Background

I’m about to build a website for a deceased artist (painter) – my dad.
The target group is art historians as well as the broad public with an interest in art.
The site visitor will find everything about the artists life and work, other artistically related painters, art politics from that time and a lot more...
Due to the artist being very productive (beside painting he wrote a lot) there will be a lot of data.
So I want the site to have a search function connected to a database.
Aside from that, the site will not include any other sort of interaction – apart from the mail service of course.

I don’t have any skills or experiences in building databases. Nor do I have many skills using CMS (like Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, etc.).
HTML and CSS is what I manage quite ok.

The Question:

What will be the best – and easiest - way to build the website – considering my needs:

  1. A CMS based site (I’m thinking of Drupal) where I have everything fixed, such as databases and modules for search functions (the backside is the uncertainty regarding updates for modules and the time to learn about using and modifying the CMS to my needs and design preferences) ?

  2. Or marking up the website myself and using some kind of “ready to use solution” for a search function with a database?


I would very much like the latter alternative, if there exists some “ready to use solution” for a search function with a database.
I’ll be happy to learn about it if anybody could tell me.
That will maybe also be a faster way to build the site and it will not be so “heavy” compared with a CMS based one, I think.
But there are probably many other aspects on this.

I appreciate all ideas, tips and suggestions!