Before you get all excited about ASP or PHP pages, find out whether the University IT guys will let you have access to those things, and whether you can have access to a database server. There are some wonderful things you can do with scripting languages and a database, but when you don't control your server environment, you may not get to play with any of it.
If you have any hope of actually learning anything by doing this, consider the venerable Notepad.exe as your HTML editor. It won't do squat for you, which means you'll have to learn how to do everything "by hand." That is a Good Thing. The world is full of FrontPage and DreamWeaver types who haven't the slightest idea how to fix anything that goes wrong.
Now for the reality shower: the reason your old site never got updated, and the reason the Rats' site never got updated either, is that many people who get stuck with your job think that the task is to "create a web site." It's not. The task is to figure out a way to hook other people into helping with the content. If it's "all you, all the time," it won't be 90 days before your site starts going stale, and a year from now the next guy will be saying, "Our old site was never updated."
So consider one of the many canned "blogware" apps. "Moveable Type" is probably the best-of-breed right now, but Zope, Geeklog, and many others are just fine. What these things let you do is appoint "deputy admins" with their own logins who can update different sections of the content themselves. They can post articles, pictures, etc. without knowing one word of HTML. If it all has to go through you for coding into HTML, you'll be sorry, so seriously consider one of these things. You will have to give up some flexibility in terms of look-and-feel, but in return you get an easy way to spread the real workload (which is always keeping the content updated after the site is built).
Moveable Type will run on a Windows server, but you'll need the IT guys' help because Moveable Type is one of those "wonderful things you can do with a scripting language (cgi in the case of MoveType) and a database." This kind of approval is generally easier to get for a canned app that is already running in lots of places. That's a much lower level of "scare factor" than giving you permission to write and debug your own scripts on their server.
Good luck whichever way you choose to go.