Plugging a blog into the body of a site -- should it be so hard?

I'm getting a site going and I want very simple things. The point of the site is to host videos -- I would like each video to have stats on how many times it's been viewed, as well as comment features like standard blogs.

A scratch version of my site is here: http://personalwebs.oakland.edu/~jwwhite/30mom/main.htm

I've been trying to adapt PIVOT, but the PHP is beyond me. I guess I'm looking for a template. I want the main page (the link above) and the "vids" page to behave like a blog, in the middle. I want a forum page...I'll likely use PHPbb or PHPNuke unless someone has a more elegant, simple idea.

The site as it's setup now doens't use CSS, but I'm working on that too. I've found some CSS templates that mostly suit me, I just need a top banner, left-hand side links, and the middle body (where the blog will send).

So, simply stated, my questions are:

Can anyone advise me on how to plug in a blog to my site, although without all of the usual blog bells and whistles?

How does this work with CSS?

Any advice/help, sarcastic or sincere, would be much appreciated.

You could always hack a blogger template and make it easy on yourself :P www.blogger.com/

I still have a bunch of blogs on my website, and it was a great excersize manipulating the code through trail and error --read, elite css coding.