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Update July 2008: If you like these tutorials and would like to read more like these, except updated for ExpressionEngine 1.6 and with tons more information, tips, tricks and recommendations, check out my new book, Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6. Available either directly from Packtpub.com or from your local online bookstore (such as Amazon), this book uses the same clear, step-by-step approach found in these tutorials and walks you from the basics of installing ExpressionEngine to everything you need to know to have an ExpressionEngine website you can be proud of. (No prior knowledge of ExpressionEngine assumed).
Nice job, Leonard, very helpful!!
I took the plunge and purchased ExpressionEngine without reading much about it in advance.
One question: Given that there are no html pages and everything is dynamic, are search engines like Google able to find and index the blog entries I make?
Posted by JD Lasica (San Francisco Bay Area) on Thursday 29th July 2004
Thanks for the comment, your site looks good. To answer your question, I’ve found Google very good at indexing my site. In my blog I might talk about a shop I went to over the weekend, and pretty soon I’m getting people coming to my website instead of the shop’s site. Google can’t tell the difference between Expression Engine templates and ordinary HTML files.
Posted by Leonard (Madison, USA) on Friday 30th July 2004
Thanks for the tutorial...I was looking for something to get me going. Other forums or tutorials assume you already know how to get started with EE. Your’s doesn’t and began right where I needed it to!
FYI Step 34 has your name hardcoded in it instead of {author} variable. I figured it out but others may be confused at first.
Posted by BH (Sherwood, OR) on Monday 2nd August 2004
Thanks for pointing that out, BH. That’s one of the pitfalls of writing EE tutorials in EE...glad you found the tutorial useful though. Hope it wasn’t too many steps 
Posted by Leonard (Madison, USA) on Monday 2nd August 2004
Just like to add my thanks for doing so much work to make my learning curve experience so much easier.
Posted by Phoebe (Ireland) on Tuesday 12th October 2004
Why thank you Phoebe. I haven’t added anything for quite a while - you’ve inspired me to get back to work :o)
Posted by Leonard (Madison, USA) on Tuesday 19th October 2004
preciate your tutorial.
Posted by Kenn (USA) on Monday 17th January 2005
Just above Step 7 you wrote this;
“Note that although you can rename your index.php file, you cannot remove it altogether. This is the file that can talk to Expression Engine...”
If you have access to .htaccess files you can setup a redirect to index.php and safely remove “index.php” from your paths, although the index.php file must still be on the server.
Read more here: http://www.pmachine.com/forum/threads.php?id=12358_0_19_0_C
Great resource; keep up the good work!
:: andy
Posted by Andy () on Tuesday 1st February 2005
Thanks for this tutorial… I wish that I’d found it the first time I’d tried an EE trial (and got precisely nowhere). Now am trying another EE trial. Meantime, they updated the software!! heh.
So by Step 19, creating a weblog, the new version of EE provides more options (create a new template for this weblog) besides the shortname and Short Name options you discuss in the tutorial. I’ll give it my best shot, but I thought I’d call this to your attention.
Posted by Susan Kitchens (Los Angeles county, California) on Thursday 10th February 2005
Andy: Thanks for tip. I’ve put the link in my note at step 7.
Susan: Thanks also for the tip. As you can probably guess I’m still using an older version (I don’t have broadband yet), though I am looking forward to this photo gallery module. In the meantime I hope the extra options didn’t stump you too much.
Posted by Leonard (Madison, USA) on Friday 11th February 2005
Thanks for your tutorial. It was just what I needed to get me started in EE. Still unsure if I am going to use buy it and use it. I have looked at a lot of open source CMS but most of them seems so steep to learn that it is not worth the effort ..
Posted by fields marshall (Mclean, va) on Sunday 24th July 2005
Getting started in web publishing can be complicated, and EE is no exception. That said, the control it gives you over your website is worth the steep learning curve. Let me know what you decide in the end and why: it’s been a while since I’ve looked at what’s out there.
Posted by Leonard (Madison, USA) on Sunday 14th August 2005
Nice job. As someone else has mentioned this is ideal for the total newbie. Don’t know how many people will find this useful, but one of the reasons I was attracted to EE was the similarity of the basic logic to Filemaker Pro, where data (=weblogs) and layouts (=templates) are also separated.
Posted by John McCreery (Yokohama, JAPAN) on Wednesday 15th March 2006