How did you do that cool screenspace halftone shader?

(I'll have to wait to actually play the game until I'm at a windows machine >_>)

Long time lurker, first time poster.

Ask yourself what features you want out of your website. You say you want a blog and a few more features, and mention wordpress. Wordpress is a great platform (for blogs or to expand as a platform for articles), and is written entirely in PHP. It's pretty user-friendly though, and I think Wordpress 3 lets you create non-blog pages with static content from within the control panel, so you don't have to much with PHP.

The downside is that you will have to learn the templating language it uses to customize it. It's not hard for somebody with HTML/CSS experience, but you do need to read up on how it works. There's no way around opening up Eclipse/VIM/TextMate/Notepad++ and hashing a site out yourself if you want it to be good.

For what to put in it? Hmmm, others will have a better idea about it, but game information, screenshots, developer process stuff, and a devblog are what I usually go to indie developer websites to look at.

As for google's App Engine, that's based on Java and I haven't touched it.

Also, do you really need the cloud? It's scalable, yes, but unless you're pushing a ton of bandwidth most shared hosting/virtual hosting providers won't cost as much and will work just fine.

Finally, while it looks like you've got this covered, other people reading might find it useful to invest time into web design. Two of my favorite resources have been Designing for the Web (http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/ - free!) and Web Design for Developers (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/bhgwad/web-design-for-developers - kinda pricey)