Here’s what I needed to start with:-

Domain name and hosting. Well, that’s easy, hosting is with my usual host icdsoft.com (great value, all the features and space small organisations might need at a great price), who can also register a domain name for you.  For country level domain names (eg myname.com.au), I prefer netregistry.com.au, who offer good prices and are very professional.

WordPress. Probably the quickest way to get a website going and growing is with blogging software, so that’s the way I’m going.  Downloaded wordpress and unzipped it, then followed the 5 minute installation instructions.  And it worked!

Education. There is a lot of great introductory (and advanced) help on wordpress.  Really helpful is First Steps with WordPress, which I will recommend to all future clients.

Initial set up. Did some very minimal set up, to fix up the date and time and to remove the standard links and add a few of my own.  I want to get rid of Comments as a general rule.  Go into Options…Discussion… and set the default to “Comments off”.  Also uncheck the Website checking option for comments which makes posting take longer.  In Options “Permalinks” you can change the Permalink format to something more meaningful than the default. /%category%/%postname%/ looks good.

Look and Feel. Wanted to explore how to adapt the look and feel, so downloaded a few alternative themes and swapped to one of these, just for experience.

Create some words. This is my first real blog entry, to give me some content to view and play with.

Time spent: 2-3 hours