I was just suggesting a CMS, it doesn't have to be joomla, you could use
Moodle, phpWebsite, or any other system that you want.  They're all
skinnable as well so you can make the site look like whatever you want.

I understand scalability issues but I doubt the site even gets enough hits
to really make a dent on the server's CPU.  It doesn't really matter what
language you use, there's apache modules for php, perl, and python so they
all run at about the same speed, if the site gets really popular then you
would need to set up load balancing.

Any way, I'm not a professional designer I was just trying to help.