I have always been a driven and creative person, I just can’t put my finger on whether it is drive based on ambition or a hope of just getting by.

Around me everyday are living examples of people who have tirelessly worked at what  they love to do with little or no gain, then they finally realise their aspirations by taking a risk that most of us wouldn’t be brave enough to follow.  This made me wonder about my own circumstances and ask myself  the question, “Am I living or just surviving?”

Now don’t misunderstand me; I have a family who I adore, I have a job which provides enough for us to enjoy life and in-turn makes me feel blessed.  However, this is the surviving part of life, and for all the beauty it brings to my existence it also brings a certain level of fear and restrain. For example, I don’t feel able to take certain career risks for fear of being unable to provide for my family, this is obviously a massive responsibility and society expects you to do this over all other more personal ambitions; yet I see successful creative risk takers around me all the time, and they are not just surviving but living as well!

These creative risk takers come from all walks of life.  Eddie Izzard and Tim Minchin have taken comedy in new directions, Prodigy and Nirvana created whole new genres of music and designers such as Elliot Jay Stocks have taken the leap to freelance design and simply didn’t look back.

What I have discovered from watching the living creative thinkers out there is, do what you love, do it well, live for the moment and the rest will simply follow.

Is it my own fear that restrains me or the relentless expectations of the society that we live in, I truly don’t know, I just know I need to survive.  Maybe the new year and new challenges will give me the push I need to get to the next level of achievement, and maybe I will let go of my fear and begin to start living the rest of my life…

This is abit of a quick post but without knowing this I wouldn’t have been able to create my first WordPress site so successfully.  If you have never used WordPress before and you are fairly new to CSS then creating a site by this method can be difficult, hopefully this post will help.

Setting up you first WordPress site can an interesting and challenging experience, however, it may not be as difficult as you first might think.  Here are my tips to creating your first successful WordPress site.

Setup your site locally first

My advice to anyone new to wordpress would be to setup your site on your own PC and then transfer it to a web server once you are happy with it. Wamp server gives you the ability to setup a virtual web server with full database access and PHP admin support on your own  machine making the development easy and best of all free.

Install WordPress and start your theme

Once your local server is ready install the latest version of WordPress to the server (Full installation instructions are available from wordpress.org site), the default theme is fairly boring so you can either download a pre-designed theme or create your own, I would recommend the later with clean semantic themes available from Elliot Jay Stocks with Starkers and Sandox created by Scott Allan Wallick and Andy Skelton which give you an excellent blank canvas to create your own theme from.

Once your site is ready upload it to the web

When you are ready to upload your site to an online space I would recommend the excellent post from webdesignerwall.com on  Exporting and Importing WordPress, this should be all you need to get your site live.

Without Sandox I wouldn’t have been able to create this site, I hope some of these links will help you in your journey to create your first WordPress site