Hi Sonja,

I’m in Austria, Graz, actually. How are you doing on WA so far? We can meet on zoom if you like or coffee in person if you want.

Diane

Sonja, Good to meet you. You have to decide what you want to accomplish with your potential website. If you are in WA to build yourself a business, and you are planning to live and work in the U.S. your audience will primarily be those who speak, read and write English. Even though the World Wide Web is literally that -world wide--you will reach more people who speak English than any other language.
For your business, it makes sense to use the common language that your potential website visitors use.
You can always do special projects-books, newsletters, reports, blogs, correspondence, etc. in German for that special audience.

There are about 175–220 million German speakers worldwide whereas around 840 million speak English. If you have English on your website you have a reach that is more than 4 times of what you will have with a German language site.

Hence English is preferable, and I am guessing from reading your post that you know good English. :-)

However, if you have a German specific niche then do it in German. But I presume that you don't else you would not have asked this question in the first place.

Coming to affiliate platforms, there are many more English based affiliate programs than there are in German, so that makes it again a preference for English.

To conclude unless you would like to be German specific for an unavoidable reason, it is clear that you should go with English.

Hope this helps you make up your mind! Wish you all the best. :-)

Welcome Sonja
It does depend on your niche and also what language you are most comfortable in. For instance, if you decide to promote wealthy affiliateS then you can have a site in German but essentially it must be directed at English-speaking Germans because the site is in English.

On the other hand, if you're in self-development I'm sure there are many programs available in German. I hope this makes sense to make things a bit clearer?

It's totally up to you... What are you more comfortable with? If you are comfortable writing English then of course you can reach a bigger audience, but similarly you could hit a real niche German market...

If your theme has a sidebar defined you can go to the Widgets area and simply drag the items you wish to appear in the sidebar. Themes normally come without active widgets so it is inactive by default ... Go to Appearance --- Widgets and drag the items you want to the right side under the Sidebar you want them to appear in ... some themes have no sidebars, some have one and some have many ...

I hope that helps ...
Allan