WordPress is my choice of blogging platform for several reasons. It’s easy to setup, easy to maintain, the plugins and expansion capabilities are almost endless, and it can handle a large amount of traffic. That pretty much covers about everything you need in a blogging platform right there out of the box.
The first thing you will need is an account with a web-host. I recommend godaddy or 1and1 for web hosting. I use 1and1 but I have recently started using godaddy and I think I like them better. Either way it doesn’t really matter as long as you get a basic web hosting package. Packages can run from as little as $5 per month and on up. The cheaper packages are whats called shared hosting, which means that your website will be shared on a server with several other different websites. The price is amazing but later on down the road, once your blog gets bigger you might want to move to a private server so you can further increase you page speed and handle more traffic.
The private server is the way to go for a blog, but I would not recommend it for the newbie staring out into the blogging frontier. Private servers can cost you a lot of money and if it takes your blog years to get any serious traffic then you might have spent thousands of dollars for no reason at all. If you have made blogs before and know what to expect, and feel that the private server is what you want then I recommend going ahead and getting one.
When you register your account with a web hosting company they are going to want you to also register a domain name. Even if they don’t ask you up front you will need to choose a domain before you can install WordPress and start blogging. I could go on all day about picking the right domain name but I have that listed in another guide. Read it here.
After you have secured the domain name and the hosting provider it is time to install WordPress on your website. Some hosting providers have an auto-install feature. If that is the case you may be able to skip these next steps and setup WordPress in a few clicks.
I could write a long drawn out guide for installing WordPress, buy my best suggestion would be to hop on over to WordPress.com Installation Guide and read the step by step they have provided for the installation. Once you get WordPress installed and can login to your admin page come back here and we can work through some details of your next few steps. It is very important that you read my guides before you get started blogging. Some of my tips can save you hundreds of hours and lots of mistakes, and you want to take advantage of them from day one.