About a week ago I took the plunge and decided to update my ageing website. The old site was ASP based. So, what should I use to produce my update? Notepad seemed a bit too basic and my design skills are, at best, limited so what should I use?

I had heard of wordpress but knew nothing about it and a quick search soon revealed lots of hits for wordpress, along with other systems, but wordpress seemed to get good reviews, is free and is open source – so WordPress it was.

Now, I know next to nothing of PHP, perl, MySQL… And, although installation turned out to be simple, working out where best to put it seemed, initially, very difficult. A quick e-mail to my ISP answered my questions and less than 3hrs later I had the fist inklings of a new website up and running.

I’m no HTML guru, but I do understand some of the basics, but what I found hardest was getting to grips with the terminology and lack of HTML. Eventually I found suitable templates for my envisioned design and after plenty of trial and error, actaully very little error but lot’s of trial I got my first WordPress site ready to release – and boy am I happy with it!

So, it was a 5 minute install, once I worked out where to put it. I then had to move it about, which turned out to be easy and I also decided to re-name the MySQL DB which proved simple enough to do.

I’m a very long way off from being a wordpress expert and I now need to get into the world of PHP and properly start to understand the CSS world, but after less than a week of WordPress I do feel I have a reasonable grounding and a good place to start from.

Oh, and a place for a blog!!