Your presence online is becoming more and more important. It's how people see you, their first impression of you or your business, and how they keep in touch with what's happening in your life. Of course, there's a lot of social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, but any data you put on those systems don't belong to you, they are owned by the platform. Instead, having your own blog is still the best way to go, to ensure that you can have the design you want, and text you write will remain in your control. WordPress hosting is the most popular way to have your own web site.

There's many ways to get your web site setup online, but the easiest way is to use an existing engine and hosting solution. There's various competing solutions like TypePad and Blogger, but WordPress is by far the most popular option, because it's cheap, very customizable, and comes with a lot of plugins. The first thing you need to decide is whether you're going to host your own site, or use WordPress hosting. By hosting your own site, you will need a hosting provider, typically they offer. The advantage there is that you never have to pay for WordPress, but you do need to know how to navigate around a web host. Otherwise, you can go to wordpress.com and use their hosting. In this case, it will be free for a basic blog, but any time you want an extra feature such as your own domain name or the ability to add ads, then you need to pay for premium features.

Either way you choose to go, after the initial process, everything else remains the same. To design your blog, you must log in to your administration panel, and select a template. WordPress comes with hundreds of templates, and you can even download or buy more. It's possible to get exactly the type of template you want, and even edit it yourself if you know CSS and HTML. Then, once you have the layout you want, you can configure a few settings such as the title of your site, which users can post to it, and how comments are handled. After that, you can start posting. Most people use WordPress for blogging, so by default you simply post one article after the next, and they appear on your blog. If you want a more personalized site however you can modify a lot of it by creating static pages, adding widgets to link to other services such as your Twitter feed or Google Maps, and much more. There are thousands of plugins available and most things can be done with WordPress.

Overall, WordPress is a great choice for most sites out there. The pricing structure is also great, with a free option for self hosting, and a list of premium features for hosted blogs. It's the most used platform online, and new plugins and templates are released all the time, which means you don't need any coding skills to have a great looking site, all you need to do is use the admin panel to customize the site as you want.

Peter is an Internet Marketing Consultant who writes about WordPress hosting. He contributes with articles about Domain Names and blog hosting for Dorian's blog.