I'm a relative newcomer to the world of decent website building. I've been involved computers for a long time but mostly as a consultant dealing with speech recognition.

I just spent the last 2-1/2 days trying to get , first, a MySQL database set up and then installing WordPress on a new website that a painfully slow developer had been unable to complete.

What an education! Thank you folks for having enough detail in your replies to guide me in the right direction. Still don't have WordPress implemented and probably won't until I've dumped my Network Solutions shared hosting and found a local ISP who's hosting setup conforms to the suggested security guidelines that the experts on this forum have outlined.

Thanks again and consider me the newbie who is being educated.