I have an existing GitHub project that already had a few html pages. Now I made a GitHub pages site of the project using the docs folder in the master branch but when I try to apply an existing jekyll theme to the pages, the theme is not applied. The docs folder contains a file named index.html.
Do I need to add some kind of import statement to my html pages or do I really need to convert them to markdown syntax? Maybe I am doing something wrong here?
If you have a _layouts directory containing files with the same name as the new theme layout files, they will have precedence over the theme files.
This is the way Jekyll makes it possible to customize themes.
In this case remove the _layouts directory and Github pages will use the desired theme.