With scripts like WordPress making it so easy for anyone to run a website, more and more new webmasters are struggling to learn the myriad of skills required to keep the site alive.  This course empowers new webmasters with the skills required to run and manage a successful website.  From hosting and registrars to Google Search Console and cPanel.  This course will guide you through the learning curve.

The course starts off by looking at web hosting and registrars.  

A lot of web hosting companies also want to be your registrar.  In other words, they want to control your domain name and your hosting space.  This is probably how you have your website set up if you already have web hosting.  But did you know this isn’t such a great idea?  I’ll tell you why and what you can do about it if you already have your hosting set up this way.

We’ll go through the settings at your registrar and how to connect a registrar to a separate web host.

We’ll also look at email and how easy it is to create and use domain based emails or Gmail.  Gmail is so easy to set up and these email addresses can be well worth considering.  Many people don’t like Gmail because they wrongly assume they have to log into Gmail to read and write emails.  Actually, I’ll show you how you can use most email software programs on your home computer to read and write Gmails without ever having to log into the web interface in a browser.

Your web hosting space is basically a disk drive on which you can store files.  But how do you access that disk space to manage, edit, add or delete files?  We’ll go through two options including how to set up FTP.  FTP can be set up on your own computer and looks very much like the file manager you already use on your computer.  It’s easy and intuitive once set up, and I’ll show you how.

Then there is cPanel.  Most web hosts use cPanel and I actually recommend you choose a host that does.  We’ll look at the tools in cPanel and how to use the most important ones.  

We’ll also look at the difference between your web hosting accounts « main domain », and « addon domains ».  Addon domains are a way of adding additional domains to your hosting package (assuming your hosting plan allows more than one domain), and you’ll learn how to use addon domains.

You will also learn what a CDN is, and why you should use one.  I’ll take you step-by-step through the process of setting up a 100% free CDN that makes your pages load faster and helps secure your site against known hackers.

We all know Google as the search giant that it is, but did you know that Google also provides free tools to webmasters to help them manage their website?  Google Search Console is like having a direct line to Google search.  The Search Console will tell you important information about your site, including if there are any problems with spidering, indexing, and even malware.  You can use Search Console to find out how your pages are performing in Google search, including how many times your pages are showing up in the results pages, and the click-through rate of those pages.  Are your titles and descriptions enticing visitors to click through to your pages?  Search Console can tell you this.  You can also submit sitemaps or just individual pages to Google through your account.  One of the powerful features of search console is the ability to download a list of links that point to your site.  Links mean better rankings, but did you know that some links can cause your rankings to drop?  I’ll show you what to do with « bad neighborhood » links so that Google ignores them when ranking your pages.

Another great free tool from Google is Google Analytics.  It’s a full-featured web analytics program that tracks your website visitors.  I’ll show you how to add your site to Google Analytics so your website visitors are tracked.  We’ll then go through some of the cool information you can find out about your visitors by looking at the Analytics dashboard.

Building a website is only the first hurdle in gaining an online presence.  With WordPress making is so easy, that hurdle has pretty much gone.  But to be successful with your website, you need to know how to manage and administer your site, taking advantage of the tools you have been given, and those that are there for the taking.  This course will get you up to speed fast so you will finally be able to put all the pieces of the jigsaw together and be in control of your website.