I used this combination to build a dead simple, yet elegant-looking personal site with my own custom domain. The result is an easy-to-maintain, low-cost site for showcasing my wares.

• Cost of hosting on GitHub: $0
• Cost of using Beautiful Jekyll: $0-$10 per month, see plans
• Cost of my scotthammer.dev domain name: $12 per year

Step One - Fork Beautiful Jekyll

Assuming you have a GitHub account, navigate to the Beautiful Jekyll GitHub repository and fork a copy. This will create a new repository on your account. From there, follow the instructions in the README to rename, customize and publish the site on GitHub Pages. Your initial URL will be https://your-GitHub-handle.github.io.

Step Two - Register Your Domain Name

I used Google Domains to register my own .dev domain. Simply type your name (or business/org name) into a text box to see 100s of suggestions. There are a huge number of domain endings available, starting at about $12 per year and ranging up to…well, as much as you want to pay for premium domains.

Step Three - Configure your GitHub Page to use your Custom Domain

This was the trickiest part for me. First, I configured the GitHub page to use my domain. Then I configured the DNS records for my Google Domain to forward to GitHub Pages. Instructions can be read here, but I found this YouTube video to be a more helpful source.

It may take several minutes and a few attempts for the DNS changes to propagate, but you should be able to do all of this within a couple of hours.