I am going to design a page where I am going to be writing articles for one section of the site. I want to know how I might go about doing it so on the main page I can have little tables with the 5 or 10 "Most Recent Articles" , "Most Popular Articles", and "Highest Rated Articles" without having to manually go through and change the most recent, find the highest rated and change them, etc.

Anyone that can point me in the right direction?

Put them in a database and learn a server-side programming language such as PHP or ASP to retrieve them. You can then sort them via SQL queries in any manner you wish automagically.

Database...using something like excel?

Anybody have any good tutorial pages on doing the things I am looking for?

Excel *can* technically be used to create the database layout, but you don't want to.

The best idea for you daholl is to look up some basic php tutorials. Since you are a beginner you will need to spend a while on those picking up the basic knowledge needed to move onto database integration.

The type of tutorial you are looking for can be found here:
http://www.pixel2life.com/tutorials/...l_integration/

Thanks for the quick replies, anyone else with tutorials or tips that might be of use I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
Daholl