Website platform advice

[AlBDamned]

Hi guys,

Complete website noob here again! Further to my URL broker question (I've almost secured the one I want!), thoughts are now shifting to the platform I want to run my site on.

It's an editorial concept, and I'm planning to have multiple authors, video, podcasts, guides, links, affiliates etc.

My big questions are whether I should go with a blogging platform and if so which one, or should I go with regular html templates.

My costs need to be kept minimal, design needs to be easily modified and look good (but not super flash with any flash or stuff like that - the subject matter is techy and creative) uploading and publishing needs to be easy (both for me and additional authors) and it needs to be quite flexible.

At this stage I'm really inclined to go with a blogging platform as it just seems the best way to do everything I want while keeping costs down, plus offering lots of plugins, comment features, easily attached stuff like digg, feedburner, adsense etc etc.

However, I only have a fair amount of experience setting up and maintaining multiple author blogs using Typepad, up to, but not including, advanced templates (I have very little HTML knowledge). Thus the blogs I've been involved with are fairly standard Typepad fare (three column, fixed size banner, regular notes lists, calendar etc).

Wordpress looks great (especially when you look at something like mrogers' latest creation) but I don't know how to use it at the moment and I'm a complete noob when it comes to sorting out hostings, e-mails domain updates etc etc.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I know this is going to be a long-term piece of work.

Cheers!

 

[tutubibi]

It's an editorial concept, and I'm planning to have multiple authors, video, podcasts, guides, links, affiliates etc.

My big questions are whether I should go with a blogging platform and if so which one, or should I go with regular html templates.

Since you need to do some content and user management using some CMS is my recommendation. BTW, CMS stands for "Content Management System", blogs are one "variant" (could not thing of better word) of the CMS.

I personally use Textpattern. It provides easy user management with different permission levels and powerful yet simple article management.

Installation is not that complicated and there is a strong community behind it.

Same applies to Wordpress.

 

[AlBDamned]

Since you need to do some content and user management using some CMS is my recommendation. BTW, CMS stands for "Content Management System", blogs are one "variant" (could not thing of better word) of the CMS.

I personally use Textpattern. It provides easy user management with different permission levels and powerful yet simple article management.

Installation is not that complicated and there is a strong community behind it.

Same applies to Wordpress.

Cheers tutubibi. The various functions on textpattern such as author/contributor privileges look perfect, although their featured examples of designs don't really appeal that much. Are there any really first class examples?

Edit: Your own site looks good, just realised it's linked in your signature

 

[tutubibi]

Textpattern templating mechanism is really simple (but powerful).

I actually took a design from freecsstemplates.org and made it to textpattern template in about hour. You can download it from downloads page on my site (in signature).