Lady Island, when I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons in 7th grade, I did not ask myself, “Where do I begin to learn the difference between THACO and AC?” I asked myself, how much of my life will I devote to Dungeons & Dragons so that I may become the most excellent Dungeon Master who ever lived? To what stark end will I fling my immortal soul in pursuit of the everlasting game, that last bastion of fantasy to which we cling in the face of modern mundanity? Will I devote countless undergraduate hours to designing worlds with my role-playing kindred into the wee hours of the morning? Will I go to grad school to write my Masters thesis on the now-defunct Dragon Magazine and the powerful influence of role-playing games on the venerable print publishing industry?

WordPress can be within your grasp if you are willing to devote yourself to it fully, in the same way a fresh box of Twinkies beckons to you from a dark corner of your cupboard. Both have the potential to widen your midsection, unless of course you do a lot of cocaine, like I do.

If I were you, Lady Island, I would take it upon myself to have a specific goal in mind. Let’s say we were to create a unicorn website for your glittered-covered colleague, Cat. We would start by creating HTML templates that represent all possible layouts for her unicorn website, such as the landing page, where there are lots of unicorns grazing in a field of daisies, and the inner page, where we depict a single unicorn atop which sits a fair maiden. Then of course there are the other inner pages that are full of LOLcat spam and blinking banner ads. Once we had all of these HTML templates complete, we would be ready to transfer the markup to WordPress.

Of course, knowing HTML & CSS is only 1/2 of the magical, rainbow-colored journey that is constructing http://www.cats-unicorn-happiness.com. You also need to be familiar with basic PHP, which is what WordPress is primarily written in. You would go to WordPress.org—the website that hosts the open source WordPress software package, and download it. (WordPress.com—the commercial website that hosts blogs—is for losers.)

Using WAMP or a similar local development environment, you would set up WordPress on your computer (or if you don’t know what that means, just open a cheap hosting account and do it there). Then you can create a copy of the theme TwentyTen, (found in wp-content/themes/) or a similar theme you like which you can download from anywhere, and begin the arduous process of transferring the markup from your HTML templates to your theme.

Of course like most things in life, this is far more complicated than I’ve made it seem. However, WordPress.org’s “Codex” is an excellent guide for WordPress documentation. I personally prefer Googling anything and everything I don’t know. For example, just last weekend I learned exactly how many seconds it takes to suffocate someone to death with a turkey oven bag. 

Also, let’s not forget the three dashing young fellows upstairs who could help you every step of the way.