Website management for group seminar I am planning to start running a group seminar, with talks scheduled regularly, at my institute.

The seminars might be of interest for people in neighbouring areas, too, so I would like to have an "archive" website with all the abstracts and a calendar of the upcoming seminars, and of course I'd like to send out e-mail notifications (and optionally also a RSS feed/calendar widget for the more tech-savvy users).

Is there any software or service that can help me automate some of this setup? I thought of opening a blog-type site on some hosting site, probably either Wordpress or github/Jekyll.

Do you have experience working with similar tools? Do you think they would really save me some time? Or maybe is it better if I just add a page to my academic website, send the mails manually and forget about the other fancy addons?
A site hosted by your university, on your university website, will probably be a better choice than an externally hosted website. This is because you'll be able to immediately identify the seminar series with your university, and that will help to improve its branding. (It also looks a lot more professional!)

As for software, there are a lot of different options. I can't really offer a lot of guidance on this, as we have staff whose job it is to maintain our websites. Which one you pick will depend a lot upon the kinds of features you want, and how steep a learning curve you're willing to negotiate.