To James and Ikawe,

Thanks for pushing me in this direction. I've just spent a few hours researching, and we will most likely go with Bazaar now.

Frankly, the website project is so small that CVS or SVN would have been fine, but it is part of a much larger documentation project that is theoretically limitless, and one that I hope will outlive me.

So setting up an effective distributed control system while the project is still in a relatively early stage makes very good sense.

A couple of notes that may help others interested in going this route:

The video James mentions is by Linus Torvalds, and is strongly pro GIT.
By way of balance, there is a self-confessed biased comparison between GIT and Bazaar at: "http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrVsGit#Bazaar vs Git"
Bazaar is supposedly much more platform independent. That is important to me because my friend uses Dreamweaver on Windoze. I can imagine this type of situation is more common in web development than in software.
Bazaar Explorer was actually quite difficult to install and get going on OpenSuse (I imagine it would be much easier for those of you using Kubuntu, since it's sponsored by Canonical).

BZR itself was in the repositories, but I had to get the required Qbzr from the Build Service, which in turn gave a dependency error of needing python-pygments. Fortunately, that was the last of it but, for a while, I felt like I was back in the Linux Dependency Hell of a few years ago.
Then the readme said simply to copy the directory into /.bazaar/plugins, but of course there was no directory there yet, so I had to read up to find a "safe" command that I could type into the shell to get that directory activated. That command, by the way, was: "whoami My Name <me@emailaddress.com>"

All in all, I feel it was time well spent. Thanks again to all respondents. I ended up with a very different answer to what I expected, but it helped to address other problems that I was only vaguely aware I had!

Cheers
Ian