What is academic-website-template?

This project is a ready-made template for building a personal academic website. It is meant for researchers, professors, or students who want a homepage showing their CV, publications, projects, and news updates, without having to learn a web framework or set up a build process. The whole site is built from plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so there is nothing complicated to install or compile. Content is kept separate from the site's design: you edit a handful of readable JSON files under a content folder to add your name, biography, publications, projects, and news items, then replace a few sample images with your own. The layout and styling stay untouched, so you do not need any coding experience to keep the site updated over time. Out of the box, the template includes a searchable and filterable list of publications, a carousel to highlight key papers, project cards that can link to longer detail pages, a chronological news feed, and a structured CV page built from one JSON file. It can even pull in citation counts automatically from OpenAlex when a publication has a DOI link attached. Getting started involves clicking GitHub's Use this template button, cloning the new repository, editing the JSON files under content and the images under assets, and previewing the result locally with a simple development server before publishing. The site is designed to work directly with GitHub Pages, which means free hosting with no server to manage. The repository ships with a full sample profile, so every feature and page is visible and easy to understand before you start replacing the example content with your own. Overall, this is a practical starting point for anyone who wants a professional academic presence online without dealing with a complex website builder or ongoing technical maintenance.