What I understand you want is a way to generate pages with a customisable sidebar and main page on your home computer, which can then be uploaded to a static webspace.
You certainly don't need a database for this ($0.02: pg). You don't need to learn a 'web language' such as PHP for it; since you're going to be throwing text into files, C could do it. But web languages weren't designed by fools.
You can build PHP as a CGI executable (which can then be used just like any UNIX CLI app), pipe your source through that, and upload the result. Alternatively, you could set up Apache/PHP on your home machine hosting the pages. Use wget to grab each page into export/, rename all to end in .html (for X in `ls export'; do mv $X ${X%.php}.html; done), then upload to your space.
AFA designing your source goes, I'd suggest something like this:
html.php: <? function htmlopen() { // html, head and body tags; set up for the sidebar content } function htmlsplit() { // close sidebar, open main page } function htmlclose() { // footer, close main page, close html } ?>
mainpage.php: <? include_once('html.php'); htmlopen(); // sidebar content htmlsplit(); // main page content htmlclose(); ?>
That looks fairly simple to me, and it shouldn't be too hard to add extra sections to the layout later on. I learnt PHP from the reference manual, and I knew enough to write that after day one.
Alexis