Are you getting into PHP?  How about MVC or REST?  I’ve been working in RoR and Microsoft MVC.  If you need to use PHP, I'd recommend using an existing framework.  Code Igniter is a MVC Rest based framework written in PHP based on Ruby on Rails (RoR).  This will give you an industry common practice to follow.  Biggest advantage, when you want to move to RoR or MSFT MVC - it follows the same architecture.  Check it out: http://codeigniter.com/

Update:  want to remove the index.php and look like the other RESTful guys?

Apache rewrites would be more suitable if you don't have a need to use CodeIgniter.

In your .htaccess file you'd use something like:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?page=$1 [PT]

Then you can use http://yoursite.com/whatever 
and $_GET['page'] will equal whatever.