38  Academic Website

How to create a Quarto website for your research

Abstract

This short chapter points researchers to the two resources they need to build a personal academic website with Quarto: the Quarto websites guide and a video that builds a site from scratch in RStudio. A Quarto website uses the same .qmd files, YAML, and Render button as the reports in this playbook, so a researcher who has published a report to Quarto Pub already knows most of what a website needs.

Keywords

quarto, website, academic website, publish

ResourcesResources: Quarto websites

• Creating a Website (the Quarto guide this chapter follows)
• Video: Build a Quarto website in RStudio (the video embedded below)
• Publish Your Report to Quarto Pub (the same quarto publish steps work for a website)

An academic website is a place to put your name, your research interests, your CV, and links to your reports and posters, so that a professor, a graduate program, or an employer can find your work in one place. You already have the skills to build one. A Quarto website is a folder of .qmd files, exactly like the reports you wrote in this playbook, plus one _quarto.yml file that lists the pages and gives the site its navigation bar. You write in markdown (Write an Introduction), you click Render, and you publish with the same quarto publish quarto-pub command you used in Publish Your Report to Quarto Pub. Your published reports can then be linked from, or copied into, the site.

The two resources below are the whole chapter. The Quarto guide explains what a website project is, what goes in _quarto.yml, and how to add pages, a navigation bar, and an About page. The video shows one being built in RStudio from File > New Project onward, so watch it with RStudio open and build your site alongside it.

GoGo: read the guide, then build along with the video

1. Open Creating a Website and read the page from the top through the RStudio tab under Quick Start. That tab is the one for you: it creates the website project the same way you created Lastname_FRI.
2. Watch the video below with RStudio open, and build your own site as it goes. Keep the site in its own project folder, not inside Lastname_FRI.
3. When your site renders, publish it the way you published your report: run quarto publish quarto-pub in the RStudio Terminal from the site’s folder.