...no, this is not about zombies(I know, it would be much cooler if it was, but its not).

I've just started coding web site and its going rather roughly. Its my first time doing it since HTML 4 was the new big thing and everyone was using Geocities and Angelfire and Homestead(so back in the late 90's).

Getting into the XHTML groove wasn't too big of an adjustment and even getting the CSS under control wasn't too bad. What's killing me is getting the bloody thing to do everything I want it to.

First:

I built the template in Photoshop and did an ass-ton of work to get it sliced just right in ImageReady and then imported that to Dreamweaver and all was well, until I added content to the slices, the stretching and distortion just ruined the layout completely.

Then:

I went back to the PSD and had Photoshop run the script to convert all of your layers into seperate JPEGs, and grabbed the few I needed to build my background and spliced them together into one JPEG. Setting that as my site background I was able to create the rest of the elements by setting them as cell backgrounds in an overall page table. Inserting a table into each cell I am able to do what I wish in terms of layout for each element.

Next:

I added a few tabbed elements to several elements and began to really visualize the overall sitemap pretty well. But, with two of my ideas I'm running into problems.

The issues:

I have 0(and I mean 0) experience coding elements that will update automatically. Essentially I want it to have a blog element with a feed on the main page that will automatically update with a tagline, author, date, and link to the full blog post where readers can comment and whatnot(your typical bloggy set up). I think one of the main problems with all this is that I'm just not really sure how to start tackling this. I guess a PHP/MySQL or ASP set up will be required? Or is there a way to send an RSS feed from another blog to my site so that I could go with a simple solution like Blogger or something similar?

I need to do some serious research.

Another thing I would really like to attempt to code for myself(as a learning experience) is a forum. I feel that is far beyond my skill at this point in time, so I will probably end up giving up on that and rolling with a precoded alternative. If you have any helpful links for creating this, please let me know.