All you need is love, love, love

…to have a good life maybe, but it still ain’t enough to build a website. You don’t need to know PHP, MySQL for sure. Those are handled by WordPress. What helps nevertheless is a basic understanding of HTML. Theoretically you can do without but in reality you will find it quite useful to know what a link is and that you can make text look big if you put it between <h1> and </h1>. The good news here is that you can acquire that knowledge as you go. What I find indispensable though is access to Google. Google, Google, Google, that’s where I go every time I get stuck. If you can’t find an answer, rephrase your question. You can be sure the same problem was encountered before and the answer is out there.

DreamWeaver or FrontPage?

Up to you. Actually you don’t need any web authoring tools. You can use them though, if you like. They help a little in the customization process, but actually WordPress has a built in template editor and a graphical user interface with spell checker to create content. Good enough for me. Actually that is one of the big advantages of using WordPress: no need for ‘web authoring tools’ - all you need to do is half an hour of template customization work and then we can fully focus on content. If you want to build a successful website, it’s all about content. So they say.

Get an FTP client

You can actually live without them but they do make life easier during the initial set-up process. What are FTP clients for? They are transport programs. With an FTP client you can upload files from your hard disk to your host and download files from your host to your hard disk. Did you ask, what is a host? Well, think of it as the hard disk of the service provider, who makes your website available to the world. WordPress recommends free programs for each operating system and has instructions on how to set them up.