average joe: I know this sounds like a huge deal, but have you tried using a blog platform for your website? Even though you might now want to hold an actual blog, this piece of software is always getting improvement by developers and you can actually do quite a bit without knowing much...
Wordpress is what I used for my blog:
brem experience [fr]
It's minimalist, but there are plenty of examples where people made awesome websites with either Wordpress or another CMS (Content Management System).