Personalize your README on GitHub

Is there anything better than having a personalized landing page that guides the visitors and allows you to point them towards what really matters? It’s hard to say yes. Luckily, GitHub offers you exactly this possibility and here’s a short guide how I set up my own (personalized) README on GitHub in three steps.1

  1. Create a new public repository with a README.md in its root.2 The repository should have the same name as your GitHub username.
  2. Once you have this, you’ll see something like this — and if you click on the pen symbol (red circle) and it will lead you to the repository where you can customize everything.

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  1. Now you can change anything that you want. You can add some text info, add more fancy stuff such as automatized overviews, or also banners. Adding the banner was actually the tricky part for me. Once you have a banner or an image that you want to add (I did mine in Procreate), store it in your folder (I stored mine in img). To access it, you have to use the full URL as shown in the raw code below.

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And that’s how the repo looks for me - you just change the README and it pops up as the landing page of your GitHub profile!

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  1. I was inspired by the wonderful GitHub README by Monica Powell. ↩︎

  2. Here is an excellent description how to initialize your README. It only works for personal GitHub pages and does not (yet) work for institutions or organizations. ↩︎