Module 4 · Understand your setup: GitHub, Vercel & your domain
GitHub & Vercel, explained simply
Three words run your live website: GitHub, Vercel, and your domain. You never have to touch them by hand — Claude does that. But understanding what each one does in plain English will make you far more confident. Here’s the whole picture in five minutes.
Watch — hand-picked
The clearest walkthroughs of this step, from creators we rate. Each one’s credited — go give them a follow.
How To Use GitHub For Beginners
How to deploy a website with Vercel in 10 minutes (for Free)
How to Add a Custom Domain on Vercel
The simplest way to picture it
- Your folder (on your computer) is where you make changes, privately.
- GitHub is the safe online backup of that folder — plus a history of every version.
- Vercel is the publisher — it takes what’s on GitHub and shows it to the world as your live website.
- Your domain (
yourbusiness.com) is your address — it points people to the site Vercel is showing.
So publishing a change is just: your folder → GitHub → Vercel → live at your domain. One sentence to Claude moves it down that whole chain.
What is GitHub?
GitHub is a free service that stores a copy of your website’s files online and remembers every version you’ve ever saved. If your laptop died tomorrow, your website would be completely safe. It’s also the “source of truth” that Vercel watches — when something new lands on GitHub, Vercel publishes it.
What is Vercel?
Vercel is the free service that hosts your live website — it’s the thing actually putting your site on the internet. Its best trick: it watches your GitHub, and whenever a change arrives, it automatically rebuilds and re-publishes your live site within a minute or two. That’s why updating is so easy — you don’t “upload” anything, you just save to GitHub and Vercel does the rest.
If we built your site, your project already lives on GitHub and is published by Vercel — in your own accounts, owned by you. You’re not dependent on us. In the next lesson you’ll just make sure your computer is connected so you can publish; there’s nothing to build from scratch.
If your site isn’t on GitHub and Vercel yet, Claude can set both up for you (both are free). Paste this when you’re ready:
Connect my site to GitHub & Vercel
My website isn't backed up online yet. Please walk me through, one simple step at a time: 1. Creating a free GitHub account (if I don't have one) and connecting my computer to it. 2. Saving my project to a new private GitHub repository. 3. Creating a free Vercel account, connecting it to my GitHub, and publishing my site so it's live. I'm not technical — do the technical parts for me and tell me exactly what to click.
You can explain, in your own words, what GitHub and Vercel each do — and why publishing a change is just “save to GitHub, Vercel publishes it.”
Still fuzzy on which is which? Ask your best teacher: “Can you explain the difference between GitHub and Vercel using a simple everyday comparison, like it’s a shop or a kitchen?” Claude is great at analogies.