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Tutorial on converting an HTML site into a Jekyll theme

by Tom Johnson on Apr 13, 2017
categories: jekyll

I recently added a tutorial on converting an HTML site into a Jekyll theme. This tutorial shows how easy it is to make any HTML site Jekyll ready with just a few tags. Creating Jekyll themes is one of the aspects of Jekyll I enjoy the most.

You can view the tutorial here: Convert an HTML site to Jekyll. Here’s the intro:

If you’re looking for themes for your Jekyll site, you don’t have to restrict yourself to existing Jekyll themes. It’s pretty easy to convert almost any static HTML files into a Jekyll website.

In many ways, any site that is currently a static site is already a Jekyll website. Jekyll just allows you to automate parts of the site (like inserting pages into templates, rendering lists for navigation, generating feeds and sitemaps, and more) as it processes the files.

Understanding how to convert any HTML site into Jekyll templates will open your world to many more options for Jekyll themes. Instead of searching online for Jekyll themes, you can choose from the large variety of HTML templates for your site, quickly Jekyll-ize the HTML templates as you need to, and build the output with Jekyll.

This tutorial benefitted from edits from other Jekyll editors. You can view the history in this pull request and this one.

I created this tutorial after converting the WTD podcast site into a theme that matches the rest of the WTD site.

About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.

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