Blogging question

[sundials]

I have never set up a blogging site before but would like to for one of the sites I manage. What I was hoping for was a template that would allow for a main blog but also space for comments. What I am trying to avoid is an entire list of comments clogging up the front page (maybe just a link to the comments?) and leaving that for the main person.

My first inclination was to simply use a yahoo group that way newsletters and the like would be emailed to the entire list. The owner has 700 emails he sends out at the beginning of the week and can only do 50 at a time and many times gets cut off and told to wait. My issue with the group setting though is that info will get lost among the comments.

Any recommendations on software, how I should begin, etc...? Please remember this is a first for me so I may ask to have some of the language dumbed down! :D

Thanks guys! You have been soooo much help already!

[sundials]

Oh and I'm not sure if this matters or not, but my editing program is FrontPage 02.

THX!!

[pghcollectibles]

i heard you can get up to 500 if you contact support with a good reason.

[Falcon1986]

1. For blogging software I would recommend Wordpress (http://wordpress.org). It is light-weight and easy to learn due to its intuitive interface. Although it does not have all the bells and whistles as many other mature CMSes (content management systems), you can find a lot of plugins that can get virtually anything done.

2. As for sending newsletter e-mail, I can recall a plugin called MailPress that is supposed to be able to do that through Wordpress. I personally do not use it; instead I have FeedBurner handling my RSS feeds and they offer the ability to send e-mail updates to my subscribers. You can easily turn this into "newsletter publisher (http://nettuts.com/misc/build-a-wordburner-email-newsletter-manager-using-wordpress-and-feedburner/)", which leaves your Wordpress installation free for other tasks instead of tying up the maximum amount of e-mails being sent by your account.

3. I used to use the webmail service provided by my Hostmonster account, but changed over to Google Apps (https://www.google.com/a/). The advantages of using Google Apps as the mail handler are that you take load off of your Hostmonster website when processing mail, if your site experiences downtime then that does not affect your mail, and you get the reliability and robust backend of Google to handle all of your domain's e-mail. Furthermore, you get lots of storage space (equivalent to Gmail) and a maximum number of sent e-mails of 500 per day per e-mail account (if I recall correctly).