If you want to start a website and/or shop and have limited technical ability then you’ve come to the right place. In the next few blogs I will guide you through set up and tweaking of a WordPress based website.

Setting up a website with WordPress is easy. There are basically two ways that you can go,* and how you proceed depends on your basic skill level and how you want your website address to look. 

Start at wordpress.com

If you are ok with a website name such as  www.yourname.wordpress.com (instead of www.yourname.com) and are a very beginner then go straight to www.wordpress.com Start there and set up an account. You can create a website directly with wordpress.com as the host – it’s easy and there are great advantages to it. Create a yourname.wordpress.com site first, and then, after mastering that you can create a yourname.com site very easily.

I hope that you follow that. It is kind of confusing. But the following might help to clear it up. Right now you are on www.grantabrams.com, I set this up myself with wordpress as the platform and it is hosted through Bluehost (a website hosting service). Go to www.grantabrams.wordpress.com and you will see a site that I set up before this site to learn how to use wordpress. It is just like a site that you can set up right now.

I love wordpress.com. The tutorials are great. You get good advice. It’s a good community and you can see how other folks set up their blogs. Once you master the skills of a www.yourname.wordpress.com hosted site you can transfer them directly to creating your own site, www.yourname.com. And, best of all bluehost has a tool for migrating an existing wordpress.com website directly to bluehost, so none of your work gets lost.

Start at wordpress.com!

Direct host on bluehost

Ok, now we can discuss the second way that you can start a wordpress based website to start www.yourname.com. Go to the wordpress hosting page at bluehost. I will leave it to the bluehost guys to guide you through the process. They make it pretty easy withvideos as they have a bluehost channel on youtube and honestly the learning curves are worth going through on their site because you can trust them. Other domain hosting services are not quite so new user friendly. Using bluehost will save you some hassles. Here is the “getting started” page.

I will see you here after you are set up with your wordpress website. Go ahead and select a theme or use the one that they give you. I personally like 2010, because I got used to it, but the newer themes are more user friendly to mobile devices so you might want to consider this.

*Total geek disclaimer time: I am not a tech guy and of course there are a thousand ways that you can set up a wp website. I am offering friendly advice for newbies that is based on my experience. If you have suggestions please let me know.