How much HTML do you know? From the sounds of it you might need to do a few tutorials on that if you don't know how to create a page with contents being a certain width, either with divs or tables.
Putting php variables into a page isn't any problem without resorting to templating. You can either just echo the values out in the appropriate places, or resort to a really simple string replace scheme, for example doing a foreach on an associative array replacing a 'tag' in a template such as {name} that matches the the key of the array with that value.
I've just started using Smarty myself even though I've already written my own templating classes, and it's almost exactly the same, has the benefit of compiling the templates, and does stuff I would have had to code anyway, so for once I've actually decided not to invent a better wheel and use a proven product.
But go to Smarty later - do some basic discovery first.
