Integrating website and blog from scratch?

Hitman Actual

Hi, I'm a web "hobbyist" currently designing a fairly basic website, and I also want to integrate a blog in the design. But I'm not sure how to go about this integration. Some questions:

Do any web hosting companies also have blogging applications as part of the hosting package? If so, is the appearance of the blog customisable i.e. can it be styled the same as the web site?

How do stand-alone blogging applications (e.g. TypePad??) work? If I use a stand-alone package, can I use my hosting site to also host the blog?

Thanks.

mneylon

Quite a few hosting companies offer blogging tools preinstalled with their hosting plans.
Wordpress, for example, can be used to run an entire site.
Have a look at:
http://www.webreakthings.com/
http://www.davidsmalley.com/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net

Each uses wordpress to manage their entire site

Hitman Actual

Thanks blacknight. I assume that to run wordpress I must have server-side software running on my machine, or already be signed up with a hosting service?

Edit: Oh yeah, which hosting sites support wordpress?

mneylon

Wordpress requires MySQL and php, which most hosting companies offer.
Some offer wordpress pre-installed *cough* *cough*

steve-hosting36

That's a bad cough you have there Michele

CuLT

Oh dear... you guys have eyes like HAWKS. :O

On the topic at hand, you have no need for MySQL, you can use a flat file system for blogging (ie, it uses text files instead of MySQL) if you don't have the option of using a proper database.
A mate of mine managed to get this running without much trouble.

Starting off with a website and integrating a blog into that is rather more difficult (depending on just how integrated you want it), but not impossible.

topgold

You can run a blog in one place and pull info from it into your website that sits in another place. We do that with the site www.inbite.com where it pulls feeds into its right hand column from news.inbite.com

The site inbite.com is edited with Dreamweaver. Its blog is hosted on Typepad.com.

m_stan

another option is the likes of blogger.com - if you dont have the server side skills or your current host doesn't provide a blog pre-installed.

they have lots of templates already setup, and using their tags you can use your existing website design and layout and integrate into your site very easily, turning features on and off by adding and removing tags.

you give blogger.com your sites ftp details, and everytime you post or edit a blog, blogger.com updates the page via ftp.

posting is done through blogger.com. you can have contributors to your blog and other users of blogger.com can post replies.

their t's&c's state that you must add a button to your site to use it. once you do that it's free.

you can see this in action on my site - www.ragorder.com though I don't allow replies - I'm just using it as an easy way to post new "news" to my site.

pretty basic stuff - good for a beginner.

topgold

You may discover some frustration with Blogger as it has often burped, coughed and refused to update sites that I use as a group blogger.

MartMax

i have posted this abt WordPress and corporate website :

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=284579

easy enuff to install WordPress and run it.
difficult part for me is to be creative to design the site.
other than that, learning a bit of CCS and HTML is more than helpful.

Hitman Actual

All,

Thanks a million for the replies.:)

In the end I went with a hosting site that already has Wordpress available, and "borrowed" the Wordpress CSS file to use as the base for my own homepage HTML. This means that all my content looks consistent.

A quick comment on Wordpress: Excellent blogging software, very simple to use. Even though I've no experience with other bloggin sw to give a fair comparison, I fully recommend it, especially for a newbie.