Hi Scott! Thanks for getting in touch; I am glad you are enjoying the articles and finding them useful. So it sounds like you are getting to grips with the actual website code OK, but are having trouble with the other moving parts around it? I’m not completely surprised — it can be quite confusing when you first start. Let’s go through each of these in turn.
Web servers — that article you’ve found that details setting up your own Apache config is too complex for beginners; I’m thinking of removing it, and redirecting readers to How do you set up a local testing server? - Learn web development | MDN. This shows you how to set up a local HTTP server for setting simple static files.
If you want to test PHP code locally, then I’d recommend using MAMP, which is a package that sets up PHP, MySQL and Apache for you automatically and is really easy to use.
Don’t bother with IIS — Apache is the industry standard.
You don’t need a CDN just for experimentation — this is an advanced tool that you will want to use only when your website starts to get a lot of traffic and you want to think about serving it to your users more efficiently/effectively.
When you want to start sharing experiments publicly, for static examples GitHub is a good option. If you want to share dynamic examples and create your own independent web site, you’ll need hosting and a domain name. See this article for more details on that kind of stuff:
Once you’ve got hosting and a domain name and set it all up, installing Wordpress on your domain is fairly simple. See this guide:
I think that should do you for now. Let me know what other questions you have.