Have a plan, not sure what to do

[Phyrefly]

I want to make a website with photos and short journals of my upcoming trip to China this summer.

Here's the base layout of the site. The only resemblance that it will have with the finished product will be the dimensions and placement (hopefully).

Now, I'm pretty comfortable with the header and title sections, I can just make them in PS and Flash right?

The problem is, I will likely have 20+ different visited locations that I want to display, and I want to have a separate page for each of them.

So for each page, the header will stay the same, while the title and content will change.

http://static.flickr.com/42/78994560_0f5c4195a1_o.jpg
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Next, the body.

The content part will basically scroll down until I run out of pictures (bad idea?). The pictures will be clickable and hopefully have a neat CSS frame around it (how do I do this?). Also, each picture will be accompanied by a small box with a description (also CSS?).

My question is: Is there a way to "automate" the process of building each content page? i.e. I only have to update the PICTURES and COMMENTS each time and not touch the code itself + add additional pictures/comments without having to copy and paste stuff all over the place.

I could probably write a program in VB to generate the code for me, but I'm looking for a way or program that won't let me touch code at all. People have suggested PHP and Ruby on Rails, but I'm not sure where to go for tutorials and examples.

http://static.flickr.com/39/78994558_b33f9238c7_o.jpg

Any suggestions? :)

[alvo]

> The content part will basically scroll down until I run out of pictures (bad idea?)

If you hava a lot of pictures, yes. It will create a really slow loading page and some visitors may run into browser memory problems.

You might want to consider using a photo gallery script for building this, using something like http://gallery.menalto.com could easy the process if you build it into the pages.