Building a static local website using Rmarkdown: step by step procedure
In most things, related to R, there are many approaches to solve a problem, sometimes too many, I would say. The task of building a static website, using RMarkdown, is not an exception.

One of the best, albeit somewhat brief, sets of workflows on the topic include the following one by Daniel Wollschlaeger, which includes this workflow, based on R, nanoc and Jekyll, as well as this workflow, based on R and WordPress. Another good workflow is this one by Jason Bryer, which is focused on R(Markdown), Jekyll and GitHub Pages.

Not everyone likes GitHub Pages, Jekyll, Octopress and Ruby, so some people came up with alternative solutions. For example, this workflow by Edward Borasky is based on R and, for a static website generator, on Python-based Nicola (instead of Ruby-based Jekyll or nanoc). Speaking about static website generators, there are tons of them, in various programming languages, so, if you want to experiment, check this amazing website, listing almost all of them. Almost, because some are missing - for example, Samantha and Ghost, listed here.

Some other interesting workflows include this one by Joshua Lande, which is based on Jekyll and GitHub Pages, but includes some nice examples of customization for integrating a website with Disqus, Google Analytics and Twitter as well as getting custom URL for the site and more.

Those who want a pure R-based static site solution, now have some options, including rsmith (https://github.com/hadley/rsmith), a static site generator by Hadley Wickham, and Poirot (https://github.com/ramnathv/poirot), a static site generator by Ramnath Vaidyanathan.

Finally, I would like to mention an interesting project (from an open science perspective) that I recently ran across - an open source software by Mark Madsen for a lab notebook static site, which is based on GitHub Pages and Jekyll, but also supports pandoc, R, RMarkdown and knitr.