You are reluctant looking into the matter of making your own website? Is it because you are confused by technical matters, which are unknown to you?

Well, ask yourself why you are reading these lines? It is because you have surfed the Internet by using either a desk-top-computer, a mobile phone or a tablet. This means you know how to use a browser and how to search the web for whatever you are looking for. If you haven’t searched for this page perhaps somebody has sent you by some means of digital communication like e-mail, SMS or social-media-app the link, the internet-address also named the URL, the domain!

You even might be using social-media by yourself - you have an account with one or two of those and once in a while you post a message or upload a video. Some even allow you to set up your own page or site with them. - And all this is free of charge!

To summarize, you know how to use the internet to obtain information, to participate discussions in forums and to be entertained.

Although you think you know nothing, in fact you know a lot! You apply your knowledge in your digital daily life without realizing it and what you are doing is equal as difficult as running your very own website. The only point is, nobody has told you how to get a website, which is under your own full control.

No matter for what reasons - there are some! - you wish to have your own website. Please be aware that this it not free of charge, but affordable!

There are three main scenarios how to proceed:

1. You want to have a website without bothering you much about how to do it. So you are willing to spend a certain budget on somebody doing it for you. - In this case stop reading at this point and contact me via wiekhorsthenning@mac.com.

2. You prefer to invest your time instead of money and learn and do it yourself. For this I recommend you to continue reading this and related pages. I hope they are helpful to you. For minor questions you may contact me via wiekhorsthenning@mac.com. You don’t need to worry about any charges. Should I need to charge you for something, I will tell you before and appoint them with you.

3. You want to learn things, but it should not take ages and you are willing to spend some money for me assisting and getting you ahead in maintaining your website. - Please continue reading this and related pages. You also can ask for my training and assistance. For this I charge 30,00 Euro/hour. Establish contact to me via wiekhorsthenning@mac.com.

When sending me an e-mail, if possible provide me your WhatsApp or FaceTime contact details, so I can call you. For German residents your phone number will be fine.

To obtain your website, usually the first thing to do is to find a web-host or an Internet-Service-Provider (ISP) and open an account with a hosting plan supporting the installation of a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.

Search the internet for the keyword „web host“ and you will find plenty of them. The offers are ranging - depending on the kind of package - from 3,— to 20,— Euro/month.

As recommendation, I’m currently working mainly with https://www.ionos.com/, but also have accounts with https://mydomain.com and https://www.united-domains.de  

When opening your web-host-account please make sure to safekeep your username and password. Regarding the password, please choose a strong one with a minimum of 16 digits. Do NOT use passwords like your birthdate, „mypassword“, 123456789…! Also you should choose a password being different from any other passwords you possibly are using already.

Once you have your hosting-account, you need a domain. Usually you can purchase, register and activate domains via your hosting-account. A domain will cost you additional charges, which can be as low as 0,99 Euro/month! There are also domains costing a lot more! To learn more about domains CLICK HERE!

After you asked your web-host to install your domain, you will need a bit of patience. Usually not, but sometimes it can take up to 24 hours until your domain can be reached via the Internet. Once it is online, you see some standard page by your web-host. Why? Because you haven’t build your website yet!

Not a must, but advisable is also to buy a SSL-certificate for your website. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, which is an encoding protocol for safe data transmission through the Internet. Meanwhile search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing & Co. will rank encoded websites higher than non-encoded ones.

Since your ISP supports WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or any other CMS, it is likely that will find an option where you can ask your ISP to install the CMS under your domain. Once you make that choice, in most cases the installation-process might start immediately.

Usually, at some point you will be told to choose an username. The preset name is „admin“. Please do yourself a favor by making hacker’s lives a little bit more difficult and change that. 

DO NOT USE THE NAME „admin“!!!

As next you will be asked to create a password. please do NOT use the same as for your ISP-account! Choose a different and complicated one with more than 8 digits. The more, the safer!

After that simply follow the instructions coming up on screen. One of them might be about the database prefix. Now, with the installation also a database with various tables will be automatically created. All these tables have a names - in case of WordPress - something like wp-users, wp-posts, or what ever. They are the same with any WordPress installation!

This again makes hacker’s lives easy to intrude your database and to inject malicious code. That is why you will be asked to change the prefix „wp“. You are not limited to only two digits. Make it also difficult to guess like „gHaf48-9“, which simply is a random example. You don’t really need to remember it, although for some rare case it would be better if you do.

Normally the installation process doesn’t take longer than five minutes and you are done!

So, log out of your ISP-account and browse to your website. The look should be different now. The standard page from ISP is gone and the preset page of your CMS is shown.

If it is WordPress you will see a post „hello world, …“ You certainly want to change this and most likely also the all over looking of your website. Check the links shown your page and search for „login“! Click that and new screen appears asking you to key in a username and password.

Those are the ones you have created during the installation of WordPress. Key them in and click „login“! Wait a few seconds the admin-panel of your website will open. From here you can start making and designing your website.

If you need help, I suggest you to visit https://wordpress.org/support/category/getting-started/. Everything you need to know is explained and documented free of charge.

Should you need further help you either can search the WordPress-forums or what else is offered to support you. As another option you can contact me at wiekhorsthenning@mac.com and I will be happy to share my experience in working with WordPress CMS. However, my assistance I would charge with an hourly rate of 30,—Euro.