WordPress is the most popular blogging engine on earth.

It is a powerful and extremely flexible open-source platform and is the basis of thousands of blogs. But WordPress was developed for Linux, and uses the PHP language and the MySQL database, which aren’t native to Windows. So some people mistakenly believe WordPress cannot run on Windows or that getting it to run is difficult.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Microsoft actually provides an convenient and easy-to-understand installation package for WordPress which installs a PHP interpreter and the MySQL database package right along with it. Best of all, it’s all free!

To install WordPress on either a Windows desktop version or Windows Server, you must use the Windows Platform Installer, found here: microsoft.com/web/wordpress/. The installation is surprisingly easy. Just follow the simple instructions and you will be blogging like a pro before you know it.