Can I do this with Wordpress?

As you might have seen from a few other threads I've posted on this forum, I'm in the process of seting up a webzine. So far, I've been investigating two mains programs for creating and publishing the site: RapidWeaver and Wordpress.

Right now I'm playing around with Wordpress, and I've been messing around with various free magazine-style theme. I realise it's more likely premium themes will cater better to my needs, but I just want to get to grips with the basics before I go spending money.

Anyway, I suppose I'm wondering if Wordpress is the right tool for what I'm doing. This is how I'd like the site to be structured:

- We're thinking of dividing the site into five main sections: Features (longer in-depth articles on current affairs), blogs, art & photography, and a literary section for short stories and poetry. I'd like each of these to have its own block or area on the homepage showing the latest content.

Also, I'd ideally like each of these sections to correspond to a menu heading, so that as well as having a block on the homepage that shows the very latest content in a section, you can click on to the 'Blogs' or 'Features' page in the menu and go to a new page showing all the content in that section. It'd also be great if, as well as organising content based on the different sections (Features, blogs...) outlined above, we could also organise it by more detailed themes (such as the traditional catergories in a blog...politics, music, sport, theatre etc..) so readers can find older content related to specific themes easily.

I'd like to be able to rotate what the most prominent article on the homepage is, whether it's a feature article or a blog post or whatever. And we have a graphic designer working on a logo and heading that we'd like to use.

Now here's the kicker: I don't any CSS or any other type of coding, and neither does anyone else involved. And considering the time we need to put into other work to get this off the ground by January, we don't really have time to learn.

So I suppose I'm looking for a Wordpress theme with the flexibility to do all this, but in quite a straightforward and simple way. I'm willing to pay for one of course, but I just want to make sure I'm barking up the right tree by experimenting with Wordpress. Am I?

Of course, if anyone has any suggestions for particular themes, that would be wonderful. In terms of design, I'm looking for something quite simple - black text, white background, minimalist but stylish - that will allow me to upload my own header image.


Thanks for reading,

SG

Thanks Jim - reading my post again, rotation was probably a confusing word to use. All I meant that I'd like to be able to manually select the main article on the homepage, regardless of whether it's a feature article, blog post etc..

Fairly simple I would imagine and I'm not sure why I mentioned it.

One thing I would like to have the option of doing - but which isn't essential - is to distinguish between different blogs. So if we have four bloggers, there would be way of distinguishing between them visually - perhaps through a slight change in graphics somewhere, with each given a separate title.

The most important thing really though is the organisation of content into different sections - say 'Features', 'Blogs' and 'Culture - with each of these having an individual panel on the homepage, and as separate page, accessed through the main menu, listing the latest content in that section.

I don't want the site to look too busy (like say nytimes.com or guardian.co.uk), because we won't have the quantity of content to justify that. But somewhere between that and a traditional blog sounds about right.

Thanks very much for taking the time to read and respond. We're based in Dublin, Ireland and we want to do something a bit similar to this site actually:

http://voiceofsandiego.org/

...which as far as I understand, is a site set up by a group young journalists, totally outside the mainstream media, that has managed to break quite a few big stories, or so I've read. It's the kind of thing that makes me really excited about the future of the media. All of us involved have experience in journalism but none in building websites, and we want to do something similar to Voice of San Diego, but with emphasis on culture, art, design and humour too.

Thanks for that ezkimo. I guess it may turn out to be the case the coding isn't avoidable. It's sort of hard to know how exactly to get the right template, seeing as I can't play around with it before buying.

Thanks - if anyone has any themes or plug-ins that they'd like to suggest, please do. We need all the help we can get, as we really want to launch this thing by the end of January at the latest.

Is the general consensus that we'll need to do a bit of coding then? If that's the case I should probably try and track down a friend who can do a bit.