Is using a GitHub Pages theme considered academically dishonest?

Hi,

I’ve recently completed all of my Responsive Web Design projects and I’m eager to move on to Javascript, but I’m concerned about whether the use of a GitHub Pages theme constitutes using excessively large snippets of non-original code.

For all of my projects I deliberately kept the theme’s CSS separate as a precaution with respect to this very concern, except for my Personal Portfolio one. For that project, I utilized the actual portfolio page of my personal website, which is troublesome and messy to detach from the theme’s CSS. Will this be a problem in terms of academic dishonesty?

Thanks for all the help. Apologies in advance if this was answered in a pre-existing post, but I couldn’t find one with a similar topic.

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I think it’s more about whether you want your page to stand out or not. Generic designs are generic. Even no CSS would stand out and avoid your policy quandary.

Either way, if you made it yourself, there’s no issue. The post isn’t completely clear in this regard.

Id make a page for the test. I don’t know if its academically dishonest if you passed the check marks by yourself, its no different than using a library and you are allowed to use bootstrap and such…though I feel like in doing so you might miss a learning opportunity…even if the page ends up looking terrible. you can always fork it and work on it more. Employers like to see evolution.

Hey Richard Feynman nice! Your other pages are off to a good start too.

I did make it myself (in terms of what checked off the tests), but a large part of the CSS came with the theme. I kept using the theme just for consistency with the homepage. I do plan on ditching the theme and customizing the design myself though, but I feel like I need more design + CSS experience before that’ll result in a net improvement.

Thanks for the feedback though! I think I’ll just make 100% new CSS for the portfolio page to make it stand out in addition to avoiding this problem.

That’s great advice. I’ll definitely re-submit my Personal Portfolio project with a different page separate from my actual portfolio.

Thanks so much! I’ve been programming for a while now but have recently tried to grasp the fundamentals of web dev and design and not rely so much on Bootstrap etc. as a crutch.