This entry will be fairly high level but is intended to address some of the high level items which must be taken care of in order to get your blog off the ground. We’ll assume for the moment that you are planning to use Wordpress as your blogging software of choice, and that you will be installing and hosting your blog yourself (rather than using the wordpress hosted service). We’ll also assume that you have a domain name either in hand or in mind, but I’ll make a note to address choosing a good domain name in a future post.
Some of the first things we’ll need to consider are:

1. Web Hosting
2. Installing Wordpress
3. Choosing a Theme
4. Installing Plugins

I’ll address each of these items over the next few days:

Web Hosting:

In general, most wordpress blogs will not be very resource intensive and can therefore be hosted on any shared hosting plan.  If you do not have any experience with web hosts, take some time to do a little research and ask friends and colleagues who they use.  There are a number of hosts which are fantastic, and there are also a number which are horrible.  If we assume that your blog is tremendously successful as we all hope they are, then the last thing you want is to have downtime or data loss because you were trying to save a few dollars.  In many cases, you can host your site for about the same cost as a couple cups of coffee at Starbucks and be perfectly ok.

Continued