Don’t ask me. Ask Matthew Stibbe of the Bad Language blog.
Last week he wrote a wonderful guide on How to get your own domain name, website and email address:
People often ask me to help them create a website. In the past I’ve tended to do all the work for them but this is getting increasingly time-consuming so I’ve put together this DIY guide to:
- Buying your own domain name
- Building a simple WordPress website [or blog]
- Setting up email and web forwarding
My objective is to let people get their own ‘proper’ email and website address without having to pay a lot of money for hosting - just the cost of registering the domain itself.
For further reading he recommends WordPress for Dummies, although you can probably get by with just his article.
Remember that Matthew Stibbe is an expert. If you want advice from someone at the self-taught-the-hard-way end of things, you might ask John of NB Alacrity. He seems to have taken this same route to getting his blog going - including buying the book - so would be a useful second opinion.

I'm a fan of the Thingamablog package - http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/
its free, quite easy to use, and doesn't need any php/sql type server side shenanigans.
Posted by: Tony Blews | Sunday, 15 June 2008 at 02:30 AM
Hi
Very interesting. So when are you going to switch to WordPress? ;-}}}
Cheers
Bruce
Posted by: Bruce Napier | Friday, 13 June 2008 at 12:57 PM
Hi Andrew,
Many thanks for the confidence shown in my blog construction ability and yes if I can help anyone into the wonderful world thats blogging I will.
John
Posted by: John | Friday, 13 June 2008 at 10:07 AM
thanks andrew, i will try his blog.
peter
Posted by: peter | Thursday, 12 June 2008 at 09:33 PM