Quote Originally Posted by Dogmama View Post
Irulan, thanks, that is what I needed to know. I bought a domain name at Godaddy (The Well-Mannered Dog)and will be talking to my web host service after the new year. I don't want ads - with my luck there would be Petsmart ads on my page.

One thing I'm not clear on - can I download wordpress, start to work on it and then upload it to my web hosting service?
Shootingstar is right in that you have to make sure your host is set up for WP.

As for working ahead, I'm not sure. It does help to be organized ahead of time. You can have a lot of your text ready, your images ready to go, an organizational structure in mind. It doesn't have to be complicated, but you should have a plan.

One thing that is cool about Wordpress is that there is a lot of built in options. For example, there is a "contact" form that is easy to set up so people can contact you by email. Social media integration is done with a click of the button.

This link will get you started. http://wordpress.org/
One thing to do first is to surf the themes. These are predesigned layouts that determine the look of your site. You can change colors, fonts, images and placement. There are lots an lots of them, generally sorted out by category such as e-tail site, blog, media rich and so on. http://wordpress.org/themes/

To give you an idea, when I was doing my mom's blog, I looked at three themes Chateau, Tiny Forge andTwentyTwelve

I ended up chosing the Chateau theme to play with, and this is what I did with it
http://hadditt.com/