My first post is about Jekyll itself. I will not go about installation and other nuances, you will find a ton of information, just Google it. However I would recommend the following sites a must for anyone starting with Jekyll.

When I started out, I wanted to keep it simple, light but a little different from the vanilla version offered out of the box. I wanted to use a light weight CSS framework which was responsive but not BootStrap. Why? I just wanted to break the stereotype, there were a dozen sites offering a bootstrap mixed Jekyll but I wanted to try some thing new. So for options there were a couple like Skeleton, Pure.css. I went with Pure.css and it looked decent. I am still adding plugins like jekyll-paginate, jekyll-gist and tinkering the look and feel using Font Awesome, jQuery etc. May be in future, I will try Skeleton or Bootstrap itself.

Update [06-18-2018]: Check this site Staticgen and give a shot at HUGO instead of Jekyll if you are starting fresh.