Drop the bloated CMS. Build CSS and HTML only by hand, easy peasy. Learn flex box or grid CSS

Wanna try hugo? I can't vouch for the others, but since I have tried it I can share my experiences... It's not 100% as intuitive as Microsoft Word so there will be a learning curve, but it is reasonably simple & can scale up to professional web development quite well. Lots of templates out there too so for the most part you won't need to make everything yourself. Some professional web devs use it too. But because it is also used professionally, AI is good at generating Hugo sites, so it may make your site look AI-my...

Just a heads up though, most hugo themes use JavaScript quite heavily; if you're against JS by chance, you may need to dig a bit deeper into their themes

Note: This is from the perspective of 30 years of web design, which is not to say I'm an expert, just that while I do personal projects, much of my time has been spent designing for small businesses and the like. I think it's a good way to go, mind.

If you want to learn coding by hand, you probably don't want to bite off learning HTML and CSS from scratch. Use a framework like Bootstrap (there are plenty of frameworks to choose from), which gives you a good baseline of CSS to start with.

If I was using something like Bootstrap, to get different backgrounds in different parts of the page - this is what "section" divs are for, because you can assign a background to each section. Well, this is true of divs in general, but in the Bootstrap contet you have sections. Inside sections you have rows, and then inside that you have columns. That's how you can set up the parts of your page, with content going in different subdivisions of the page.

If you prefer a more visual way of working, I can recommend WordPress and Divi 5 (specifically as opposed to Divi 4), although the latter is not free. But it is a highly flexible solution that gives you the power of WordPress on the backend, but a pretty darn good builder on the front end.

If you want a simple blog, try static site generators like Jekyll or Hugo. Both are FOSS. Once you set up theme and other things, you just write your post or article in markdown, and the site generator will create full HTML website for you, and you can use something like codeberg pages to publish it for free.

If you want something more, you can look at Ghost CMS, which is also FOSS.

https://neocities.org/

seconding on the static site generator advice.

also i personally found serendipity more comfier than wordpress personally, might be worth checking

What are you looking to do with the page?

Do you want a blog? Or do you just want a more static page?