (becomes yoursite.com/myproject) · Destination: [full URL or site path]. Show me a preview first."
  • Update a person's profile (group sites)
    "Update [Name]'s profile: change their title to [new title] and replace their photo with the attached image. Show me a preview first."
  • Add a research area
    "Add a new research area called '[Name]' with this description: [1–2 sentences]. Assign these existing publications to it: [list titles]. Show me a preview first."
  • Add a presentation or talk
    "Add a new talk: Title: [title] · Event: [venue] · Date: [date] · Slides PDF attached. Show me a preview first."

2 Publish — for whichever option you chose above, once the preview looks right:

"Commit, pull, and push."

This saves your change, pulls in any edits other people have made to main first, and then publishes — so no one's work gets overwritten.

! If something goes wrong
  • Site isn't updating after publishing: go to your repository on GitHub, click the Actions tab. If there's a red X, copy the error and tell your assistant: "The build failed. Here's the error: [paste]."
  • You don't like a recent change: tell your assistant "Revert the last change and republish." Everything is versioned, so nothing is lost forever.

Last updated June 22, 2026