Seeking Expertise

[Hags]

Hi Everybody,

My company is looking to add some features to our stale website in order to, obviously, drive up traffic.
We've been having some issues with our current web designer (a freelancer), so I wanted to get some unbiased opinions on a couple things.

We'd like to add a non-automated news feed type of thing. Ideally, we would like a few of our staff to be able to post links to relevant news stories from around the web throughout the day (we're a science and technology magazine). We'd like this to be noob-accessible, as not everybody has much web know-how.
I guess my question is, can this be done through some sort of web-based login for staff, allowing staff to post the link into a form which is then updated in real time?
The functionality I'm interested in would be similar to that of link posting on facebook, where a photo and some header text woudl be acquired automatically, so that the link posted by staff isn't just a bland chink of text.
If this advanced linking is maybe too advanced for the average web designer, is it possible to create the login and web-based form I mentioned above, and our staff could insert a picture and some text along with the link?

Feel free to ask me for more if you need any supporting info.

Cheers

[LunarMoon]

If I understand your question correctly, it's definitely possible. I suggest that you experiment with a PHP slide show script(http://www.maani.us/slideshow/) while encasing the images within the typical image linking format.

Example:
echo "<a href=\"www.yoursite.com\"><img src=\"/image.jpg\"></a>\n";

You're just going to have to find a web designer with some competence in PHP, Perl, or any other dynamic web development language. HTML won't be sufficient, especially for the login system.