Debbie
From what you say, html and css are all you need to start. In fact a lot of quite excellent sites use nothing more.
It is best to just prepare a few basic pages, perhaps three to five, and put them up. You could have an entry page that describes your site and purpose, an about page that tells who you are, and a resource page (just ideas—you need to decide what based on what you want).
Skip the "under construction" signs. That just says "Go away" to most people. If what you have is good, it doesn't hurt to be short. You can suggest what you are working on next, but even then don't ever sound like it is is an apology for what you have.
For your information, php is an open source programming language that enables you to do a lot of things that are nice, things like receive information from contact forms and save it in a data base like MySQL. CMS stands for content management system which people who change a lot of their content regularly like to use, but is unnecessary for what you describe. A simple example is like the blog pages where new blogs are added and information is relocated automatically.
My suggestion would be to get started with a few pages and then start improving them by adding information. The longer you are on line the better for search engines, etc. Anyway, there will always be just one more thing to learn!
Most people seem to recommend javascript as the next thing to study so you can do things like a "go back" button as Lisa recommended recently. A survey of web developers found that successful developers much more often learned php before javascript, however. Even a little understanding of php is useful to do things like making "includes" (inserting files, like putting your navigation in a separate file so you can put it on every page and only have to make one addition when you add a new page instead of doing it on every page.)
[Rats! I see Lisa jumped ahead of me again while I was writing. Luci, too. Well I took time to write so I'm going to post anyway even though much is the same. Guess the repetition won't hurt.]
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