Customizing CSS requires an upgrade that costs $14.95 / yr. http://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-css/
WordPress is web software that is downloaded to your computer and can be used to create websites and blogs.
The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available.
There are hundreds of thousands of web hosts out there, the vast majority of which meet the WordPress minimum requirements.See our website for suggestions (but HM covers it).
If you don’t need the flexibility of a full web host, you may consider getting a free blog on WordPress.com.
To run WordPress your host just needs a couple of things:
That's really it. We recommend Apache or Nginx as the most robust and featureful server for running WordPress, but any server that supports PHP and MySQL will do. That said, we can't test every possible environment and each of the hosts on our hosting page supports the above and more with no problems. (see HM features; they offer a WordPress button in the cpanel)
Not required, but recommended for better security
Hosting is more secure when PHP applications, like WordPress, are run using your account’s username instead of the server’s default shared username. The most common way nowadays for hosting companies to do this is using suPHP. Just ask your potential host if they run suPHP or something similar.A Little History
WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPLv2 (or later). It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.
For a bit more about WordPress' history check out the WordPress Wikipedia page or this page on our own Codex.
WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.
Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it.
