A fundamental feature of a website is the software to run it on. One could have code each page in HTML... but that's a bit limiting.

The software to choose depends on what the intended features of the website will be, so give it a good think through.

Google is you friend, and attempting to compare all the software products out there would be tough, but they can be broken down, roughly, into Blogging software and CMSs (Content Management Systems).

Blogging...

Blogging software can be self-installed on your own server, or and account could be run from a central server (like XXX.blogger.com). Wikipedia (via Answers.com) has a good summary of blogging software and there is a good blog software comparison chart. The two most popular types of blogs, that are self installed, appear to be MovableType and Wordpress.

A note of importance. Shared blog hosting sometimes gets blocked for those in Mainland China. For much of 2006, those with accounts on blogster.com, as well as others including shared blog hosting from Chinese companies within Mainland China, were blocked and many couldn't access their blogs. While there is a little more administration and cost from hosting one's own blog, there appears to be less chance of being blocked.

The list of blocked free hosts is growing, and at the moment includes BlogSpot, LiveJournal and Wordpress.com.

Content Management Systems (CMSs)

CMS is a term to describe the majority of software the web runs on. They were the preserve of expensive proprietary software until recently, now there are many Open Source CMSs with lots of features.

The intention of a CMS is to make information storage and retrieval easy. They're not always web-related. Here is a list of common CMSs - there are a lot. This site runs on Drupal; a completely unscientific observation suggests that Drupal, Joomla/Mambo, MD Pro and Wikimedia seem to be the most common CMSs available. All work in slightly different ways, but start with a framework which can be extended by modules (blogging software blurs the lines with more and more modules available for them).

Recommended is a Review of Open Source CMSs, covering many in good qualitative detail. Whatever CMS you choose, look in detail at the features. In choosing Drupal for this site, categorisation and flexible user permissions were deemed most important, therefore Drupal won.