I have two questions:
From personal experience, what free blog engine is the best to integrate a blog to an already designed website?
Since many blogs are using their own template tags, I wanted to know if there was an easier way to integrate a blog than having to learn those template tags? If there is not an alternate way of doing so or even a workaround, is there a better way that will allow me to have an head start so it can be done faster?
Yes, other content management systems exist, like Joomla or Drupal.
Wordpress relies on themes to style its sites, which are basically just a collection of CSS and PHP files. So yes, you just need to edit these files to match the styling of your website.
Other popular blogging platforms include hosted software such as Textpattern and Movable Type; and non-hosted blogging platforms like Blogger, TypePad and Tumblr.
Most of them include support for “themes” or “templates” that you can modify or design from scratch to match your website’s look and feel. Here are a few links to documentation on how to do this for Wordpress, Movable Type, Blogger, TypePad and Tumblr.
I'm not sure what your objection to Wordpress template tags is, but in my experience Wordpress is extremely extensible if you have some PHP knowledge and patience. It's also quite well documented. I'm not trying to be a smart alec about it -- but I think anything else you use is likely to be just as much work to dig into and understand.
I think it depends on your need from my experience if you want to just include a blog roll and allow for people to move over to another section of your site that you can do that with any of them and RSS. A little programming or xsd styling and you can include your homepage.
If you want to have more control or display the entire site you could use frames (although I do not encourage it). With a past site I worked on I did the feed route and made sure I could host the wordpress blog on the same hosting/domain. That way the main page is clean and shows more of the business (along with the large RSS feed). Then instead of sending uses to another domain like mysite.wordpress.com I just redirected them to mysite.com/blog. All the traffic stayed on one domain and I could control everything. Including the theme and CSS.
I found that some of the free blogging platforms provide the average person 90% of what they need, I just needed more control and hated having to send users to another domain, appears cheap to me. Good luck.
If you're worried about templates and tags in terms of implementing your own sites design to the blogging system, there are many tools to fit that too!
On WordPress there is a wealth of documentation on how to implement your theme, as well as stripped down themes for you to quickly get started with.
There are similar resources for MovableType, Drupal and TextPattern. Alternatively, if you're that worried about struggling to implement the theme, odds are you could pay for someone else to do it and to a deadline of your choice (given that the html templates are ready).
In addition to this, if you don't mind the paid for option, there are even more choices available. These include:
These apps are great if you don't want to get dirty with tags and just need to get your blog/cms setup fast. I would recommend Perch over the other two, purely for the great support and it's a downloadable (you host it), one-time-fee app.
If it is integration with asp.net subsystem, i will advise you to go with BlogEngine