The documentation site is missing a quickstart guide and the structure might make sense to me but not necessarily for everyone.
zola init does provide a starting point but clearly not enough for many people. I am reluctant to provide a default theme as there will be no way of making one satisfying all my own use cases and don’t want to pigeon hole Zola in blogs.
The installation guide, under “From source”, states dependencies, then “From a terminal, you can now run the following command: $ cargo build --release”.