What kind of skills do I need to set up a wordpress site

It really depends on what you want to do. If you install it, and you find a theme you like and install it via Appearance >> Add New, install some plugins via Pluigns >> Add New, add some pages, most people would be fine doing that given sufficient patience and time.

If you start wanting to, say, code your own theme, or do something totally out of the box, you might need to do some more learning. But for a basic WordPress site, you should do just great. Knowing some HTML is helpful as well. XHTML is eXtensibleHTML, so if you know HTML you pretty much know XHTML. Some key differences are having to include alt text and dimensions for images, using <strong> instead of <b> and <em> instead of <i>. Very minor, though.

Just in case it isn’t obvious, use of an FTP client of your choice is not essential, but pretty close. In theory, you could use the File Manager of most web hosts, typically in cPanel, but everyone I know finds themselves eventually using an FTP client. FileZilla is the favourite of the crowd I move with.

Over time, if you get very involved in WordPress as a platform for your web sites, you’ll probably slowly gain some MySQL database and php programming knowledge.

For example, even some types of small changes to a Theme generally requires modifying some php and/or some HTML css.

Most database usage will be through phpMyAdmin and cPanel.

Thanks you two.