Buy hosting package from hostgator. You'll be given 2 name servers, then go to namecheap.com and buy a domain, they'll give you an option to set the name servers while your buying the name.

Go back to your hostgator cpanel and set up a Wordpress installation using fantastico. You want to start out using Wordpress nothing else, don't use anyone's proprietary website builder software, build your site using wp.
GL

derosnec , thanks for your posts! whats your blog url?

This is good advice if you want to learn Wordpress. There's a relatively small learning curve, but you will have hundreds of thousands of free themes to play with and plugins to help you automate different tasks.

Installing WordPress through Cpanel and their Fantastico software is also very easy. I even have that set up on my own dedicated server and love it.

My only warning with WordPress is to go easy on the plugins to start. A lot of users will use way too many and cause problems when they conflict. As you learn, you will be able to add them one at a time and make sure everything is working properly.

Speaking of Wordpress Plugins, I know a few other people here are using Wordpress for various reasons. Please share your list of favorite plug ins. Here are some of mine

AfterRead - Adds Next Post, Previous Post listings to each page, but you can set it to do within individual categories, instead of just chronological like Wordpress forces

BulletProofSecurity - Good Security Plug in, but not newbie friendly. Must know a bit about htaccess

ContactForm7 - Simplest Contact Form ever.
EasyPrivacyPolicy - Simplest Privacy Policy ever.

Epik GeoIP - Paid Plugin, but it is great for geo targeting individual banners or entire paragraphs.

Google Analytics for Wordpress - Easy Analytics Install
Google XML Sitemaps - Easy XML Sitemap

Pretty Link Pro/Lite- Great for hiding affiliate links and using a redirect scheme to manage them in one place. I purchased the pro version, but it's not really necessary honestly.

Redirection - Great for handling 301 redirects. Allows regex expressions as well.

Search & Replace - Will search the entire WordPress database for a string and replace it with another. Can limit to just posts, comments, or even plugin settings, etc. Very useful and powerful, but not for newbies.

Ultimate TinyMCE - I don't normally like the visual editor modifiers, but this one is great. Allows you to enable/disable a ton of different features such as quick YouTube posts, Font Style and Size changing (something sorely lacking in the WP editor) and other awesome things.

W3 Total Cache - Good plug in to optimize your site speed. Allows multiple different types of caching and CDN integration. Slightly complicated for new users though.

WP-DBManager - Just set this up a few months ago. It automatically backs up, repairs, and optimizes your WordPress database. I set mine on a 3-day interval and have it sent to a gmail account that I set up purely for this sites back ups.

Maybe we should just have our own WordPress thread. Possibly an SEO thread as well, but at this point everything keeps going in this mega-thread and it may be hard to separate.

Nice post derosnec!

thanks for the plug-in list trikkur. I found the afterread one helpful.

Grunching a few days late, but there are a few on OReilly's Safariweb that I've thumbed through, you can go and look there.

I don't know how nitty gritty they get as far as "make sure your tab bar is 48px high" or whatever, my advice is go to dribbble.com, search the hell out of the terms ios, ui, interface, iphone. Get ideas there, pull the screenshots into Photoshop and zoom in and see what they're doing as far as making nice looking buttons/textures or whatever.

I've actually been doing something like this for the last day or two for an app interface I'm working on. Oh also if you wanna do things a bit easier check out these pre-built ui kits:

http://designmodo.com/pandora

http://designmodo.com/futuricopro/

http://www.awwwards.com/30-free-ui-kits.html (I haven't looked through these yet just saw them linked in a tweet today)

I think that designmodo site has a few other kits too.

Holy crap, I should have read down 3 more posts before replying, amazing long post Derosnec, damn!

Seems like it's a bit too easy to get a website filtered out for keywords at the moment likely because of recent changes:
http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-...e-seo-results/

A later post in that thread detailing the destruction of a fairly large site is quite interesting as well:

http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-..._20#entry33039

If you already know the basics of account optimisation they dont have much to teach you.

On the other hand it doesn't take long and if you tell them "I already know all that" then they skip forward.

Very interesting

Also seeing big changes in Google SERPs today, seems like they are implementing the over optimization update and it's going to be a bit bumpy along the way.

wow what an interesting read

I like Add This for social media stuff.

I was reading about his WMT message the other day on another site. Now I see why he got that message. This has really shown the downside of the path Google is taking. I wonder if they will change course.

big congrats to Gullanian for making the front page of HN for their kickstarter fundraise.

Oh no a lot of confusion about that! It's a guest blog post from one of our long term users

Can you summarize?

I think it's very unlikely Google changes paths (in terms of filtering/penalizing over optimization in some manner). Things like exact match domains, side wide 301s and anchor text are easy targets for abuse. Google may have gone a bit too far recently but this is pretty common for updates IME and certainly doesn't mean they are going to change direction.

Yeah but what about negative seo? They surely have to do away with penalties for bad links, right?

There are lots of people out there being penalized for low quality links and if you wanted you can blast your competitors or pay someone on fiverr to do it.

They're surely not going to continue on this path or its going to be a disaster, unless your selling a service which offers 10k link blast in which case you'll get rich.

edit:
fwiw I've never bought any links but it seems to be that everyone is complaining over the last few weeks about getting messages from google about having bad links and needing to clean them up to get serps back.

Right no doubt it went too far to one extreme but you're not going to see an about face. The only thing negative SEO really affects is standard links/anchor text the other stuff is rightly getting hit hard. As for anchor text / quantity of links the easy solutions is to heavily devalue sites that don't have a social metrics like RSS feeds, links and proximity to trusted hubs, social signals like Twitter and Facebook. It's fairly clear cut that is the future it's just we don't know the specifics of what that looks like.

In the end there really is no reason why directories, profile links, unshared social bookmarking links, low quality articles should pass any rank at all it's just not clear how to get from A to B just yet. If you can take anything away from this past week is that it's definitely coming probably in the not too distant future.

This is also the exact same thing that happened with Panda, the change was a bit too aggressive and weeks later most genuine sites got rolled back to their pre-Panda levels.

This is what I was referring to Cwar. The penalties from links since you cannot control who links to your site. I would assume they would just not count them like in the past or even do something else (I am not sure what). By giving out a penalty it really can damage smaller, lesser known sites.

random question:

If you were tasked to create a dynamic website (with backend access to a database) that needed to be highly elastic in scalability (potential spikes of 100K simultaneous users), what platform (hosting,language,service) would you use to construct the site?

I've heard ASP.net/SQL Server doesn't scale well (ref CodingHorror). I don't feel qualified to tell you what is good for that sorry, but ASP.net probably not.

For potential spikes of 100k users you're probably looking more at a hardware problem over a software one anyway.