Anything about the web is not easy. A few years ago I was walking students through the steps of creating a S3 bucket so that they could stash web files and see them live...here&#x27;s the web tutorial I created for them:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smalldatajournalism.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;one-offs&#x2F;using-amazon-s3&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smalldatajournalism.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;one-offs&#x2F;using-a...</a><p>Note that I didn&#x27;t go over things like, &quot;What is S3&quot;, or &quot;What is AWS&quot;...or even web domain hosting, or even &quot;What is HTML&quot;. It simply involved making a quickie HTML file and uploading it to S3 via the AWS web panel, and then visiting the URL...being able to put something on the web of their complete creation (rather than through a CMS) is pretty revelatory for newbies.<p>So where did people get stuck? Some people didn&#x27;t have an Amazon account yet. Easy enough, they created one. But then one student had a hell of a time just getting into AWS. Hearing her describe her problems, I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I watched as she tried to log in...well, you know how Amazon, like most modern services, allow you to use email addresses as your username? That greatly simplifies things, as most of us would agree...but for some novices, they don&#x27;t realize that logging in on `my.personal.account@gmail.com` on Amazon (nevermind AWS) is not the same as doing it for `my.personal.account@gmail.com` on _GMail_.<p>How does such a person survive on the modern Web, where emails are generally used as the user ID? I&#x27;m guessing they just have been blithely reusing GMail credentials for all their other accounts which they use their GMail address as their user ID.<p>This doesn&#x27;t have much to directly do with the complexity of creating a site via a CMS, perhaps....except that if you&#x27;re a veteran web developer, it&#x27;s very very difficult to imagine what is confusing to a novice...We think that Wordpress is easy compared to say, Drupal...sure...but that&#x27;s not the level of thinking that novices work at. For them, it&#x27;s more, &quot;Where do I write my program that makes the website?&quot;, and all of the fallacies and ambiguities that question entails.<p>That said...not sure why the author has to care about anything beyond how to set up things for Wordpress.org. If we&#x27;re talking newbies here, let them use the vanilla Wordpress.org, and then let them worry about self-hosting later.