Newbee is lost, need some direction

Ok, I'm new at this. I can put together a simple HTML site but not much more. I've created and trying to manage a site for my car club. On the site I have an "event pics" page. On this page it has a list of events. Click on the name of the event and it takes you to a page with a bunch of thumbnails on it [not a "Gallery" page], click on one of the images, and it takes you to another page to view the image bigger. I created each page in html and did this for about two years. Over the last two years I haven't added anything because it's a PITA. In comes Gallery, pretty damn cool, it'll automate everything I used to do by hand. So I go to my host provider [GoDaddy] and they install the Gallery 2.2. So now I got this cool new software but I don't know how to customize it to integrate it with the rest of my site. I've seen samples where folks make it their own, but I have no idea where to start. So here I am.

First, here is my current "event pics" page

http://www.cjvws.com/eventpics.html

and here is my new Gallery page

http://www.cjvws.com/gallery

Ideally I would like a main page similar to my current "event pics" page, with a list of album links that link to the individual event albums. I would like to view these albums within an environment similar to the rest of the site [header on top, nav links to the left]. I'm not married to the tilted images with white boarders. I'm cool with just doing the basic views of the uploaded images.

I believe this can be done easily, but it seems to beyond my skill set. I've been reading different posts on this site all day, and haven't been able to figure it out. I appreciate any advice and or guidance.

-jeffrey