If your golden project is a great blog, you should start with Wordpress. Tech crunch make 200.000$ a month and uses wordpress. Why to start your golden project with Wordpress? 1-) There are dozens of cool and proffessional themes. Also you can edit them from style.css file easily. 2-) You can create search engine friendly urls. This is very important. 3-) With simple plugins, you can back up your blog easily. 4-) You can add avatars, polls, forums, calendars and thousands of things from wordpress free plugin directory. 5-) Interface of wordpress is easier and user friendly than the others. 6-) Proffessional Web Bloggers use Wordpress. 7-) You can add image thumbnails at the bottom of the posts easily. This is very important for " images.google.com" traffic and "CTR". Adding new features with plugins has never been easy like that. 9-) WP also includes adsense plugins. For example; "adman". With this plugin, you can add ads into the posts.
I like the look of WordPress sites, and have been close to moving my Blogger site to a hosted site and start using wordpress, but I'm no HTML whiz...I know enough to get by, but not enough to bang things out with speed and accuracy. Will I be in trouble if I switch my blog over to WordPress?
Change host, you're paying them money after all. Don't worry you sjould be fine with wordpress, a few basics always helps but nothing advanced is needed. You should be able to import all your posts from blogger into wordpress automatically. Look for a host with cpanel/fantastico, it makes it really easy to set up your blog. I personally like a small orange as a starter (only $25 a year)
WordPress is the way to go. There are many great features and it's very user friendly once you start learning it.