When to have multiple tables

I'm still getting used to working with databases and PHP but I have been able to script a news application for my site. I'm now getting ready to work on a database that will track award winners and nominees. I'm still not entirely sure when it's best to use multiple tables and relational concepts and I'm also wondering what method would be the most efficient to code via PHP. The average awards track the following info: YEAR CATEGORY STATUS <--nominee or winner NAMES(S) <--single in the case of actors, directors, multiple for crafts like editing, song TITLE ORDER <--Best Movie comes before Best Actor, so alphabetical doesn't work, so I figure I assign each category with an order of importance from say 1 to 5 and sort alphabetically by category within that e.g. Best Movie=1 Best Director=2 Best Actor/Actress/Supporting=3, the technical awards=4, the special awards (humanitarian,lifetime)=5 Things like categories can change names, disappear, merge, etc over the years, so perhaps category should be in one table along with year and an ID# and the other table would have year, id# and the other fields. My ultimate concept of speeding the presentation would be to have: $Category <ul> <li>$nominee for $title <li>$nominee for $title <li>$nominee for $title </ul> etc. and I could generate the pages for each year just by changing the $year variable at the top. I could test for status and use an IF statement to change winners to <li><b>$nominee for $title</b> Thanks for letting me think out loud. If you have any comments or suggestions I'd appreciate them. Links to good pages on relational database design would also be appreciated. Thanks. -- Ian Evans