Jekyll for Web Designers

Once you’ve finished building your Jekyll site you’ll need to decide where and how you want to deploy it. Since Jekyll builds static content you can serve it almost anywhere. There are no server-side dependencies, CMS installations, database administrators, or server stacks to worry about. If the server can handle HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it can serve your site. With that in mind let’s take a look at some of the most common options for deploying Jekyll sites. read more

One of my favorite things about Jekyll is how it gets out of the way and lets you, the designer, actually design. Jekyll imposes no type of structure or framework, no default classes, layout, or coding conventions. You’re free to structure and style your content as you see fit. As such how you plan and author your styles is entirely up to you. There are, however, a few things you want to keep in mind when writing CSS for a Jekyll site. read more

YAML front matter is perhaps the most important aspect of creating sites through Jekyll. It allows you to control how Jekyll processes and builds pages, create page-specific variables, and triggers file processing. Let’s take a closer look at front matter and how it can help you create more efficient Jekyll sites. read more

In Jekyll, content for pages and posts can be written in either HTML or Markdown. Although there will be times that HTML is the more appropriate choice, Markdown provides a more natural writing environment that makes blogging easier and less of a chore. In this post we’ll examine how Jekyll uses Markdown and cover some basic Markdown syntax. read more