Blog and CMS software offer users online interfaces that allows them to edit the contents of their web pages without needing to know html. The applications include Blogger, Word Press, Drupal, and an increasing host of other on-line hosted services, tools and programs that offer out of the box installations with user friendly interfaces.

Most of these systems come with some cookie cutter "looks". Your ability to change the appearance depends on your access to the css, and templates.

Some like Word Press are very editable, with multiple “skins” and on-line plug-ins. Others, particularly hosted services, tend to limit you to a few changes of color and the built-in templates.

Word Press has an easy installation, can be hosted within your own site, and can be customized to blend in with existin pages.
Drupal is more complicated, but also more powerful if you are looking for management of large numbers of users.
Joomla is another popular software, which has a built in banner module, built in support for a forum, and some user control.

Most of these are open source, and relatively easy to customize. Depending on your level of comfort with setting up php pages / mysql databases, you can do it yourself.

Or for a fairly reasonable price have someone install and edit the template so that it has individualized style and colors. Most template skins include contact information for the designer. Once the basic template is in place, the page page can be changed with no more difficulty than you experience using a word editor.

Some systems focus on creating blogs, some allow other categories of content. The "right" one to choose depends on what level of complexity you need, how many users, your purpose, and what types of plug ins you want to use.

The applications linked from this page are developed with three different programs, Word Press, drupal and an old install of Google's Blogger, although blogger no longer offers the FTP option that originally let me edit the pages via FTP on my own domain

The various sample installations contain simple demo content, so that some of the differences between the programs are more obvious. If you are interested in developing a site that uses CMS, check over the samples and drop us a line.