CMS – Custom post types, permalinks and template files

First of all, may I give my compliments to the developers of WordPress. It is an excellent invention.

I originally intended to use WordPress for a blog only, but since installing it I have been very impressed with it and I now plan to use it as a CMS for my whole site.

In a nutshell, my site will have the following content driven pages (I will use WordPress’s ‘page’ functionality for static pages):

News
Services
Blog

I have setup a ‘news’ custom post type, which now has a seperate template and a directory, and I will do the same for ‘services’ when I am happy with everything.

My problem is with the blog. At the moment, my html root is where the blog URLs orignate from, but I would like them to have their own subdirctor, like ‘news’ and ‘services’. I know that I can make a custom ‘blog’ type. If I do this, can I remove the ‘posts’ admin section, for the sake of neatness?

Also, I am using the Simple Custom Post Type Archives plugin to manage the templates for each type, and their permalinks. Is there a way to manualy make an archives sidebar widget, for example, a list of months that have news posts?

Thanks.