I apologize for the terribly basic question but I'm not even a particularly adept web dev. I've read that Drupal is great if you know exactly what you want to do (then the API is handy) but I don't even know what I need yet. That is what I am hoping to gain from this discussion.

I want a main content page which has a fancy content slider (using jQuery or something) which will be a selector for showing some basic information on these 2 or 3 subjects. I'm stuck on where I should be writing this mix of markup. In the template? Create "content" through a content type? Since there's a fair share of CSS and markup required to do this, I don't know if I can do that through the "basic page" content type that was there.

I'm looking for pointers that can teach me how I would become aware of what Drupal can and can not do.

Thanks for reading, let me know if I need to clarify anything.