Whilst this is a good thing, you will also know that often, making changes to your site, adding plugins, updating to the latest release, changing themes etc. can sometimes have unpredictable and occasionally undesirable results.

When working with a live site, you do have the option of using something like the maintenance plugin that can display a screen to your visitors advising them that the site is temporarily unavailable, but if you are making some major changes the potential downtime for your blog makes things a little more difficult.

This is where having a working installation of WordPress (or indeed any other popular script such as Joomla, drupal, PHPBB) on a local server on your own computer comes into its own.

In this video you will learn how to install a local server to your own machine using XAMPP and then how to upload a fully functional WordPress blog to that server so that you can change test and tweak as much as you like, whenever you like, without having to worry about your live website(s). (The video also takes you through the process of installing a forum using MyBB in its second section).

It really can’t be stressed how valuable a facility this is, nor how it can rapidly accelerate your learning on all aspects of running and maintaining your website(s).  Following the steps outlined in this video takes very little time and the software is all free – within an hour or two, depending on how quickly you can follow the instructions, you can soon be playing in your own server environment without fear of breaking your database tables or live sites in any way.

We will shortly be posting another video that expands on this idea and shows you exactly how to copy an existing WordPress blog to your local server so that you can work on your real sites locally, safe in the knowledge that you will not be risking any of your valuable data and can test all potential changes before going live with them on the web.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmkrJG4vhRI