To build a website via Blowdown, an easy way is to let Netlify to build an initial website for you once you have GitHub account.
For example, if you use “Academic” theme, go to Install Academic with Netlify. Nelify will create a repository academic-kickstart (you can change the name) under your GitHub account and provide you with a customizable URL to access your new site.
On GitHub, go to your newly created repository and edit config.toml to personalize your site. Shortly after saving the file, your site will automatically be updated
Usually you want to write post in markdown (.md or .rmd) and pre-view it in your local repository. So clone the repository from GitHub to your Rstudio, install blogdown and hugo to do it. Netlify does not physically put the theme into your GitHub repository. You will have to download the theme into your local repository (put the files under folder “theme”, don’t need to commit those files) so that you can pre-view the website in your local laptop.
There are other ways to build a website, please read the book “blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown”. Alison (alison.rbind.io) has also written a nice post “Up and running with blogdown”.