What this covers

You have a local workspace connected to GitHub, but nothing is visible on the internet. This step gets a splash page live on your custom domain in under an hour.

What I did

I wanted footybeat.com to show something that afternoon. Not an app. Not even a real page. Just proof that the domain was mine and the site was coming. A splash page with the logo and "Coming Soon" would be enough.

First I created a repository on GitHub. A repository is a project folder that GitHub hosts online, so other services can access your code. I went to github.com, clicked "New repository," named it footybeat, and left it empty. Back in the terminal, I connected my local folder to the remote repo with git remote add origin followed by the SSH URL. Then I created a simple index.html with the logo and a heading, committed it, and pushed.

Next I signed up for Vercel. Vercel is the service that takes code from GitHub and turns it into a live website. I connected my GitHub account, selected the footybeat repository, and clicked deploy. Vercel auto-detected it as a Next.js project and built it. Two minutes later it was live on a generated URL that looked something like footybeat-abc123.vercel.app.

That URL worked, but it was not footybeat.com. So I went to the Vercel dashboard, clicked "Domains," and added footybeat.com as a custom domain. Vercel showed me the exact DNS records I needed to add in Namecheap. An A record pointing to 76.76.21.21 and a CNAME for www pointing to cname.vercel-dns.com.

This is where the Step 3 mistake surfaced. I had already configured DNS records two days earlier, before Vercel existed. Those records pointed to nothing. I had to go back to Namecheap, delete the old records, and enter the ones Vercel actually gave me. Then I waited for propagation. About thirty minutes later, footybeat.com loaded. The splash page appeared. The logo was there. "Coming Soon" in clean type on a white background.

From that point on, every push to the main branch on GitHub automatically triggered a new deployment on Vercel. Push the code, site updates. That is the entire workflow.

Skip the mistakes

Deploy something on day one. It does not matter what. A single HTML file with your name on it is enough. Having a live URL changes your psychology. You are no longer planning a project. You are iterating on a live one.

Connect Vercel to your repo before you configure DNS. Vercel tells you exactly which records to add. If you set up DNS first, you are guessing at values you do not have yet, and you will have to redo the work. This is the mistake I made in Step 3, and it cost me an extra round of configuration and an afternoon of wondering why the domain was not resolving.

Use push-to-deploy from the start. Vercel does this automatically once connected to GitHub. Every time you push code, the site rebuilds and redeploys. There is no manual upload, no FTP, no "publish" button. This is the single most important workflow to establish early, because it means every improvement you make is one git push away from being live.

Keep the splash page simple. One HTML file. Logo, heading, maybe a sentence. Do not build a coming soon page with an email signup form, a countdown timer, and animated transitions. You are not launching a product yet. You are proving the pipeline works.

What's next

Everything works, and that is actually the problem, because I could not explain why it worked.