I'm interested in attaching some sort of blog or news box to the main page of my site, for posting about updates, commentary on individual pages, etc. While this seems to be a fairly common feature of webcomic sites, all the ones I've seen have been in php, which I have virtually no knowledge of. I have considered using a wordpress site, which has this built in, but it's awfully restrictive about what the rest of the page looks like. Are there any other canned scripts available for this? Or would I be better off putting the blog on a separate page altogether?(seems to be another common strategy)
You could in fact do this without something like PHP, but it'd be kind of a pain in the ass. That being, you'd need to use Javascript, AJAX, and XML parsing. Which honestly, you'd be better off going with the PHP.
I have no knowledge of php to speak of; I just utilize it. I use a highly modded version of CuteNews ('cause as it is it has no official support and is otherwise a big security risk... should anyone ever want to hack you |D) for my websites' blogs. If all my comic websites ran on Wordpress rather than just their archives that would be doable, too, but they're completely built by me except for the archives.
You don't actually have to know PHP to use a lot of PHP stuff out there. Just need to be able to follow instructions.
I used a highly modified B2Evolution for my latest site layout. I found it significantly easier to modify than WP. You just copy themes/skins/custom and change the index.main.php and css file. Everything else can be done in the admin section.
SomeryC is also easy to modify, and better if you want one post (or less) per comic on the front page, with comments underneath.
Wordpress + Comicpress is the standard if you want a stand alone blog AND a comic (with a post for the comic, and comments for both the comic/post and main blog) on the front page. It can run a little heavy, though.
Wordpress + Webcomic + Inkblot is newer and supposedly better, but I found it harder to figure out.
It'll take some tweaking but it's doable in Wordpress. I think this is what you're looking for: http://www.corvidworks.com/articles/wordpress-content-on-other-pages
The blog can be set up on yoursite.com/blog while the most recent post(s) go to yoursite.com's index page.
Ah, that looks perfect. Thanks.