Building your WordPress website – start here

The first decision you have to make is where your blog is going to live. You have two basic options for the location where you will create your site. You can

Let's look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of each of these two choices.

The advantage of using WordPress.com is that they take care of all of the technical details for you. The software is already installed; they'll upgrade it for you whenever there's an upgrade, and you're not responsible for anything else. Just manage your content. The big disadvantage is that you lose almost all of the theme and plugin control you'd have otherwise. WordPress.com will not let you upload or edit your own theme, though it will let you (for a fee) edit the CSS of any theme you use. WordPress.com will not let you upload or manage plugins at all. Some plugins are installed by default (most notably Akismet, for spam blocking, and also plugins supporting Google sitemaps, caching, Carousel slideshows, and some social media buttons), but you can neither uninstall them nor install others. Additional features are available for a fee as well. Furthermore, you can sign up for WordPress.com Enterprise and get access to a range of optional plugins. The current list features more than 60 plugins (WordPress.com Enterprise is Available at http://en.wordpress.com/enterprise/). This chapter will cover creating a blog on WordPress.com, and you can learn about navigating around the WP admin in the next chapter. However, much of what this book covers will be impossible on WordPress.com.

The huge advantage of installing WordPress on another server (which means either a server that belongs to the web host with which you signed up, or a server you set up on your own computer) is that you have control over everything. You can add and edit themes, add and remove plugins, and even edit the WordPress application files yourself if you want (however, don't do that unless you're confident about your WordPress skills). You'll have to keep your own WordPress software up-to-date, but that's relatively simple, and we'll cover it in this chapter. The only disadvantage is that you have to do the installation and maintenance yourself, which, as you'll see, shouldn't be too intimidating. Moreover, some web hosts provide a one-click or easy-to-use installer, which lets you skip over some of the nitty-gritty steps involved in manual installation.

As I said, in this chapter, we'll discuss how to create a new blog on WordPress.com and how to start working with it on a daily basis. However, if you want to accomplish any of the more advanced topics from this book, you will have to install WordPress on your own server as opposed to using WordPress.com.

The following table is a brief overview of the essential differences between using WordPress.com versus installing WordPress on your own server.