Making a website can be useful to share your views, market your products, journal your story, connect with others, make progress toward writing a book, and can be quite therapeutic.

1. buy a domain name (we use namecheap.com, cheapest we’ve found) (costs like $10 the first year if you use namecheap, then $20/ year after that)
2. next buy a host (we use namecheap.com). There should be a link to do it on namecheap.com. (costs $25 first year, and like $6/mo. after that)

(*and if you don’t care about your site having something else in the name like spencer.wordpress.com or spencer.blogspace.com instead of just spencer.com, then you don’t need to buy a domain name or a host.)

(*if you buy from namecheap to be your host, then namecheap enables you to access your cpanel facilitator. (Some hosts don’t let you control your cpanel, namecheap does)

3. when the host sends you the welcome email, follow the link to cpanel, and from there use softaculous (which is an ap installer)

to install wordpress (wordpress is included as part of the package when you chose namecheap for your host)

4. you can use this to chat with someone from namecheap https://www.namecheap.com/support/live-chat/general.aspx
5. once you’re in wordpress you have to install a theme. If you want a menu at top of your site, you’ll need to pay for one that has that feature.
6. to connect social media to your website, you use a plugin, or, if your theme has that built in, you can, once you’ve created those social media places i.e.. spencer.comFacebook page and twitter page, you will be able to attach those to your website.
7. to make an email associated with your site, create an email in your cpanel, ie editor@spencer.com (mine is editor@richardsonstudies.com). From cpanel, click email, create an email. You can make those emails show up in your gmail etc. account by creating a forwarder. Setup the email first, them create the forwarder. Make the forwarder via namecheap too. 
8. one fun thing to do is on the settings of your email, put a link to your website to your website, as you see below.
9. One place we like to use for legal pictures to use canva.com. It’s also a good place to create a logo, or merge pictures together, as you’ve seen I’ve done below.
10. with wordpress, to make menu’s, you’ll need to use “pages” not “posts”. A post is a standard article you write. A page is a bit more for permanent things. For example, your menu could lead readers to a page called “about” which tells about your website. Menus can also be pages with links in them to guide people to certain posts by topic.