16.10 Build websites with blogdown
If you want build a website based on R Markdown, you may consider using the blogdown package (Xie, Dervieux, and Presmanes Hill 2024). The easiest way to get started is to use the RStudio menu File -> New Project -> New Directory -> Website using blogdown, as you can see from Figure 16.5. If you have never used blogdown before, you may use the default settings in the dialog box, otherwise you can customize things like the website theme. If you do not use RStudio, you may call the function blogdown::new_site() under an empty directory to create a new website.
A website project may contain any number of Rmd documents. They could either be normal pages or blog posts. R Markdown makes it easier for you to maintain your website because the results on your website are automatically and dynamically generated.
We recommend that you read Chapter 1 of the blogdown book (Xie, Hill, and Thomas 2017) for an overview of this package as well as the basic workflow of maintaining a website.