I would have to say that Wordpress is still the best solution for you. In reference to your questions:

Here’s what I need:

* Three distinct, simple Web pages of static material that I can still easily edit. In wordpress admin, go to

If you look on my blog at the top horizontal navigational bar, the “Contact” and the “Spurgeon’” links are done via the page formats.

* A simple blog page that would NOT be the home/index page. I installed my blog in a subdirectory under the root directory. My main page is http://availablelightonline.com but the blog is at http://availablelightonline.com/blog/

* Some ability to add a cash register module in the future.

http://www.instinct.co.nz/?p=16

You should consider popping this question into your LinkedIN Q&A box, and see what your network has to say.

Rich.
BlogRodent

I am a web designer; however, I am afraid I still do it the old fashion way, from scratch via Dreamweaver and hand coding. I am not up on Joomla, so I can’t give you any specific help with that. A few suggestions, would Go Daddy’s WebSite Tonight and Quick Blog help you? https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/hosting_build_website.asp?se=%2B&ci=265
Seems like they also have a predefined templates that seem aimed at the person who might want to tackle a web site on their own.

Lastly, I don’t know what your ultimate plans are for your shopping cart, but I have found http://www.mals-e.com/ Mals Ecom to be the best free shopping cart on the web. However either you or someone with some experience may need to help code your items, but the code is very simple html, that from what I can see, you seem to have some level of understanding. I have found http://www.propay.com/ to be a great payment processor for web orders.

Mals Ecom does have a method to employ payment gateways right from the shopping cart. I have always ran it with my business’s where Mals Ecom sent me the shopping cart order, I logon to Mals secure server to get payment (credit card numbers) , and then I manually processed via a service like Propay. This works well if your orders are something you can manage on your own. You would not want to use this method if you were getting dozens of orders a day. But if your business did grow to that level, you would just need to make a change within your exsisting Mals shopping cart and set up a automatic payment gateway, instead of manual.

Let me know if I can help you out in any way.

{{{Candleman}}}
swr44@verizon.net

“Three distinct, simple Web pages of static material that I can still easily edit.”

I’m a little confused if you want three distinct pages defined by “design” or distinct by the content? For design you would have to have three different headers that you include into the index’s, each header would link to seperate style sheets. For content, Wordpress can easily create, edit and format the content on the pages you add.

“Some ability to add a cash register module in the future.”

I’m also confused with what you mean by a “Cash register” module? If you want a “shopping cart” feature there is a link below for a
WordPress Module.

http://www.instinct.co.nz/?p=16

If you want the ability to allow users to “register”, create a link to ../wp-login.php. You can style this page any way you want with CSS and can also add other features etc with further plugins/modules.

If you are just looking for a completely new CMS with more corporate type functionality, I suggest PostNuke, it’s open source and a LOT of highly respectable companies use it, like T-Mobile and numerous Poker sites.

Let me know if this helps at all, and visit my site

Lord Bless!