I am currently making up a site for a friend, and have the basic site done in VSD. It's for an equestrian centre, who have an active events program. She needs to be able to update stuff, like news, and to post competitor times for competitions. She would prefer not to spend ages learning a new software, so would a blog be a solution? I have no idea about blogs, but can you customise them to look like a site? Would she be able to post links to pdf documents on a blog? I'm sure lots of people create websites for people who want to have some input to them, but don't have the time to learn a new software (or even have an ounce of techyness in them!). Help please?

Although I've never used the program, I am to understand that CC's blogging software is pretty good and easy to edit with as from what I've read (hopefully someone will correct me if I'm wrong lol) you can edit a text file rather than having to learn a program. It didn't sound like any code would need to be edited to update the blog, but I'm not 100% sure on it.

I would suggest you take it for a trial run since all of CC's software has a nice trial period and see if it does what you need. Let us know if you need any assistance with it also as there are quite a few users of the program on the forums here.\

As for making a blogging site, I've worked with Wordpress and I can tell you that learning how to create new blogs and such is harder than it sounds like the blogging software would be. It's not super intuitive if you don't have web experience already. It's not horrible, just not real easy and to answer your other question, yes you could set that up like a real website rather than just a blog, but that would take a bit of time to do too as it's a lot of monkeying around with the themes and the files for the themes editing to get what you want and very limited in the end on what you can do because the themes are setup for you in specific layouts. Some can be altered quite a bit, but most can only be altered to a degree which is mostly a small amount of layout and colors and images etc. That is providing you don't have knowledge of editing themes for Wordpress that is

hi, this has some easy to use scripts, which requires a MySql database but easy to set up and use.


http://www.phpjabbers.com/products.php

example
http://bruzer.coffeecup.com/

I think I may be getting in over my head here!!

I have downloaded the trial of CC blogger, but I can't see how my friend would input any info to it? It looks like I have to update the blog in CC Blogger, upload the files, then add it to my VSD site, and then publish the VSD site. Am I doing it wrong then?

don't mind the first half!
http://www.myofficialnewbie.com/tutorials/FlashBlogger.html

Janet, I think this has been brought up in a different forum, but the S-Drive/Stream would be the easiest way to do this. It's made to be easily inserted into a VSD site, and allows the user to make changes, posts, or add pictures from any computer or smart phone. They access it with a user name/password, so you don't need to supply them with additional software and training or deal with FTP issues.

I'll put a link to my Stream if you promise not to laugh at me . This is just a test page, and I haven't done anything except plop it on the page as is. It wont run off the bottom of the page when it's finished.

http://callendaledesigns.com/stream

The Stream can be customized to match your site. Change the colors, size, whatever you want. After it's in place, the user logs in and will see a control panel with common word processing functions. Just like what you see here in the forum, but with more options.

Maybe someone else would post a link to their Stream so you could see a better example?

Wow! That's it, just what I need, I need to find out more about Stream.

Thanks, I was just starting to get a headache linking about all this!

Just looked at the info on it, it seems perfect, but I am still working on a test site on an unrelated sub-domain, the S drive site says that I can't change the web address later, how can I run this in a test site?

I can see it's getting to you!

The S-Drive and Stream are still in beta testing, so even more features and functions will be added before the final release. It just keeps getting better. Just click the S-Drive link above the forums to find out how to take it for a test drive.

I added an extra page on my site that isn't linked to or from any of the other pages so I'd have a place to try it out.

Janet, The CC blogger software is very easy to use. You can add links and images to your blog so if you have doc's to share it will work. It's flash as far as the visual part that is inserted into your webpage but it still has the text file that people can subscribe to with the RSS button on their web browser.
If you want a browser to detect your your blog when users land on it you can go to the page that you pasted the blogger flash html and click "Edit" then "Edit Header". In the box paste the code below.

Change the My Blog and the mydomain.com/myblog.txt to fit your needs.

Edit
I walked away for a few minutes and the conversation went some where else. I would agree with paintbrush if you want to use stream it's an awesome application.

For a client - I think the Stream will be easier. No need to purchase/install the Flash Blogger. No need for Janet to be on call while the client learns to use the software and how to FTP her posts. The client can post photos and info from anywhere with a simple log-in (as well as make any changes required) without having to touch the website or worry about uploading files to the right location. And - since it's not a Flash program, it will show up on all devices.