Create Your Own Website

My latest project was creating my own website. In addition to using it as a more detailed CV, I would like to regularly write about some stuff that I'm interested in or currently working on. When the Idea of creating my personal website first came into my mind, I started reading a few tutorials on the internet. It seemed to be fairly easy, but in the end there were some obstacles to overcome for someone that had literally no experience with web design and domain hosting. In this post I will show you how to overcome those in case of Google Sites and STRATO.

In my particular case I chose Google Sites to design my homepage. It was just a personal preference, because I'm used to Google Services and the layout seemed to be quite user friendly. In addition, Google Sites is free of any charges. This means that the only costs you have to cover are for the hosting of your domain. Since I live in Germany, I was not able to register my custom domain directly at Google. I guess that would have made things a lot easier. Anyhow, I decided to use STRATO as my domain host, since STRATO's services seemed to be priced very reasonable.

Whenever you want to use a homepage designer such as Google Sites or WordPress for example and you want to use a custom URL, you have to verify that you actually own the respective URL. Right now I can only talk about how this works with Google Sites and STRATO. When you are in the Web Designer, you can go to the settings button at the top right corner and then select "Benutzerdefinierte Domains" (Picture 1). Next, you can add your custom domain and the window will tell you to verify that you own the domain. In case of STRATO it is now important not to select STARTO as host, but "Other" at the end of the list (Picture 2).

Now you have to log-in to your STRATO account and create a subdomain with the prefix "www " (e.g. www.yourdomain.com). You then need to go to the DNS Settings of the subdomain and add the string in Picture 2 in a TXT entry. To be sure, you should also add the same TXT entry to the main domain. At last, you need to add a CNAME entry for the subdomain. You can also do that in the DNS Settings. The CNAME Entry is "ghs.googlehosted.com." (including the period!). You find the menu overview in Picture 3.

Once you are done with the previous steps, you can go back to the Google domain verification page and proceed verifying your domain.

Now you should be able to use your custom domain in Google Sites. Have Fun!