Hi Sarah,
I checked out Drupal as you suggested and honestly i've got mixed feelings on it. It definitely has some nice features, poles that's something i hadn't even thought of, and it would be perfect for my girlfriend's site, but we're not doing that one anymore. For me though i think i like something i can edit myself, I started out with hand-coding my html way back and maybe i'm just to set in my ways. This doesn't mean that should you take this job that i want you to hand edit, basically as long as i can run the w3c xhtml and css validators on the site and come up cool i don't care how the site was put together.
Dave.