Charles @ CodeConquest.com

jQuery allows you to do this. There are a few different jQuery plugins available for that. I wouldn't use Flash, because it's falling out of use and will make your site look outdated.

I find that it isn't very exciting - it just doesn't have any zest to it. And it's quite slow to load too - especially the animated feature content.

I'm surprised no one's said this yet, but the big advantage of PHP for simple sites is that you can share elements between pages. So you might have your header HTML code and if you want to change something about it, you'd have to edit each page one by one. PHP allows you to have one single chunk of HTML code which your web pages can all refer to, so if you want to change something you only have to edit it once. Hope this makes sense. I've written a post about this on my blog, I'd link to it but I don't want to get banned by the forum as I've only just joined.

Good to see you're passionate about doing God's work. Have you looked into Invision Power? This forum runs on it, and I'm pretty sure it does chat as well.