Set Up Your Blog With WordPress: The Ultimate Guide

WordPress is the most powerful blogging platform in the world; nearly one out of every three sites on the internet is powered by WordPress. WordPress separates the content of a site from the back-end code that drives the site. This means you can run a fully functional website without any web programming experience. WordPress Help

But if you want to try your hand at setting up WordPress on your own, this guide will walk you through everything you need to know from ground zero.

1. Intro to WordPress By separating out the content of your pages from the layout, WordPress can then dynamically generate new HTML files every time someone visits your site. WordPress also takes care of automatically linking your posts together, creating the sidebar with links to your latest content items, and managing the archives. In fact, because WordPress works from HTML theme templates that you can download, you don't ever need to write a single line of HTML code---all you need to worry about is writing the actual content and uploading your pictures. WordPress takes care of the website coding, you just supply the content. It's this separation of template and content that opened the world of running a website---a blog---to the world.

Why WordPress? 

Although WordPress is most commonly used to create a blog-style site---which is technically just a series of posts with a specific date and time that they were posted---it can also be easily adapted to suit static websites, such as for your local business, artist portfolio, or even a complete online shopping site. As you delve into WordPress, you'll find that there's a WordPress plugin to create literally any kind of website you could possibly think of.

WordPress isn't the only CMS around though, so why choose WordPress? Simple:

• It's feature rich, so with the basic installation you should be able to everything you want to. If something is missing for your particular requirements, it's highly likely there is a plugin already made to handle it for you. The upshot is, you don't need to code anything.
• It's mature---created in 2003, it's had a very long life so far and continues to be in active development. This isn't buggy new beta-release software---it's incredibly stable.
• It's secure. As with any piece of software or operating system, there have been a few serious hacks over the years but the developers have been on top of them quickly. The latest versions include prominent warnings when a new version is available, and so long as you regularly check your blog and update when needed, there's very little chance of your blog being hacked.

Still not convinced?

• It's incredibly easy to install
• There are literally thousands of plugins to add functionality
• Image and media management out of the box for instant portfolio and photo driven sites
• Simple coding for core functionality makes it easy for novice programmers to customize their blog at a code level---however I won't be addressing any coding in this guide.

The Difference Between WordPress.org and WordPress.com

Many people are understandably confused about the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, so let's take a moment to go over this before we begin.

WordPress.com will give you a free blog, hosted on WordPress' own servers. It's most suitable for absolute beginners---you don't need to worry about configuring files or databases and everything is taken care of for you. A WordPress. com blog is similar to any other online blog service like Blogspot or Tumblr. It's the absolute easiest way to begin with WordPress, but it's very restrictive in the plugins and themes you can use---essentially you get to choose from a limited catalogue of pre-chosen styles and approved plugins.

WordPress.org, on the other hand, is the site from which you can download the self-hosted WordPress system and upload it to your own server. You'll need a server capable of running PHP, and a MySQL based database. Setting up a self-hosted blog is a little more difficult (think 5 minutes instead of 1), but you get a lot more freedom to do as you wish, customize how you like, and it's easy to have your own domain from the start. The majority of this guide will refer to the self-hosted wordpress.org version.

To add further confusion, many web hosts will offer one-click WordPress.org installs which will install the files and set up the database for you---so you don't need to configure anything! If you choose to host with a shared server, this is the recommended option.

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