Building a Website - Need a Little Help.

[The_Grudge]

I have a few friends that sit on the board of directors for a local charity. This charity is new to my city, but very established world wide. Since this charity is coming to my city, my "friends" asked me if I could build a website for them. All they want at this point in time is a splash screen that basically says "we're coming to cityx very soon, click here to donate". They volunteered me because I'm a computer programmer, it didn't seem to matter that I'm not a web designer

Anyway, I want to set them up with this welcome page. My question is, what language would you guys/gals recommend? I'm not totally out of my league here. Like I said, I'm a programmer and I have built a few websites using raw HTML (am I dating myself or what?...actually, I'm 29). I'm sure I'll catch on pretty fast to whichever language I choose. I'm asking this question to see which language is more robust and will lend itself to expanding the site more in the future.

I'm thinking PHP is the way to go but I really haven't settled yet.

Thoughts, suggestions, advice? I've also heard of something called "Ruby on Rails" although that looks to be more for the application-based websites.