What's the easiest/best tool for a novice to design a site?

[brucewagner]

If I want to create a website very similar in format to The Huffington Post ( Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post ) -- blog, columns, articles, etc. Being a total web design novice, would it be EASIER, and get a better result, for me to use:

(1) a Wordpress.com blog / theme

(2) a Joomla template (with what plug-ins?)

(3) Other What?

[Toon]

It's a very big site to build with just wordpress, I would say a decent team of developers built that all from scratch

[CVW]

The HP site is driven by Movable Type, an established blog platform. If you want to build a similar multi content site, there are some free Wordpress.com themes with online newspaper layouts. You can also pay a bit for non exclusive use of a better quality theme that suits you.

Joomla is more flexible but takes more learning too.

If you interested in running such a site, ask yourself how much time you actually want to spend learning/building/developing vs. getting your content and brand together.

I know that I will always pay for a good template so I can spend more time on with the content.

[axecity]

I agree with CVW, paying for your website management system will save you alot of time which you can invest in building and improving your content instead.

But, if you have some time and the passion for learning, I would recommend Joomla, powerful and flexible.

There is also the 2 most powerful open source cms's out there: Krang and Bricolage, a lot of great sites are powered by one of those great 2 CMS's.

Best of luck.

[Mute]

You're recommending Joomla? Why not shove a pine cone up his arse right now and get it over with.

Only use Joomla if you're into pain, torture and the likes.
I'd go with a WP theme like the revolution theme packs or something, not expensive, heck you can download them for free off warez boards (which you should not do because that's sort of illegal)

Then there's the painful task of keeping everything up to date and blah blah but i guess with wp you can always site on the site for a couple days and time stamp a bunch of posts that will keep the site nice and fresh for a few weeks.

Like Toon said, it's a big task, so unless you're planning on making it a looooong term project or a full time job i suggest you scale your idea down...a lot :)

Good luck either way bro