How to organize a website with thousands of pages worth of content?

Here is my story:

I have a friend who has created, over a period of many years, a large database of documents. The documents are MS Word files in various categories. I, myself, am an beginner level programmer with some experience. I offered to make, for him, a website which allows to showcase this data, as well as maintain and update it more efficiently. I figure this will let me gain some experience in this area.

I want to do this in the form of pages that the user can cycle through and annotate with info that is visible only to him. Somehow, in spite of my lack of experience, I feel it unwise to put this data up as thousands of interlinked html. A better option may be to come up with templates for different categories and populate that with text and images from each document (which might have to be manually extracted from the MS Word documents)

My question is, what website design architectures account for this sort of problems?

Can this be solved with a Single Page App like Angular or Meteor?

Thanks.