How to add a simple noticeboard to my site? Database Vs MM Contibute

I'm a web designer/dreamweaver user who's familiar with HTML, DHTML CSS and javascript but I know very little about databases and CMSs.

I am building a relatively small website which mostly has static pages that will rarely need updating.

However I want to add a simple Noticeboard/News feature to a website. This would take the form of a "Recent news" section section on the homepage which displays the date, title and a few lines of text of say the 3 most recent news items. Clicking on one of these items will take the viewer to a page containing the full article. There will also be a "news" contents page which contains the date, title and a few lines of text of all the news articles again with links to the full article.

My question is what's the best way to do this? Do I need to go to the trouble of getting a database and CMS built and have that integrated into my html pages or should I use MM Contribute instead.?

I understand that when using Contribute there would be 3 phases to adding a news item - update the recent news on the homepage, update the news section contents and create a new page with the new article. Cheap and straightforward if a little long winded.

With a database and CMS I know that all 3 things would be taken care of in one go by adding a new entry to the database.

What I dont know is -

a) Is this something I could easily build myself in a couple of days (as yet knowing nothing about PHP/mySQL) - are there any tutorials, off the shelf "kits" or freely available sources of code for with instructions for doing this?

b) If not, how much should I expect to pay someone to get this done? I assume that this kind of database and CMSs is about as simple as they come and I don't want to be ripped off as money is very tight at the moment

c) If I did get someone else to build a database and CMS how would we work together? Could I send designs (dreamweaver) for the homepage, news contents and a news article template to the programmer and them simply add the code to make it all work or is it more complicated than that?

Thanks for reading this - any thoughts , comments, experiences you have on this would be appreciated.

I think a database and news script would be more what you're looking for.
I've never used it, but as far as I could tell, MM Contribute is so people who can't even figure out a WYSIWYG editor can update a page. If you are doing the updates, you could do the same thing in DW just as easy.
There are a ton of PHP/MySQL news scripts out there. Some of them are probably easy enough to configure for a newb. Just check out the demos and/or download and try a few to find one you like.
Try starting here:
http://php.resourceindex.com/Comple...s/News_Posting/