One of the first things you should do on a new WordPress install is to update your permalinks, and it’s really not very hard, but one of the things that gives people problems is that their .htaccess file isn’t writable.

If you’re on an Apache host, you most likely have mod rewrite, and you most likely already have an htaccess file, in my experience.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that your htaccess file is writable, and this can be done with your FTP software or your file manager inside your web hosting control.