Github Deployment: submodule problem

Hi,

I’m trying to deploy my site using GitHub pages, and I must’ve deleted and retried this over ten times now - the instructions appear to not work? Specifically step 5 and linking a public folder with the repo I’m hosting my site from.

My main repo is https://github.com/NickWerren/QC_container/

Everything works locally, it’s just deployment where I’m having the issue. I am having numerous issues but the current one is that I’m trying to run

git submodule add -b master https://github.com/NickWerren/NickWerren.github.io.git public

I get the error message that a git directory already exists locally. After clearing that out from the .git file, and then running the above command again then I get the error that “I appear to have cloned an empty repository […] unable to checkout submodule ‘public’”

I have no idea where I am going wrong or how to make this work.

Thanks,

Nick