One of the swimmers from my early-morning breakfast group at Temple Cowley was apologetic. "My e-mail has been hacked," she fumed.

She had received a message from Hotmail asking her to register, which she ignored. Then another message, saying her webmail account would be discontinued unless she registered. Who could blame her for following the link?

Her son, who had set up her computer, shouted: "How could you be so stupid?"

The website she clicked on had hacked into her address book and caused untold damage. It's not uncommon, and I didn't think she had been stupid at all. The same could happen to anyone, I thought. And it did.

Inspired by a book entitled The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich, I decided to see if — like the millionaire author Tim Ferriss — I could turn my hobby into an income.

The book, a bestseller, is an irritating American self-help guide. Once an overworked and underpaid office worker, he has become a jet-setting semi-retiree by setting up several Internet sites which somehow earn money with little effort.

My first step was enrolling on a course called Build Your Own Website, run by the National Union of Journalists.

The attendees were a mixed bag. A translator, who was seeing her work being snatched by less able but more Internet-savvy rivals, struggled with the instructions and I realised with relief that I would not be the slowest learner.

There were several redundant BBC journalists looking for new avenues for their talents. I sat next to Stan, a sports reporter from Belfast, who was hoping to use his website to earn money from his passion, which was golf.

The tutor, Chris Wheal, an editor with AOL, is known as 'whealie' online, because he writes about motorcycling.

My website, www.groundhogwalking.co.uk, stems from a joke that is difficult to explain, but seemed to me — perhaps wrongly — to fit in with social networking culture. (It comes from the film Groundhog Day: walking holidays are always the same. The first day you get up and go for a walk, and the same thing happens the next day.) By the end of the course, we all had working websites, for an outlay of less than £50.

I was proud to be the only one to become an Amazon Associate, which meant that (theoretically) I would get a tiny amount of income from any sales of books I recommended. It all seemed too easy.

For the first few months, things went swimmingly. When you Googled such things as 'GR51' (a long-distance footpath known as the Les Balcons de la Côte d'Azur) or 'Brightwell-cum-Sotwell' my website was on the front page. Why do people pay thousands of pounds for sophisticated websites when they can do it all themselves?

After wondering this for some time, I quickly found out. I received an e-mail entitled 'security update' from UK Webhosting. It was pretty incomprensible so naturally, I ignored it. One of the instructions was: 'do not enable vulnerable PHP functions', and I swear I did not do that. Unlike my swimming buddy, I did nothing. Next time I looked at my website, it had gone black, with a sinister hooded figure replacing the green and pleasant Oxfordshire countryside scenes I had painstakingly uploaded.

I contacted the UK Webhosting helpline. Someone called Sarina replied to my plea that they reinstate the original. She wrote (sic): "I have checked all the backup available with us and all the backup we have are infected. I have evan checked the monthly backup for the domain which unfortunately infected."

The Oxford Times’s web expert, Dave McManus, feels amateurs like me would be better sticking to blogging, rather than trying to set up a website.

"If your blog is run and hosted by a large, reputable company then clearly you will have the robustness of whatever security measures they have in place across their entire blogging network. They not only have the resources but also a desire to maintain a faultless level of credibility.

"You also get the added bonus of all the extra features that blogs offer like ease of use, commenting, search engine optimisation etc."

Tim Ault, of Oxford-based Alberon, which specialises in web development for small businesses and charities, said I should have taken more notice of the e-mails offering upgrades.

“My advice would be about prevention rather than cure. First, find a web hosting company that’s taking regular back-ups and keeping them for a period of time. Second, do the upgrades to your content management system.”

It was also important to pick a strong password — not your favourite footballer or your cat’s name, he said.

When I looked at Stan's website, the same thing had happened to him.

Time is money, as I am sure Tim Ferriss appreciates and I have wasted too much on my website. Perhaps I should concentrate on the next big thing — social media.

Then a press release pinged into my inbox about the rise of Smugging (social media mugging).

Apparently 1.9 million social network accounts are accessed by unauthorised and/or fraudulent users every second, 91 per cent of which are Facebook accounts.

It seems I can’t win . . . ib