Dynamic Website? Need suggestions!

I am looking to make a site for a friend who runs a movie company. Ive done a little html in the past but one of my other friends is going to take care of that since hes into PhotoShop and stuff like that. Anyway since i have never designed anything for the web i am a bit confused as to how to go about doing things. Heres some questions that come to mind. Any feedback would be great. :)

• 1.) Whats the best way to go about mixing html with backends?
  
  Should i have him design the page where a portion of it is set aside for an appplet? Then depending on what the user selects in a JList like title, category ect ect, query the db for the info? So in effect we could just have only one web page with a dynamic applet instead of serving up multiple pages.

Well only one question for now. :D

I think driving the whole page by applet is a bad idea. Applets take rather long to load, and the page is completely inaccessible should you, for some reason, not have Java.

Better to use JSP and multiple pages.

Using an applet just sounded like a good idea. Instead of serving up multiple pages i thought i could just have a page which contains an applet which would display the information depending on what was selected.

As I said, I don't consider a page that depends completely on Applets or Flash or any other plugin good. There must be at least an alternative version in pure HTML.

Just curious about the use of JSP. For a web page where the content is not produced dynamically(you just click on a link say Horror Movies and then get a whole list of movies with images ect ect..) JSP shouldnt be needed then right? If i have to use JSP's to make a site how is everything normally tied togther?

Huh?

If your environment is set up correctly, normal html files and jsps can simply coexist. Call one, it's served. Call the other, it's processed.

Yeah see i know nothing about JSP's. I used to do a little html but thats about the extent of it. My friend just ripped me a JSP book from bit torrent since hes got the cable connection so ill have to give that a look. My dial up just wouldn't cut it. :lol:

In their most basic form, JSPs are PHP pages with Java syntax. But JSP has various other stuff (beans, taglibs) that allow you to better separate functionality from separation, which is a must for everything but really small pages.

Ah ok after reading this J2EE book i am begining to get a better understanding of JPS's. I like the fact that the JSP tags are embeded in the html as opposed to embedding the html directly in the programming language code. Only thing is if you are comming from a non-page author background it's kind of a switch. :(

If your friend is using Photoshop, I strongly suggest that he does NOT use the built in cut out to HTML feature, as it does not produce valid markup.

Yeah to be honest i really don't know what he wants to do. I might even design the site myself using straight html and just place more emphasis on the inner-workings rather than the design of the site since my html skills are a bit limited. Here is some of his work www.bmxbandits.com which was done in PS and yes that is me on the front page. :D