Do you know of an example that you could show us as far as sites that work this way?  For the most part I would say do the web site designed in Frontpage or use a content management system.  With Frontpage, you edit the pages and design all together and go through that one program.  With a CMS, you would have the design (or template), then you would have the backend (which you wouldn't have to worry much about) then you have the content, which is often really easy to edit, update, ect via the CMS's admin interface.  With some template editing, I could see your web site easily being controlled by something simple like WordPress.  For an example of a kind of personal page (no blog even really in there) totally controlled by WordPress check out my own page.

You might try downloading a few themes and have a look around inside of them.  There is a learning curve, but I could see your layout there being wrapped around WordPress probably pretty easily.  Here are some of Lunarpages free themes as a reference:

http://blog.lunarpages.com/free-wordpress-themes/

Then to setup something other than the blog as the front page, from within WordPress you would just need to go to Options > Reading and setup a static page (also managed from within WordPress) as the default thing people see when pulling up your domain.