By Ryan Cecil and Gabriel Vasquez-Peterson
29 June 2026
For graduate students (and academics in general), creating a personal website is a great way to build a public profile—something that anyone who’s interested in you, including (hopefully) hiring committees, can look at to get a good sense of who you are as a scholar and teacher (and, if you have a good headshot, put a face to a name). However, many of us don’t know the first thing about creating or designing websites and lack the funds to have one professionally made. There are, of course, several services that allow you to create a website without any coding (Wix, Squarespace, Google Sites, etc.), but these can still cost money and offer only limited customization. We were thus pleased when we recently learned that for Pitt students and faculty, there’s another option: you can host a custom HTML website at sites.pitt.edu for free! In this AI bite, we will walk you through the steps to get a website up and running on Pitt’s servers (with a little help from Claude).
Creating an HTML page: HTML is a language which allows you to define what a webpage looks like (its format) and what it says (its content). If you—like us—don’t have much (or any) background with HTML, you can use Claude (or another LLM) to do the heavy lifting. A solid starting point for a newbie is simply to ask Claude to write you an HTML page for an academic website. You can get pretty good results by giving Claude some minimal specifications (e.g. “make sure to include a bio section with a photo and research and a teaching section”) and leaving things up to the AI, but you can also be more detailed and give examples of other websites if there’s something specific you want. Claude has the functionality to display html pages directly in the chat, so you can preview the website and just ask Claude to make edits until you have something you like. Sometimes Claude can make mistakes, but if you point them out, it is usually able to correct them. When you’re satisfied with the page, download it (make sure to name the file ‘index.html’).
Alternatively, you can ask Claude to build your website using a static site generator such as Jekyll or Hugo. These generators allow you to write your content in simple markup files like Markdown, then compile them into HTML so that you can publish and update your site without manually editing the HTML page. For the different generators, there exist many starting themes to choose from, and you can even provide Claude with a theme to initially customize and build on, saving time on design and letting you focus on your content.
Connecting to Pitt’s File Server: To host your website at https://sites.pitt.edu/~username, you will need to connect to Pitt’s file servers. If you are off campus, you must first install a virtual private network (VPN) to connect remotely. Pitt uses a VPN called GlobalProtect, and a setup guide can be found here. Once GlobalProtect confirms that you are connected through portal-palo.pitt.edu, you can connect to the file servers using this guide. The guide recommends using WinSCP for Windows or Fetch for Mac. Both tools allow your computer to connect to remote file servers. However, there are a variety of other options that could be used to connect, such as SSH over the Terminal on Mac, MobaXTerm, or even VSCode. Regardless of which application you use, make sure to enter the hostname as linux-ts.it.pitt.edu and the username as your Pitt username all in lowercase. Once connected, you should see a folder called ‘public.’ This is where you will put your website files.
Uploading your Site: In the public folder, create a new folder called html. Then, upload the html files of your website (there could be just a single index.html file, or multiple depending on how complicated your website setup is). Afterwards, the site should automatically be generated at https://sites.pitt.edu/~username. If you have any issues, you can check out this guide provided by Pitt IT or reach out to them directly.
Updating your site: Whenever you need to make changes to your HTML page, you can always go back to the chat (or start a new one and upload the file to it) and ask Claude to make the changes. However, we would recommend learning how to make at least some basic edits (i.e. change text, add photos, etc.) on your own. There’s a ton of material on writing and editing HTML online, but Claude is also a very useful resource—just ask it how to do something. If you went with the static site generator option, then updating is even easier (and Claude can still give you a hand with anything you need). Once you have the new HTML file, all you have to do is replace the old HTML file in the HTML folder with the new one.
Building a custom personal website may seem daunting, but Pitt’s free hosting and Claude’s AI assistance makes creating one far more accessible than you might expect. Furthermore, once you have an HTML file, you can also host them elsewhere (like Github), if you prefer. For a firsthand account of what this process looks like in practice, please stay tuned for Part 2 of this AI Bite in the next GAINS newsletter, where we will describe our experience building the initial HTML files of our websites with Claude’s help.