The first building block for your website is the virtual real estate, i.e., your domain name and web hosting.

The second building block is WordPress itself. Think of WordPress as the foundation of your website. It’s what gives your building support and shape.

WordPress is the program that tells your website what to show your visitors. It’s the foundation you build on to create an attractive, highly functional website.

WordPress started out as a platform for bloggers, but it’s evolved into a whole lot more than that. (If you’re curious to know more, click here to delve into more WordPress history and information.

WordPress is a free download from WordPress.org.

Notice I said WordPress.org above. There’s also WordPress.com. At the dot com site, they’ll do everything for you except write your content. It’s a great place to host a site if you want an online journal or something for your family and friends to enjoy.

It’s not the place for a business website, though. For that you want what we call self-hosted WordPress, which comes from the dot org site. That’s what we’re talking about here at WordPress Building Blocks.

Here’s a screen shot of a traditional blog.

Now take a look at some websites built with WordPress. They don’t look anything like the basic blog, but they’re all built with WordPress.

Notice how different all these sites look. None of them looks like the blog up above, but every single one of them is built on a WordPress foundation.

Just to recap:

• Building Block 1 is your virtual real estate, otherwise known as your domain and hosting.
• Building Block 2 is WordPress itself, the foundation of everything else you’re going to build on your site.

If you’re ready, move along to Building Block 3.