Teach me the essentials I need for my new Joomla website

I've just had the framework of my old website (which used Soholaunch), rebuilt in Joomla 1.5. I understand there is a more recent version. I need someone with Skype voice available during weekday daytime within my time zone (Western Europe) to talk me through the problems I am having that I need to overcome. (Reminder to bidders: do not post your Skype username in your bid as this breaches site rules.) It is a thumbnail gallery site with adult content so no bids from Islamic countries, Cuba, North Korea, Mongolia, P R China or Vietnam thank you. I need to understand how to bulk upload images through Joomla (or from images FTP'd to a server directory), create the image galleries and their associated thumbnails. Structure is fundamentally what you will find in the image galleries on the present site at [login to view URL] One immediate question I also need answered is "Should I upgrade to the current version of Joomla?" Tools I have available: Filezilla, Putty, Paint Shop Pro X2, Better JPEG (for fast batch rotation to orientation flag, and fast batch resizing), Arclab Watermark Gallery (for fast batch watermarking - fairly obvious, that one). Please note I have slightly limited hearing over some frequency ranges, especially with what you would call "sing-song" accents as I only hear part of what is being said if a speaker's voice rises and falls rapidly through the human voice frequency range, so clear English diction would be a distinct advantage. I struggle to understand people speaking even well-educated English with Asian, African and Caribbean accents, but have little or no difficulty with most European accents unless they particularly distort English pronunciation. I am academically qualified as a computer programmer, albeit from the days of Cobol, Fortran and PL/1 on Data General midi computers in the 1980s (although I left the industry in 1991), so I can handle most thought processes quickly, but bear in mind my occasional limitations on understanding unfamiliar modern terms. I also type quickly and accurately. I have programmed in HTML and ASP, but my knowledge of PHP could be written on the back of a very small postage stamp. I estimate I will need about a maximum of three hours of your time. If you can recommend an easy "idiot's guide" for me to read in advance, that would be appreciated and would probably save a lot of time when we speak. No generic bids (I'll blacklist you), no "let's do it" bids (I'll ignore you) and no lists of websites you have produced (because I actually don't care about other sites you have done in this case; they are irrelevant). Please give me a PM with a straightforward set of reasons why I should hire you. Please also give me dates and am/pm over the next few days that you are available to do this job. Thanks. Happy bidding.