Zenphoto looks perfect for everything I need, except I want to have a basic links section to the left of it. I'm not a programmer by any means, but a basic html layout is all I need. How can I accomplish this simple task with ZP? Can I just edit a .php file somewhere? Or is it done with CSS? All I need is a general direction of where to go, and I figure I can go from there.

Yep, edit the index.php, album.php, and image.php files in whatever theme you want to use, and put the HTML around the zenphoto code. You shouldn't even have to tweak any PHP if you leave it alone