It’s only a placeholder, but I’m very happy to finally get that sorted out. So, what had gone wrong was that I owned the URL for multiple years, and had long intended to point it to my own server, hosted at home. My attempts at that had long ago been fruitless and I only held onto the domain name for future use. So, when I decided to get hosting service through the same portal I bought and maintain my domain name, it did not automatically set the domain host setting to “web hosting” and it was left on “basic hosting”. Correcting that made it possible to get the SSL certificate approved, but the process had no way of moving it forward and customer support had to push that for me.
In the end, it all could have been avoided if Namecheap had automatically moved my domain to web hosting when I subscribed to their web hosting service, or at least made it clear in the initial setup that this was a needed step. Despite frustrations, I am glad the site is online, even if only a placeholder while I work on adding functional buttons, pages and subdomains!
ZDBlog 