Here's the deal:

I'm an amateur web designer, and I've taught myself lots of random stuff over the years — mostly, I can do HTML and CSS, though I've been experimenting with PHP as of late.

The director of a local youth theater really wants a website he can easily update with news like auditions, theater camps, whatever, but the theater can't afford to pay someone to set up a site or anything.

I told him I'd be willing to set one up, and now I'm trying to decide the best way to go about this. SETTING up the site isn't a problem, but it needs to be made in a way where everything can easily be edited by the theater director (and he's not very good with computers).

I had considered just setting up a Wordpress blog, since that's super-easy to update, but I'd have to pay extra if I wanted to do any custom CSS or fun stuff.

I'd also looked into CutePHP, which has a CuteNews item, but I've never known anyone who's used it. Has anyone here used it? Would a non-computer-literate person be able to use it to update a site?

Also, does anyone else have any other ideas I'm not thinking of?

Thanks!

Just go with WP. It'd be easy to set up as long as you give the theater director VERY SPECIFIC instructions on use. Use categories extensively and walk him through their use.

you can use blogger.com. It has the option to host it on your own server and you can edit the template to look however you want using html and CSS. Plus you can just log into blogger.com to make updates. You could also use Joomla as it is free and extremely customizable and every page can be updated and added on the fly however it does have a little bit of a learning curve to learn how to use it.

can i know for that system, how much u will gain? $$$

go go go... joomla
try zymic.com for host provider...

My best two guesses are WP or a CMS that is easy to edit. Joomla does work but I have seen some newbies get tricked by what goes where. As long as you can walk your friend through it either should be okay, he/she just needs to be willing to learn.