Hey guys!
For the past couple of days I've been trying to replace the USB string communication from my arduino to my laptop with a wireless connection over my wifi using the Ethernet shield. The plan is to have the board and shield plugged into the back of my router. What I currently have happening is a software (bitvoicer, a speech recognition software) is running on my laptop sending string code over USB to the arduino when a sentence is recognized, then the arduino carries out an action according to the code. All I want to do is replace the USB cable with a connection going through my wifi router. Bitvoicer gives the option of connecting to an ip and port for its communication. I believe I need to do this by running a server on the arduino but I just don't know how and after trying to learn from the examples I am just completely lost. Please help! I'm still very new to the arduino and have been pretty much teaching myself, so "spelling out" would be appreciated. 
Thanks guys!
- calm8809