GitHub for normal people

You’ve got your website as a tidy folder from the last guide. Now it needs a home on the internet, and the first stop is GitHub. I know that name makes a lot of people tense up — GitHub is built for programmers and it looks the part. Ignore all of that. You’re going to use exactly one small corner of it: a place to store your folder online. No code, no command line, no Git vocabulary. About fifteen minutes, mostly clicking.

What is GitHub, in plain English?

GitHub is a free service that stores your files online, keeps a complete history of every change, and — the part that matters for us — connects to Netlify to publish your website. Think of it as a safe online home for your site’s files, with a built-in undo button.

Programmers use GitHub for complicated things. You’re using it for one simple thing: a reliable place to keep your website folder where Netlify (the next guide) can reach it and turn it into a live site. You’ll never need to understand the rest. And you get two nice benefits for free — your site is backed up online (your laptop could fall in a lake and your website would be perfectly safe), and every time you change something, GitHub quietly remembers the previous version, so nothing is ever truly lost.

How do I create a GitHub account?

Go to github.com, click Sign up, and follow the prompts — an email, a password, a username, and a quick email verification. It’s free, and no payment is required.

Your username becomes part of your address on GitHub, so pick something tidy and professional — your business name works well. The free plan is genuinely all you need: it includes unlimited private repositories, which more than covers your website and anything else you build down the road.

How do I create a place for my website (a “repository”)?

A repository — “repo” for short — is just a project folder on GitHub. Click the + in the top-right corner, choose New repository, give it a name, check Add a README file, and click Create repository.

A few small choices along the way:

• Name it something simple and lowercase, like my-bakery-website (use hyphens instead of spaces).
• Public or Private? Choose Private if you’d like to keep the underlying files to yourself — Netlify will still turn it into a fully public website that anyone can visit. (Public works too; it just means people can also see the raw files.)
• Check “Add a README file.” This gives your repo a friendly starting page instead of an intimidating blank setup screen. A README is just a notes file — you can happily ignore it.
• Skip the rest (license, .gitignore). You don’t need them.

Click Create repository, and you’ve got your website’s online home — ready and waiting.

How do I get my website files into the repository?

Open your repository, click Add file → Upload files, and drag in the contents of your website folder — your index.html (and your images folder, if you have one). Type a short message, click Commit changes, and you’re done.

This is the part to do slowly:

• On your repo’s page, find the Add file button above the file list and choose Upload files.
• Open your my-bakery-website folder on your computer and drag what’s inside it into the upload area — not the folder itself:

my-bakery-website/        your folder on your computer
   index.html             (drag THIS into GitHub)
   images/                (and THIS, if you have it)

Dragging the contents this way puts index.html at the top level of your repo, which is exactly what lets Netlify find your homepage. (If you drag the whole folder instead, your homepage ends up buried one level down, and the next step gets fiddly.)

• Below the upload area, type a short message like “Add my website,” then click the green Commit changes button.
• Your files are now safely on GitHub — you’ll see index.html listed on your repo’s main page.

One note from hard-won experience: upload your files — don’t copy and paste their contents into GitHub’s text editor. Pasting can quietly garble a file. Uploading the actual file keeps it exactly as it should be.

Why am I doing this, again?

Because the next step — publishing with Netlify — connects directly to this repository and turns it into a live website. GitHub is the bridge between your folder and the internet.

Netlify watches your GitHub repo. When you publish (next guide), it reads these exact files and serves them to the world at a real web address. And later, whenever you want to change your site, you’ll update the file right here and your live site updates on its own. This little repo is the hub that everything else connects to.

---

Your website now lives safely on GitHub, backed up and ready. The final step is the satisfying one: turning it into a real, live website that anyone can visit, using Netlify. That’s Publish with Netlify, the next guide in this series.