Academic Website Template

A bare-bones academic website that Claude Code builds with you — and keeps updated for you.

This template ships deliberately unstyled. Instead of fighting someone else's design, you show Claude Code a site you like (a link, a screenshot, a few notes) and it restyles the template to match. From then on, maintenance is a conversation: paste an arXiv link and your new preprint appears, formatted and in the right place. Deploys to GitHub Pages for free — no build step, no framework, no config.

Features

• Bare bones by design — clean, semantic HTML/CSS/JS meant to be reshaped into your site, not a theme to work around.
• Built from your references — the included /setup-site skill turns links, screenshots, or descriptions of sites you like into a design tailored to you.
• Easy to update over time — publications, news, talks, etc. each live in a data/*.json file; the page renders from them automatically. Update the file (or just tell Claude Code what changed) and the site follows.
• No build step — vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, deploys to GitHub Pages as-is.

Quick start

Steps 1–3 run in your terminal; from step 4 on, you're talking to Claude Code.

1. Get a copy of this repo: sign in to GitHub (create a free account if needed), then on this repository's page click the green "Use this template" button (top right) → "Create a new repository". Name it <your-github-username>.github.io (e.g., janedoe.github.io) — that exact name makes GitHub host your site at that address for free.

2. Clone your copy to your computer:

   git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/<your-username>.github.io.git

3. Install Claude Code: follow the install instructions, then launch it from inside your cloned folder:

   cd <your-username>.github.io
   claude

4. Design the site: run /setup-site and give it links or screenshots of sites whose design you like, plus any notes. Claude will restyle the template to match, swap in your real name/bio/links, and verify the result.

5. Preview any time with /preview-site, or manually:

   python3 -m http.server 8000
   # open http://127.0.0.1:8000/

   (Opening index.html directly via file:// won't work — the site fetches its JSON over HTTP.)

6. Publish: when you're happy with it, ask Claude to commit and push, then follow Deploying to GitHub Pages.

Updating content

Run /update-site-data and describe the change — for example:

• Paste an arXiv/OSF/SSRN URL or a BibTeX entry to add a working paper.
• "Our cascade paper was published in Nature" to convert a working paper to published (renames its docs/publications/ directory, moves the JSON entry, updates the BibTeX).
• "Add a news item about my invited talk at X."

Or edit the data/*.json files by hand — schemas are documented in .claude/skills/update-site-data/references/schemas.md.

Example: moving a paper from "Working Paper" to "Published" by hand

1. Move its entry from data/working_papers.json to the top of data/publications.json, adding publication (venue) and year fields.
2. Rename its directory docs/publications/0_LastName_ShortTitle/ → docs/publications/YYYY_LastName_ShortTitle/ and update the entry's pdfPath/bibPath to match.
3. Validate (python3 -m json.tool data/publications.json) and preview.

Deploying to GitHub Pages

1. Push the repository to GitHub.
2. In the repo settings, enable Pages → deploy from the main branch, root folder.
3. Your site appears at https://<username>.github.io/<repo>/ (or name the repo <username>.github.io to serve at the root).

Project structure

index.html            # page skeleton; sections are filled from data/
css/styles.css        # minimal default styling (restyled by /setup-site)
js/                   # one renderer per section + shared utils.js
data/                 # all site content, one JSON file per section
docs/publications/    # one directory per paper: PDF + cite.bib
assets/images/        # headshot and other images
.claude/skills/       # setup-site, update-site-data, preview-site
CLAUDE.md             # conventions Claude Code follows in this repo

Need a CV too?

The site links to your CV (see data/profile.json) — if you don't have one ready, check out mrd-cv-template, a simple LaTeX/Overleaf academic CV template, also powered by Claude Code. After it is built, drop the PDF into docs/cv.pdf.

Found this useful?

If you use this template I would appreciate it if you let me know. You can contact me directly (matthewdeverna.com) or create an issue in this repository. Thanks!!