New Event & Blogging Site

Hi Everyone. This is my first post and I hope that I sound intelligible enough to communicate what I’m looking for. For a couple of years now I have been trying to develop a website for my local city. It is a college town with metropolitan status and there is a lot of potential for traffic on this site.

I want to make the main component of the website an event list of some sort that lists weekly the drink specials at certain bars and also i can enter in events and bands that are happening at the venues.

This would be like an entertainment guide for my city that everyone could access online. I tried joomla and felt it wasn’t the right fit. I have been researching a lot and think that I can do this with WordPress.

NOW THEN,

I need help. I can’t seem to decide on a theme.. and I’m not sure if I should just type up manually the events each week in some sort of php form or if there is a plug-in that will do that.

I also have assigned blogger that will try to drive traffic to the site. They will blog on categories such as local music reviews, drinking games, etc. and I want each blog to have a tab on the front page with a featured article coming up.

I am willing to invest some money and a LOT of time. I just need to be pointed in the right direction. My coding skills are very weak but I have been using photoshop for 10+ years.

Any help is graciously appreciated.

Thanks,

Alex Abell
http://www.abellmultimedia.com

p.s. – I’m looking for some sort of FLASHY (but not too busy) theme. The name of my town is Valdosta, GA. I am naming the site the nickname that residents (jokingly) give it ValVegas so I was thinking something neon or just bright colors. VEGAS will also double for Valdosta’s Electronic Guide for After-hours Socializing