Chapter 17 Make it yours

17.1 Adding new pages

Adding new pages to your site means adding new .Rmd files to your site’s project root directory. You can do this in RStudio using File > New File > R Markdown. Delete the default YAML except for the title and all text/code in the document, then edit away.

17.2 Grow your navbar

To make a new page actually findable from your site, you’ll need to also make a change to navbar, which means opening up the _site.yml file and fiddling with it. To add another R Markdown link to your navbar, you need to know two things about the new page you want to add:

  1. The name you want to see on the navbar for this page; this is the page’s text.

  2. The name of the .html file that corresponds to the .Rmd file you’re adding; this is the page’s href

Let’s say we create a new file called readings.Rmd. We want to add the link to the rendered page readingss.html to our upper navbar next to “Home” and “About”, so we would add the following to our YAML:


Save the changes to _site.yml, build, and preview to see the new page appear in the upper navbar.

You may have noticed that in the YAML options we’ve looked at so far, left: has been one of the first things to go under navbar:. You can add all (or just some) of your links aligned to the right side of the navbar instead by using right:.


If we added the page for rmd.Rmd to the right of our navbar instead: 
![](images/screenshots/rmd-grow-nav-right.png)

17.3 Add a dropdown menu

At some point, you may realize that you need room to grow with your navbar and the content you have planned to create and share. When you do, you may want to use dropdown menus. You can create a dropdown menu to add many more pages to the site without taking up space in your navbar. Let’s say we had a course with several modules, and we decided to create a separate R Markdown document for each module of readings in this course. We could create a dropdown menu called “Readings” and link to each of the readings pages underneath that.

See how we do this in the YAML below:

  1. We’ll start by getting rid of the single readings.Rmd that we linked in our navbar.
  2. Add a new - text: field followed by the heading that you want to use for your dropdown. I’m going to call mine “Readings”.
  3. Add a menu: field. Nothing else goes on this line.
  4. Now add the pages that will go under this menu with their own - text: and href: fields.
  5. Repeat the previous step until you’ve added all the pages for this dropdown. We’re adding 4 new pages under our menu.

17.4 Add your content

Now that you know how to add and link new pages to your site, you’re ready to make your site your own with your own content.

Creating this for a workshop? A course? Need ideas of what to include? Check out our Organization page.

17.5 Recap

In this section you:

  • Added new pages
  • Grew your navbar
  • Added a dropdown menu
  • Added your own content to your site
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