galaxy-dawn/academic-homepage-templates

Academic Homepage Templates gives researchers and PhD students a fast way to build a polished personal website without touching web frameworks or wrestling with complicated setup. It ships with 11 ready-made design themes, ranging from clean and minimal to playful styles like a retro newspaper or a cyberpunk terminal, so you can pick one that fits your personality and get online quickly. The project is built with plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There are no build steps or external dependencies to install. You choose a theme, copy its folder, and then edit a single file called config.js to plug in your name, bio, publications, projects, education, and news updates. That file acts as a simple content database: the site reads from it and displays your information automatically, so you never need to edit the HTML directly. If you want to tweak colors or other visual details, each theme uses CSS variables that are easy to adjust. Every theme also supports dark and light mode and adapts to look good on phones and tablets. This is aimed at academics who want a professional web presence but don't want to spend days building one from scratch. A PhD student applying for faculty positions could use the clean "Academic" or "Swiss" theme to showcase publications and projects. Someone in a more creative field might pick the "Bauhaus" or "Ink" theme to stand out. The themes cover a wide range of aesthetics, so you can find one that matches your field's expectations, or breaks them on purpose. What makes the project practical is how lightweight it is. Since it is just static files, you can host the finished site for free on GitHub Pages or any basic web hosting service. The README does not go into detail on advanced customization beyond the config file and CSS variables, but for most users that simplicity is the main appeal: you fill in a config file, pick a theme, and your academic profile is live.