[Mike Connor]

Your problem is not inexperience, but lack of a target. Unless you know what you are trying to achieve, then it it is quite impossible to achieve it.

What sort of website do you want? Are you wanting to offer people useful content? A family website? Or are you just playing around in order to learn how things work?

With all due respect to the previous posters, Joomla is not a good software packet for a beginner, and Wordpress is basically a publishing software with the emphasis on Blogging. You CAN use it for other things, but only if you have some idea of what you are doing, and what you actually want to achieve.

Ease of installing and operating these things varies considerably, and there are dozens ( probably actually hundreds if you count them all) of CMS and similar systems which all have various advantages and drawbacks.

They all have the same problem though, that unless you know what you want to do with them, they are largely useless.

If you are merely interested in discovering how these things work, then you have to install them and play around with them. This will however quickly become boring and frustrating unless you have some structure in your operations, and either a specific general target, or a set of targets.

Learning curves for various systems and targets vary a great deal, but without some specific targets you just waste a lot of time in aimless wandering and don't learn much either.

Another problem here, is failure to understand the terminology involved, which causes mistakes and misunderstandings. Many systems install themselves with scripts in some form of default configuration. You don' t actually have to do anything much at all,the script does it for you. You do need to know the basic parameters of the target system, ( The server where you are going to install it), and the parameters required by the software. If you don't understand a particular parameter, then of course you can ask.

Make a basic plan of what you want to do before you start trying any software at all. This also makes it far easier for people with knowledge on the matter to answer your questions without having to write very long explanatory articles about things.