I have a small celebrity fansite that I designed in HTML (using frames, the horror) years ago. Lately I've noticed the traffic picking up a little, so I want to redesign the site. While I have completed one small project in CSS, it would be very difficult and time-consuming to do it for my celebrity fansite because of my lack of experience. I want to try to use a CMS solution instead, but there are so many choices and many of them seem to do much more than what I want for my simple site.

Basically, the site is about 6-7 static pages (Bio, Movies, Quotes, etc) and a medium sized gallery (not a real gallery; just my <img src> tags doing all the work). I'm hoping for a CMS that will integrate well with Coppermine, the only image gallery software I'm familiar with on the administrative side. I'd also like to have Google Ads on the page.

To explain it as simply as possible, I want a CMS that will allow me to:

-Have a website banner at the top-middle of the page
-Link buttons for site navigation on the left
-Google ads on the right
-Page content in the middle

Ideally, I'd like the Coppermine gallery to not be "visible;" in other words, I don't want the "Images" link to take a user to a page with a totally different layout. I want the thumbnails of the gallery to show up in page content area, with the framing elements staying the same. For example, http://natalieportman.com has managed to do this with it's images (although I believe they are using Gallery, not Coppermine). In fact, natalieportman.com is a very good example of how I want the layout of my site to be (I think they are using a custom-made CMS, though).

The only other requirement I need to have is the ability to play with the look of the site. I notice that most CMS solutions have a variety of themes, but sometimes the themes don't match the colors you want, so I want to be able to configure them myself.

Can anyone give me some suggestions? If possible, please link to some examples of how a particular CMS accomplishes the look I'm going for.

Any help would be appreciated.

One thing I should add, which might be unrelated: It seems that most people get to my site by doing a Google Images search. Whichever CMS solution is best for me should allow for Google to be able to index the photos in my gallery.

Your best bet would be wordpress (wordpress.com). It does everything you are asking to do and much more. The script is very easy to understand and the template section is a breeze to edit. They have HUGE community to get help from and all kinds of different scripts. You can't go wrong with them. Good luck!