How can I...

[adkatie]

...add a dynamic press release and industry news area to my site design?

I am a graphic designer who is recently adding "web designer" to my skill set. I have been tasked with, and mostly completed redesigning my company's web site. Here is a better explanation of what I want to do:
Two other people in my organization will be contributing content for our site on a regular basis, and they are NOT web designers. They will need to post press releases pertaining to our organization, and post industry news related articles.
I have designed areas on the home page where the top 5 or so most recent stories/press releases will appear, with just a title and "read more" link to a page with the full article.

At the moment, we are doing this manually because I don't know how to have it be more automated. For example, they write their article or press release, create a page for it, it then gets added to the full list of articles or press releases, and finally, the "top 5" blocks on the home page dynamically update.
All of this would happen without need for my help.

I have created the site with Dreamweaver CS5 and we have Contribute for the purpose of other people in the company updating their own respective areas ongoing.

But this one simple task perplexes me! I know lots of sites do it, I just haven't had any luck so far in searching for the technique.

Today we launched the brand new site I redesigned which you can view -HERE-.

If anyone could point me in the right direction in how I can do the above tasks, I'd be ever so grateful! And please explain fully, as I am still learning this web development stuff.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Mug]

First off I would try and sort out some of the errors with the site (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=h...(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0). When I build a site I will run it through a validator every 1-2 hours to make sure I am on the right track. If something comes up you don't quite get then you can just google the issue and usually something will come up to help. I would also suggest reducing the file size of the photographs. On the FTA membership page you have a couple of images which are over 100k in size and they are only 340px x 266px. Reducing the quality to 60%, when selecting the "save for web" option, reduces the file size to around 25k but without compromising the image. This will help your page load quicker and will take a bit of strain off your server.

For ease of use for the other team members and for ease of installation I would suggest having a look at Wordpress. Every thing you require can be built relatively quickly with WP and there are a ton of tutorials.

 

[adkatie]

Thanks so much!

Thanks, Mug!

I will look into working out those errors. That is very helpful information! Also, thanks for the advice on WordPress. I'm definitely looking into that as my solution.