I wanted to set my site up on Google webmaster’s tools. Google offer two choices, one is to put a meta tag, with defined content, in the header of the index page. This would require programming with PHP which is a little beyond my scope. The alternative to is to download a html page, provided by Google, and put it in your website. The page is actually 1 line of text, so it’s not really html.
The obvious way to do this is to add a page with WordPress, as advised, for example, on Jalal P. Jha’s blog. Obvious, but wrong. Jalal’s advice applies, as he says, to sites hosted on WordPress.com, not to self-hosted sites, such as this. It’s possible to create a WordPress page with the correct title, but WordPress adds in a lot of invisible bits and pieces, which alter the contents of the file, which is what Google checks.
So, the solution is very simple, use ftp, to add the page provided by Google, to the right directory on your web host, in my case the root directory of this website, (/website/httpdocs/astaines) and you are done.