In addition to this blog, I’ve started several WordPress blogs for special projects as the WordPress folks have progressed through their versions. This is the first of two parts to give you the idea of how to do it.
This entry will be much shorter than the second because I’m going to recommend you do something very simple: go to wordpress.com and decide if creating a free blog there won’t give you everything you need. In particular, look at the feature list to see if this isn’t sufficient for what you want to do.
Everything you can do there you can do if you have WordPress installed on your site, though some things are easier if you just let wordpress.com handle your blog.
If you want the ultimate control over your WordPress installation you should put it on a website that you manage. You’ll need to do some customization and maybe touch up a little PHP code in the theme, but it gives you the most flexibility. If you start at wordpress.com you can later move your blog content to your own site, so you won’t lose anything to begin with the hosted solution.
Next time I’ll look at handling the code yourself.
I took the middle ground of choosing a website hosting company (Dreamhost — I’m sure there are others) that offers a one-click install of WordPress (also one-click upgrade whenever a new version of WP is released). That way I have more control (including more choice of themes) over my site than at wordpress.com, but I didn’t have to download and install the program itself. I’ve done this for 7 or 8 websites and it’s worked out very well.
@Jean: Very good point, I’ll mention that at the top of the next entry in the series.