Once you are able to edit your repository, it’s time to change some of the basic settings that control the look and feel of your site. These settings are located in the _config.yml file that is at the root of your site. Open the file, and change the settings indicated. Once you save and push your files to GitHub, they will impact the look at feel of your site.

The first two options remote_theme and plugins are static and should not be changed. They tell GitHub Pages to render your site using GitCourseware.

In the section titled Site Information, the title attribute will control what displays in your titlebar. style defines the theme for the site. The only two options currently are ncstate and generic. Additional universities will be added over time, via a pull request on Git Courseware, or by emailing Mark Samberg directly with a link to the branding guide for the school or university.

nav_showcourses, if set to 1 will display each course in the header navigation bar with a dropdown menu for each unit. If set to 0, the header navigation bar will contain a dropdown menu called Courses with a link to the home page for each course.

Under the Header Pages and Footer Pages sections you can add links to display in the header or footer navigation bar. They are listed under the header_pages and footer_pages elements in the following format:

- title: "Wolfware"
url: "https://wolfware.ncsu.edu"
absolute: true

As YAML is particular about spacing, be sure to copy the spacing from the existing entries when adding new entries. The absolute attribute should be true if the link is to an external site and false if the link is to a page within this site. To construct a link within this site, start with a / and then point through directories to the file and change the .md extension to .html (i.e. this page would be /courses/gettingstarted/start/config.html).

Save the file and commit/push to GitHub. You’re now ready to build a course.