makeovelry.com: Building and deploying a Hugo portfolio site via GitHub Actions in a single session

The project

makeovelry.com (hosted at jmail482.github.io/makeovelry) is a professional portfolio built to present SEO and digital marketing case studies in a STAR format — Situation, Task, Action, Result — with each post card showing a date, reading time, 2–3 sentence description, and tag pills matching the visual style of the Hugo PaperMod theme.

Stack

• Framework: Hugo Extended (latest)¹
• Theme: PaperMod²
• Hosting: GitHub Pages (jmail482/makeovelry repository)³
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions (hugo.yml workflow — triggers on every push to main)⁴
• Content management: Markdown files in /content/blog/

The structural issue that hid the posts section

The initial site build had posts section invisible despite files existing on disk. Root cause: /content/posts/_index.md was empty except for the title. Hugo treats a section without draft: false in the front matter as a draft and hides it from the rendered site.¹

Fix: add draft: false to _index.md. Posts list rendered immediately.

The directory restructure catch

Nine case study posts were written to /content/posts/ and committed to GitHub. They did not appear on the site. Investigation revealed: the remote repository had been restructured — posts moved from /content/posts/ to /content/blog/ — in a commit that was not in the local repository.

The git push had failed silently (Status Code: 1) because the remote contained commits the local branch did not have. The correct sequence:

1. git pull origin main — merged remote restructure into local (confirmed directory rename via merge output)
2. Moved all 9 files from /content/posts/ to /content/blog/
3. git add, git commit, git push — confirmed clean push (Status Code: 0)

The GitHub Actions deployment

Hugo was not installed locally. A GitHub Actions workflow was written to build and deploy automatically on every push to main:⁴

name: Build and Deploy Hugo Site
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v2
        with:
          hugo-version: 'latest'
          extended: true
      - run: hugo --minify
      - uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          publish_dir: ./public

Current state

21 posts live as of May 2026 across three groups: historical client case studies (Appendix B), recent audit and research case studies, and systems and infrastructure case studies.

Sources